Breeding Sweet Potatoes (turning them into a seed grown annual)

[reed]

Well, a little bit of a disaster has struck. When I put my saved roots in the cold frame as in the photo shown in earlier post it was still pretty chilly in the mornings, but they took right off. Then it got warmer and I went ahead and took off a few slips, just from three or four roots and planted one of each thinking it would probably get colder again, and I wanted to see what effect that would have on them. Unsurprisingly it slowed them down but did not hurt even though one morning had light frost on the car windshield it didn't kill or even damage the plants.

Meanwhile in the cold frame the others were doing nicely, and I was planning to set them out in a day or two, but it got a bit warmer and I forgot to open the cold frame one morning. The cold frame had been recently remodeled with new tape to seal the seams and with a foot deep bed of composting material providing a little heat from the bottom, and a fully sunny day with a high of about 85 F, my sweet potatoes and the slips they were making cooked. I held out hope they might make some more slips, but the roots themselves were actually cooked. They were soft and dead.

I was only able to save a couple slips from one root so those I planted earlier and those are the only ones I have. Five of the nine roots in that other photo, five unique examples of ipomoea batatas were lost. Fortunately, one that I had planted earlier is our favorite for cooking and it is doing fine as are the other three. All of them are fine sweet potatoes that all have most of my preferred traits. It's just that I won't have extra slips to maybe sell this year.

I described it a "little bit" of a disaster because that is all it is, maybe no disaster at all really because one of the main objectives of this project is a guarantee that a crop failure, even a total one which this isn't, is recoverable the next season.

Except all along I have selected for fast maturity, seed to harvest in 100 days or less and I have plenty more season this year, no need to wait till next. So, I got into my seeds and planted forty in a row in the ground. These seeds are top line seeds mostly from the very plants that were lost. They just sat there for a while until it finally rained and twenty-seven of them popped up immediately and a few more since then. A little bit of a disaster is that I only have twenty-five pots ready and four of them are already take.   

And then on a whim I planted a couple hundred low grade seeds. These are seeds that after harvesting last year were later picked off the discarded vines. Mostly little brown and wrinkled things, not the nice fully formed black ones. Drying on discarded vines without fully maturing and even after a frost or two I figured I would be lucky to get half a dozen plants but apparently what I thought were bad seeds and usually didn't mess with aren't bad at all. I suppose they are responsible for the volunteers that I find each year.

Germination on the low grade wasn't the two or three percent I expected but more like 25% or more. This photo was taken a couple days ago and a few more have pooped up since then.



Now I guess the disaster is that I have probably wasted a bunch of seeds because all together I have close to a hundred and only space for about twenty. I do have some more pots but not that many but I don't have enough compost and stuff to mix up more soil to fill them and I have a near religious objection to buying dirt. I might do that though, so I don't have to discard them because chances are very high that plants as good or better than those I lost are in there.

Maybe this is more of an opportunity than a disaster. These low-grade seeds also (mostly) came from those same superior plants. If I can pull off keeping them all maybe I can arrive at a measure of probability that any one new plant will have all or most of the desired traits. Another possibility is that if I can study them close enough maybe I can get better at finding observable traits that will indicate early on which ones are likely to make nice big roots and which ones are more just ornamental. 

On the ornamental side both "Likes to Climb" and "Ms. Bloom" are doing fine. I had already planted several of them here and there and those in the cold frame died back from the cold frame turned sauna but immediately shot back up from the roots. I had thought of planting some older generation seeds looking for more ornamentals but under the circumstances won't be doing that this year.
   

[reed]

Sweet potatoes are mostly transplanted and looking good. I ended up with 30 from the grade A seeds in my 7.5-gallon pots and 15 from the grade B seeds in 3-gallon pots. I left half a dozen of the grade A sprouts in the ground, but they are being smothered by okra now. I might try to find a new place for them too but not worried about it right now.  I made a nice well amended bed and put another 35 from the grade B seeds in there. They are a bit crowded but it's the best I can do. There is another very nice dozen or so of them left for now in the big tub I started them in. I also scrounged up ten mismatched pots for some volunteers that I found here and there but are still some more volunteers.

I have another smaller spot that I was going to turn into a new onion patch but since I'm already so invested in the sweet potatoes this year, I might use it for the leftovers. I'll leave three or four in the big tub where they sprouted and have another big tub currently drying down some peas that can take three or four.

A lot of interesting things showed up in the grade B seeds. They are from the same plants as the grade A but something weird happened. I don't want to say that mutations were caused in the lower grade seeds, but it seems like that might be the case. There were three what I call "vampires" in the bunch. I've seen them before and they apparently don't know how to make chlorophyl. They also die fast if exposed to full sun, I didn't mess with trying t save them. Probably a dozen more had just one or fused cotyledons. I have also seen extra cotyledons in the past, as many as five but none of the showed up this year.

Often when the cotyledons are single or fused the true leaves sort of bust out of the stem below the cotyledons and the plant grows normally after that. I planted a few of them in the in-ground patch and they just look like normal plants now.

I remember when I did lots of research, I found that they can mutate or revert to the mother phenotype in the first few seasons of cloning. I won't say I didn't believe that because I think the university plant witches know what they are talking about, I guess I didn't expect to actually see it myself. Turns out it isn't all that uncommon like when the plant I call Ms Bloom grew a different color root. I think it applies not just to sweet potatoes but to most plants that are generally cloned like apples. That's why a new one has to clone true for a few years before it can be presented for patent, not that I want to patent anything.

I lost the saved roots of Ms Bloom. Not from failure to produce slips of anything, I mean I can't find them. I'm not the only one that gets into the storage bins so my best guess it that we must have ate them.  Kind of a bummer but as they say, stuff happens.

I'm watching one those with the fused cotyledons this year because heart shaped leaves busted out in the center but another stem with "maybe" ivy leaf bust out below. I say maybe because it is just one leaf right now and could be just an injury or something. If it turns out a single plant really has two different leaf shapes it will be fun to grow it out, but I don't know that there will be anything really special about it.

All of the cloned plants are in big tubs and doing nicely. I've got about twenty each of my ornamentals, Ms Bloom and Likes to Climb stuck here and there all over the place. They are in varying conditions depending on how well the ground was prepared and how hard it is to keep them watered.

I almost forgot that lots of seedlings and clones are growing flower buds. Several started with just the first or second set of true leaves. I've seen that before but not to this extent. I don't know if it is genetic or environmental or maybe a bit of both.     

 

[reed]

I've neglected to update on my sweet potatoes lately so made a little video this morning. I accidentally refered to my ornamental plants as culinary, so ignore that.

[reed]

Just uploaded another little update about my sweet potatoes.

[reed]

It's too early to say for sure but observing my sweet potatoes this year they certainly do better with some shade. At least they are much easier to take care of. I sat and watched them for a couple hours the other day and those that get full sun until early afternoon and full shade by later in the afternoon never wilt from the heat.

Those in full sun all day are wilted by midafternoon, especially the ones with darker colored leaves, no matter how much I water them. By evening when they also fall into shade you can literally watch them perk back up. By morning there is no difference. It's a big difference though in how often I have to water them. I have clones of the same ones in the different spots, will be interesting to see at harvest time if there is a difference in root production. If not or if it is just slight, they are all going into more shade from now on.

When I first started with them, I thought that being tropical in origin they probably wanted full sun. Looking back that was a silly assumption. I'm sure there is lots of shade in the tropics and probably lots of plants there prefer it.   
   

[reed]

I've mostly just been wandering around visiting with the sweet potatoes for the last several days. After much pondering and some great consultation, I think I have an idea on how to proceed next year.

I have those three clones that survived the easy bake cold frame incident growing together now semi-isolated from the others and want to expand on that idea next year. It will depend of course on what I find underground with all the newly sprouted plants at harvest time. Those seeds came last year mostly from the same original nine clones I had in the cold frame.

The survival of those three I still have isn't because of genetics. It's because I had taken some slips already and put them out early knowing they might get frozen, they didn't. When I forgot to open the cold frame that morning and it hit 85 F with bright sunshine all of the slips and all of the roots died. The slips were fried that evening, and I thought the roots might sprout more slips but within a week or so they all turned dark color and started getting soft.

Anyway, out of those almost 100 new plants I hope to come up with a few more of what I'll call breeding groups or compatible groups or something like that. Seeds from those three which I guess I'll call breeding group #1 will be saved separately from all the others, I may even separate those from each individual clone. I may or may not grow those seeds the following year. If I end up with more collections of three, I will only grow clones next year, no new seeds at all except for what might come up volunteer. I imagine there will be quite a few as both the in ground and in pots plants are terribly overgrown and intermingled. It will be near impossible to find all of the seeds and I don't intend to even try. I'll just watch for seedlings next year and move them appropriately away from the breeding groups.

I have close to twenty of my big tubs which can easily hold three plants so my breeding groups like the one this year will be sets of three different clones in the tubs and isolated from each other by forty to fifty feet. That's nearly far enough I think but there will also be such things as runner beans, dahlias and corn separating them. Any pollen sneaking in from one of the other groups will be minimal.

I'm going with three per group because I don't know the compatibility preferences of any one plant and I think it is possible that some plants might only be compatible with some other particular plant(s). Just two plants in a group have a higher chance of incompatibility, four plants make it overly complicated for continued work of eventually answering some questions about any particular plant(s) compatibility preferences. It's possible that self-pollinating plants could be identified as well but in the near term, I'm looking at narrowing it to polyculture but not mass polyculture, at least for a couple of years.

Assuming the breeding groups goes well, seed from those groups will need to be grown in 2028 to confirm that they reproduce acceptably true to type and continue to be cross-compatible. On second thought I will grow seed from breeding group #1 next year, it has a head start.