Welcome and Introduce Yourself!

[Martin Mikulcik]

Hi, I'm Martin
I've been growing plants and breeding since i was child, I can remember learning to hand pollinate camellias in grade school. My father ran a little independent experiment station, well it started out as a wholesale Japanese maple nursery and one spring, a late frost killed 90% of the inventory.

After that we focused on breeding plants adapted to our environment (kentucky). Mostly Japanese maples at first, but we've had modest improvements on a whole host of things

Camellias for cold hardiness
Hardy blue oaks
Azaleas and rhododendrons
A few different bamboos
Blueberries mostly highbush, some rabbiteye and a handful of hybrids
Some work with hollies, currently working on yaupon
A very good paste tomato
Hybrid peppers
A couple apples
Pawpaws
A landrace Indian corn

Currently working on olives (hopefully, haven't sprouted), butternut and maxima squash, i have some garlic seed I'll try sprouting, maybe peanuts, chenopodium, grapes, black cherries, prunus munsoniana, barley, rye

Now my brother's running the nursery and I have a little seed shop I started this winter flyoverseeds.com, and I'm just passionate about exploring the world plant breeding offers with other people who appreciate it

[William Schlegel]

Martin, that is neat! I'd like to hear more about your work with oaks?!

[Martin Mikulcik]

As for breeding, we've mostly just worked with blue oaks, when a chance specimen survived well enough to produce seed and now we've had seedlings survive -7f unharmed in somewhat dense understory.

My brother's been tossing white oak seeds into the woods this past winter after he picked up ~30 gallons of acorns.  Mostly just trying to re-establish them

Oh and they did some live oak work, I'm not as well informed as I probably should be

In my work in progress list of species they've grown, I've got
Acuta
Acutissima
Alba
Coccinea
Falcata
Glandulifera
Glauca
Hemispherica
Imbricaria
Laurifolia
Lyrata
Macrocarpa
Marilandica
Myrcinifolia
Nigra
Palustris
Phellos
Prinus
Robur
Stellata
Virginiana
Douglasii
X chenalti

But to be honest with you, I can't remember ever selling an oak

[Tim DH]

Hi Martin,
     Welcome to the forum.    That's an impressive list of Oaks. They'd need some  S P A C E !

     As a much younger man, in the Chinese Himalayas, I came across some 'Heathland' which was very reminiscent of the heather/bilberry moors of home. Only the dominant shrub was tiny oaks!

Tim DH

[reed]

Hi Martin,
Interesting work you are doing. I may take you up on some of your Japanese maple seeds. I love those little trees but haven't had much luck sprouting them, not that I've tried all that hard.

I'm curious about your location in KY but you say it is zone 5B, I think I saw you mentioned Missouri, does that mean you are in the SW corner of KY? I'm in Indiana, not far from Louisville but I think we are considered zone 6-ish.

I've planted a lot of oaks and even more pecans but just from seeds collected locally, I don't know the individual oak species.

I think you also mentioned Holly, I've had better luck starting them, but man are they slow growers.

Do you have any experience with Southern Magnolia? I'm trying them from seed this year for the first time so will see how that goes. I have had success cloning them. Umbrella or Elephant ear magnolia produces what looks like viable seed here, but I haven't gotten them to sprout, and I don't have my own tree to try cuttings.

Anyway, welcome to the forum and I'll be looking over your website listings some more, definitely want some of the Japanese maples. 

[Martin Mikulcik]

Hi reed

Yeah you gotta stratify maples but they come up in high percentages quickly although i have seen where the seed is hollow.

Hollies are harder and will sprout somewhat randomly for 3 or 4 years

Japanese maples were our focus for decades and we have some very interesting genetics, I'll get pictures this spring.  I just started with online in November so it's very much a work in progress and don't have pictures

The nursery is in murray ky zone 7a, but we have a family farm in northeast missouri where i live and we collaborate.  I have near nuetral soil, they have between pH5-6 so they can do blueberries and hollies and azaleas and i can do walnuts and stinging nettles and plants that need more calcium, and i can test cold hardiness to another level. Any chance your soil is on the basic side for hollies?

The past few years I've been trialing small samples of seedling camellias, I had 2 out 10 make it the first year, 1 survived the year after but was froze back above the snow line and didn't make it.

We used to do star magnolias from seed.  We have a Southern magnolia with particularly green foliage that we root from cuttings. I know we have a few tripetala, but I'm not sure how we got them

You're not real far, so if you're ever passing through murray when it's not the dead of winter, stop in and see the maples

[Graham S]

Hi, I'm Graham,

I mostly grow tomatoes and peppers in a small garden in London, England (zone 9b).

I've worked as a gardener for over forty years, and had a large collection of exotic plants for twenty plus years which led to a good deal of hybridizing.

I've always grown some tomatoes but only in the last few years with the higher profile of antho cultivars did I think about hybridizing them. Just recently orange (both beta and tangerine) has overtaken my interest in antho varieties as the trait most worth exploring for both flavour and nutrition. Ultimately I'd like to develop a range of colour types to cover all bases (nutritionally speaking).

I'm particularly keen to add some disease resistance to my breeding lines via wild species/hybrids if I can source them, though they seem to be pretty scarce here in the UK, which is a shame as the better the foundational plants the better the final outcome. I do also like the 'wild card' aspect of breeding in wild genes.

This year for the first time I'm growing purple tree collards, seeds from a breeding project in Arizona. Depending on what comes up and how well they do here in the South of England that might turn into another breeding project.

The last of my tomato seed purchases are due through the letterbox this week, going to have to make some tough decisions as to what to sow and what to put in the fridge, boy have I overbought lol.

[Martin Mikulcik]

Hey @reed
I talked to my brother.  He says he does Magnolia tripetala from seed, and he's got some he's willing to part with if you want.

The seed is really sensitive to drying out, but other than that it's just a normal cold stratification, i think we usually do 120 days in the fridge

[reed]

Thanks, but I think I'll hold off on the Magnolia tripetala. I am curious about them but in fact I am aware of just two of those trees in my area. A big one is in the yard of a home in a little town near here. It's in the river valley flood plain 400 feet in elevation lower than my place on a nearby hilltop. I've always kept an eye on it because it is such a cool tree. I think it must have been in the super cold winter of 1977-78 that it died but came back from the roots. It died again in the drought in 1988 but grew back still again. Now it is almost as big as it was a long time ago but has two or three trunks instead of just one. The second one is much smaller, in a yard a couple blocks away. I don't know how the seed got there but it must have volunteered from the big tree. I imagine trying to grow them on my ridge would be difficult at best.

My Southern Magnolia tree came from Lowes or someplace like that about twenty years ago. There are quite a few of them again, in the towns by the river, but they never did well for me on the ridge. When I bought this one, it stood out as having wider, darker green leaves than the others on the shelf and has a much thicker brown fuzz on the underside. I had read somewhere that the brown fuzz indicates better cold tolerance and that tree has grown beautifully for me. It was pretty badly damaged by an ice storm about ten years ago but recovered quickly. It's now I'd guess about 25 feet tall and bushier than it should be because of recovering from the ice storm. It has never bloomed but is an absolutely beautiful thing.

I don't know the ph or other specifics of my soil, I just plant things and see what happens. Holly grows fine but very slowly but blueberries won't grow at all, if that tells you anything.

Could you tell me how to properly clone my magnolia tree? I won't describe my technique except to say I have less than a 10% success rate. I'd like to try about a hundred cuttings this year and hope to get a number of them to sell.

[Martin Mikulcik]

Softwood cuttings from vigorous growth about 12in, normal rooting hormone

We use a mist system outside.  With mist systems its very important to have soil that can't hold much water or they'll rot, so play around with a perlite and sphagnum mixture

Indoors mist very infrequently to not at all (basically only if wilting) because indoors is much less drying, and you'll want decent grow lights.  Soil should hold more water because you might not water even every day

With larged leafed plants it's often helpful to cut the large leaves in half to reduce water needs, i can't remember doing it with Southern magnolia

If you don't have much vigorous softwood growth, a heavier pruning can help.  You can even root oak trees after a heavy prune

Blueberries need very acid soil.  If you ever notice hollies yellowing after being mulched, hardwood mulch substantially raises the pH and  prevents them from taking up enough manganese. Pine straw doesn't raise pH near as much 

Throw some sulfur on those hollies and they'll grow faster

There are dwarf hollies that grow slowly so maybe you got one of them

[Ben DeLine]

Hello! I have just started my journey in plant breeding. It feels like magic to me and I can't believe I haven't been doing it my whole life. I'm located in SW Wisconsin. I have a lot of questions...

Mostly to this point I have just enjoyed growing my own food and have been a complete opportunist. Last year my focus was corn and squash. I'm so grateful for the work of this community. It's astounding what is available to simple gardeners like myself.

I desperately am seeking a comprehensive list of local (SW Wisconsin, upper midwest) tomato varieties.

This year I'm going to plant a bunch of dwarfs. I'm interested in early tomatoes. I'm interested in the idea of increasing diversity in tomato varieties.

I seem to pick up things related to breeding and genetics pretty well because I'm very interested but I confess that a lot of what the most experienced breeders talk about goes over my head i think because I lack any practical experience.

Going to buy Carol Deppe's book and read it when I get a chance but it's late January and I'm gonna have to use my best judgement and any wisdom shared by more experienced breeders.

Glad to be here.

[William Schlegel]

Welcome Ben,

I share your interest in Early tomatoes! I think if you try some OSSI dwarfs this year and could figure out how to cross them with something like Wisconsin 55 or Wisconsin Chief you would be well on your way to breeding some new Wisconsin tomatoes to add to your list of Wisconsin varieties. I wish you luck on your Wisconsin tomato research! Look forward to your future posts. 

[AJ Thibodeau]

Hi everyone my name is AJ, I live in Central Florida USDA Zone 9b. I am a college student in my final semester of my bachelors degree in linguistics however before I switched to linguistics I was a biology major so I have taken most of those classes as well. I have been interested in plants and genetics since I was a child. I have been inspired from a distance by many plant breeders on this forum and I decided I would finally join now as I start my first breeding projects. I have had a garden for many years however it is characterized by many fails and lots of trail and error. I have very sandy soil, it might as well be what you fill a sand box with. Root knot nematodes are one of the biggest enemies in my garden making it practically impossible to grow anything that's not resistant. In more recent years I have started to grow more tropical crops like Sweet potatoes, Ube, Cassava, Sissoo Spinach, Moringa, Cowpeas etc. and those have made for most of the success that I have had.

Now I plan to grow more "traditional"/northern US crops for lack of a better word i.e. tomatoes, squash, beans, etc. with the plan to breed varieties better suited to my garden. The main trait in focus being Root Knot Nematode (RKN) resistance as it tends to be the main determiner for life or death in my garden (see pictures below for examples of RKN damage in my garden).

In the past I've tried growing tomatoes, squash (C. moschata), beans, cucumbers, watermelons, etc and pretty much every time they grow a few inches tall and then mysteriously die for me to pull them up and discover severe RKN damage rendering the roots completely useless.

All that being said, this year I plan to grow mostly in containers to prevent RKN damage. This should allow me to incorporate RKN resistance into breeding populations for me to hopefully develop varieties to overcome these issues with the goal of growing in the native soil, which I affectionately call beach sand.

The crops I plan on working with this year are tomatoes and moschata squash however I am also trialing some other resistant crops to potentially work with/ grow in the future (RKN resistant carrot, Uberlandia which doesn't require vernalization to set seed perfect for tropical climates , and RKN resistant Manoa Wonder pole bean)

Tomato:
For my tomato project I will mainly be working with the following varieties:
Tropic VFN
Everglades
Neandermato

I will start a thread in the appropriate categories for my projects soon!

Seminole Pumpkin (C. moschata):

Everglades tomato (S. pimpinellifolium):

[Tim DH]

Hi AJ,
     Welcome on board! You might find grafting tomatoes helpful in beating nematodes. One of the ones I'm using this year, Arnold, claims resistance to Ma, Mi & Mj which I think are three of your enemies.
     If any particular rootstock works, then you could also use it as a parent in a longer term breeding programme.

Tim DH

[whwoz]

Welcome to the Board AJ from Down Under.  If you can, look at incorporating chitin and organic matter into your growing areas.  Several people who live in Florida and East Texas have developed a process that allows them to ground grow veggies with minimal impact from RKN.  Check out the information available on Tomato junction.com, which sounds right up your alley.