Sugar beet X yellow and red chard

[Steph S]

Space constraints have been temporarily tighter than expected due to a bout of Arctic cold.  With daytime high in the greenhouse only getting to 32F, it's not a good moment to move anything out.  This is expected to end in a couple more days, so today I finally potted up the F2s into some deeper soil so they can get big enough to evaluate, but keeping the spacing tight.
In their current state, it appears that some of the yellow rooted plants have white leaf stalks, not yellow, and confirmed yellow stalk in only about a dozen of 34 total.  I potted them all up anyway to see what they look like when they get bigger.  There are eleven plants in the red shades, a half dozen with pink root and white leaf stalks (as a group these seem especially vigorous), and around 18 with white root and white stem.  Omitted all plants that failed to promptly germinate and grow in the cool winter grow area.  There were some very late germinations in the lot 3 which are red as expected. But I also expect them to have low vigor overall, so did not pot them up.
I am curious to see whether these numbers are enough to find 'less bitter' candidates.

Also in thinking about possible outcomes, I am wondering whether a 'dual purpose' chard/sugar beet could be selected - that is, something you can grow for the season-long production of stalks and leaves, and then harvest the roots for sugar production.  Could be handy for small farms or homesteads.

[Steph S]

Couple of interesting outcomes, as the plants got big enough to taste.

One is that in spite of intense root colors, there are very few dark red or dark yellow plants - only a couple each.  It is nice (if a bit baffling) to see many shades, and I'm sure they'll be clearer when the plants get large, but I will follow Bill's advice to isolate the colors for the next round of seeds.

Second, what is really interesting in the tasting is that, when the strong beety or chardy flavors are absent there is actually a nice range of different leaf tastes.  I'm not sure whether the dilution of the betalain pigments was helpful for that.  Beety and chardy tastes also turned up in white and green stem plant parts so these tastes don't seem to be exclusively correlated with the colors. I need to taste more fully colored plants before I can figure out if they guarantee a higher level of beety/chardy flavor.

So far I have tasted 30 of 56 plants in the colored root group - mostly the larger, taller or most vigorous seedlings, culled 20 for bitterness or astringency, and potted up ten for further growth and evaluation. I wondered whether the seedlings would have developed strong tastes, bitterness, and oxalate at this stage - well that is settled!  There were some very objectionable candidates - I'm assuming astringency is the oxalate factor, while bitterness due to saponins may also mask and combine with the astringency.  Then you get the other strong tastes:  earthy, beety (earthy + fruity), chardy (earthy + fruity + greens) which in some cases are masking bitter and astringent taste as well.  I had to drink a lot of water between tastes.  And take breaks to lose lingering aftertaste.  I am still grasping for the words to describe tastes but typed up my scribbled notes for future reference, and will be keeping track of how taste compares to first impressions as the selected plants grow and experience environmental stresses.

I used different colored stakes to mark which plant I was tasting out of the thicket.  It worked alright for keeping track and got easier as I thinned them out.  So the winter/small space selection process seems to work fine for the chard in a flat that's 4 inches deep.

[Steph S]

The selected chard haven't grown much in the last two weeks.  Greenhouse has gotten past the "death by freezing" stage and is now in the "death by heat" stage, with few options for ventilation being still partly well snow covered - we got extra in March instead of the usual beating down.  I potted up 11 favorites - 4 red rooted, 5 yellow rooted, and 2 pink rooted.  There are three "beety" classic flavored but non bitter waiting for a pot up, and three smaller plants I think may be short statured, destined for my mother's garden.  Plants in 4 inch pots that were soon moved to the greenhouse had very few roots developed at transplant, while those that were selected last and stayed under lights had better root growth.  The sunny weather should give them all a chance to come on and they don't look distressed at the 80+F temperatures, but the top growth is so negligible I don't expect much soon.
Another gardener has volunteered to grow these F2 in Monterey California area, who is fond of chard and has two young boys also fond of it to help with the selection. This is great news, and since she has bolting issues with all kind of crops in her climate, a really good test for bolt resistance as well.
I started a thread to share our results at TJ, and was really surprised at the amount of interest in the project.  So there is a possibility that this could turn into a real 'crowdbreeding' project.
The discussion is here:
https://www.tomatojunction.com/viewtopic.php?t=4321
I am already really pleased to have one more person growing out, and if there are a few more it will be great for the project to really assess the potential of the F2 including the range of different climates, which obviously I could never do with the small space.
So I'm feeling quite optimistic about the larger span, as well as being excited to grow my own selections.