Plant Breeding Ideas

Plant breeding projects I'm interested in tackling...

Carrots:

I am interested in a wider, more interesting range of Carrots. More colours, more flavours. I am particularly interested in one or more varieties that are specifically grown for juicing. They would need to be juicy and somewhat sweet; colour would not matter very much, but a touch of anthocyanin would be a good thing for its nutritional advantages. On the other hand, people might be put off by a "Carrot Juice" that is not orange... (People are funny that way.)

Cabbages:

I'd love to see a purple-leaved Savoy or conical Cabbage. Its flavour should be sweeter than most Cabbages, somewhat along the lines of Red Russian Kale, and I'd like it to have a tender, succulent texture. More of a salad Cabbage than a cooking variety. Size should preferably be a bit small so that we don't have to keep chunks of partly-consumed Cabbage hanging about in the back of the fridge because they're way too large to use all at once. This variety would definitely be a "use fresh" type. Heat tolerance while growing would be a big advantage, because Summer is when we would want these, though I guess it might be good in Winter soups, too.

Parsnips:

Just interested in working with them, since there don't seem to be too many varieties available (at least locally.) Only "Hollow Crown", in fact.

Chiles:

I'd like to once again taste the Jalapeno x Habanero type I accidentally got a few years ago. Had the size and general shape of a Jalapeno, with the dimples characteristic of Habanero, and a flavour that was a fantastic blend of the two. If all goes well with our weather and water I'll be trying that cross this year.

Then, too, I'd love to see whether C. Baccatum "Amarillo" (Aji Amarillo) will cross with anything else. It's a pretty wide cross, so likely nothing will come of it. Crossing C anuum, chinense and frutescens at least stand a chance; according to my books they share a common ancestral gene complex that allows some of the crosses to work. I'll probably be shooting for crosses between (at least) Purple Jalapeno, Jalapeno, Sweet Banana and Amarillo.

Another accidental cross some years back resulted in a Chile I called Hot Banana: Sweet Banana with something warmer crossed into it, probably Serrano, but maybe Jalapeno. I'd like to try and stabilise something like that. The heat was not very great, perhaps about 4/10, but the Sweet Banana flavour really worked very nicely with a touch of heat.

I'd really like some thin-skinned drying varieties, but with better and more interesting flavours than the commonly-available Long Thin Cayenne. Then, too, ALL varieties could do with better UV-tolerance and drought-resistance than I have seen to date. Another interesting direction could be for better Wintering: most varieties that I have were sourced from the US, frequently from higher latitudes, and they have mostly had their cold-tolerance destroyed or diminished - mostly, I suspect, through it being unattainable under any circumstances in those climates - and I'd like to get it back in. There's no reason for Chiles to be anything but perennial here, since we have no Winter frost at all.

Potatoes:

I'd like to see more varieties, and more specialised varieties than the generic "potato" varieties available locally - fryers, boilers, mashing potatoes, salad types,... Greater disease resistance is always of interest, particularly in our climate and soil. Would also be interesting whether one could breed a good-tasting and nutritious Porcupine-resistant variety. :-O

Mostly this means growing from true seed, and few of the commercially available varieties set seed. Challenging...

Beets & Chard:

Interested in where they can go - wild crosses. I'd like to get back to some Sugar Beets, Fodder Beets, Fodder Chard, as well as new, interesting eating varieties. Chard in more colours. Chard grown primarily for its stem, which would need to be flavoursome and stringless. Worthwhile, since Chard lasts so well in the ground, and just keeps on coming while we harvest leaves. Nicely< trouble-free under my growing conditions, too.

Grains:

Maybe not so much a breeding project as maintaining some of the older
varieties. Modern agribusiness grains are very monopurpose - grain only - and terribly vulnerable in the face of anything but the Full Monty of fertilisers, supplements, and drug cocktails. Not at all suited to permaculture, organic or self-sufficiency setups. Older varieties tended to be more multi-purpose; straw was used for animal bedding, mulch, roofing material, chaff for mulch and composting, sometimes feedstock, fuel. Not to mention that there's a genetic heterogeneity there that's worth preserving, propagating and playing around with in its own right.

That's probably enough to be getting on with for a while... Anybody who can help source genetic material that might be interesting for these, please get in touch with me!

Random Tomato

Here's an interesting mystery... a half-dozen tomato plants from seed that, somewhere along the line last year, lost their labelling, but were compelling enough to keep. They are finally ripening, and quite a nice tomato it is, too.Trouble is, I've never grown anything like it at all. Ever.

As you can see, the fruit is about 40-45mm across. The colour-balance in the picture is a little off -- the true colour is more of a peachy-orange shade, and very uniform through the fruit. Flavour is good -- fruity rather than tangy, and the tomatoes are nice and juicy. Their skin is quite tough -- almost like commercial tomatoes. I'd place them as a pretty-good (not spectacular) salad tomato, and they should be good for roasting or sauce. The bushes are smallish -- about 30-45cm tall, indeterminate, and quite sparse. Fruit set in trusses of about 6. They're not massively prolific, but not bad either, and one of the earlier tomatoes in the garden this year. Fruit are splitting quite badly, but then so are all the tomatoes! (It's the damn drought and resulting irregular and inadequate water.)

I think that this is a random cross of some sort, so I'm growing the F1 hybrid. My guess is that one of the parents -- most likely the mother -- was Moneymaker, which I grew last year (and swore never to bother with again, as the flavour was just so lackluster compared to everything else.) The other parent? We can only speculate. (Taxi? Ida Gold? Gold Nugget? Those would be the only yellow tomatoes I was growing last year, but my records are not good enough to have recorded what varieties were growing close to each other.)

Another reason to believe I'm dealing with an F1 hybrid is that the fruit are very uniform in size, shape, colour and flavour.

I still have plenty of the seed that produced this oddity, so I can grow them again for some years to come. I'm also saving seed from at least one fruit from each of the bushes for growing out next year to see what comes out in the next generation.

Unless I'm completely wrong in my guesses... ;-) (And that's not unlikely! I'm a complete n00b to the whole breeding thing, and finding the genetics and theoretical side of it quite difficult to wrap my head around.)

Hmmmm... this plant-breeding lark is quite exciting!

Forest-Garden-Planet-Earth

As researchers examine the Amazon more carefully, it appears that huge areas contain not only wild plants, but have been stocked with people-friendly cultivars of useful species. More and more, it looks as if the Amazon, like much of the Americas, was a carefully cultivated garden before the Europeans showed up and abused it into a thicketed wilderness. It appears that our idea of wilderness—black forest so dense you can barely walk, where people "take only photographs and leave only footprints"—is a notion burned into our psyches during an anomalous blip: the first two centuries following the Mayflower, in which the gardeners who had tended the Americas for millennia were exterminated, leaving the hemisphere to descend into an neglected tangle of "primeval forest." It's likely that this so-called intact forest had never existed before, since humans arrived here as soon as the glaciers receded and began tending the entire landmass with fire and digging stick.

--Toby Hemenway, "Beyond Wilderness: Seeing Garden in the Jungle"

We've known for some time that it's time to kick things up a notch in terms of extending, enriching and diversifying our permaculture efforts at Braamekraal, but its been harrd going in terms of deciding how to proceed. The basic plan we figured out a decade ago still holds good, by and large, but the details need filling-in. What pioneer tree species? Understory varieties? And time, too, to apply the hard-won lessons of the past ten years. What edible varieties will the Mouse Birds leave alone? What fruit trees are bound to attract the Baboons? Ten years ago we didn't even know that Mouse Birds existed! The devil is always in the details!

Reading Toby Hemenway's fascinating write-up of the pre-Columbian Americas has set ideas detonating like fireworks on Guy Fawkes Night. His insights and accounts also resonate strongly with some very puzzling things about the South- and Meso-American natives.

Here's a small, green berry. Its a bit poisonous, so if you eat it, you'll almost certainly get a severe tummy-ache. It's an annual that grows all over, seeding itself pretty freely, but nobody in their right mind would want to actually eat it!

What vision, what insight, possesses a gardener, inspring them to expend years, perhaps generations, of effort to selectively breed this semi-nasty little berry into the beautiful Tomatoes we love so much?