Sometimes I feel like a mad scientist....
Jan. 17th, 2019 08:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
unicorndukeI've got ~~~garden plans~~~
One of the things I've been thinking about is plant breeding. What I like and how it grows and if the varieties I'm growing are suited to me and my growing practices. And one thing I've discovered is that not everything is! Surprise!
First thing that came to mind: sorghum. I use sorghum as a whole grain and ground for flour. Sorghum is a long season grain more likely to be found in the south where the heat does it good. Some varieties are as long as 130 days to maturity which is almost the entire length of our frost free growing season (more or less 140 days). In bad years, those won't mature in time. Like in 2018, we had an extreme wet year, literally 60 inches of rain in comparison to our average which is 30 to 35. I grew a sorghum that was 120 days but due to the weather, it didn't mature and I harvested it literally a day before the frosts moved in and 75% of the grain wasn't mature. So a short season sorghum is great. The other factor is color of grain. Red sorghum has more tannins and is more bitter. I don't really want to eat it because it makes my stomach upset in larger quantities (more than a half cup whole grain)
I grew a total of four varieties: Ba Ye Qi Sorghum, 75 days but a red. White Pearl Sorghum, white but 100 days, Sand Mountain, a dual purpose syrup and grain variety, mostly red, around 100 days (it's mostly as a trap crop/cover crop so the birds eat it instead of the things I care about, it makes smaller grains than the others), and Kassaby sorghum, white, huge grains but 120 days.
None of these quite do what I'm looking for in sorghum. The 100 day variety is probably fine but maybe I can improve it. Maybe a shorter day variety. Or work with the Kassaby to get it earlier. I'm going to see if I can pollinate the White Pearl with the Ba Ye Qi to get a shorter season white sorghum. I don't know what will happen but it might be neat!
Second one: Tomatoes. I eat paste tomatoes only by processing them into sauce or paste. This is personal preference and I eat a lot of things that use sauce or paste in them. I currently have a lot of options for paste tomatoes but none of them quite fit what I want. Determinate tomatoes produce so many but most of the fruit is small. What a pain to cut the tops off a lot of tiny tomatoes. Indeterminate's have larger fruit, up to hand sized, which I love. My favorite is Amish Paste But they are slow to put fruit on and they mature pretty slowly. Plus the vines end up enormous and then dead.
I recently found out about the dwarf tomato project. Dwarfing is actually just a trait that is in an indeterminate plant but makes the nodes very short. So they produce like an indeterminate but are very short and easy to manage vines. The problem is that they've focused almost exclusively on fresh eating tomatoes. Very few of their tomatoes are paste. I ordered one of the few paste varieties that produced 4-6 oz fruit. I want 8-12 oz fruit at the minimum. So I'm going to crossbreed until I can get the dwarfing gene into the amish paste tomato. I'm thinking that once I get it stabilized I can pledge it to the Open Source Seed Initiative who led me to the project and just do really good work.
I also want to start selecting and working with peas. My thoughts for next year are to collect as many bush pea varieties as I can (which will be many haha) to create a over wintering shell pea landrace.
Plus just working with shell peas to find ones that actually taste good. I've grown some out that legit don't taste good because I suspect they've drifted in genetics if they're maintained by mass seed selection. Or mislabeled by the companies that sell them. Blue Podded shell pea does have somewhat wrinkly seed but not enough to be a very sweet variety. In both peas and corn, the sugars do something while drying down and the seed is extremely wrinkly.
So much to do!
One of the things I've been thinking about is plant breeding. What I like and how it grows and if the varieties I'm growing are suited to me and my growing practices. And one thing I've discovered is that not everything is! Surprise!
First thing that came to mind: sorghum. I use sorghum as a whole grain and ground for flour. Sorghum is a long season grain more likely to be found in the south where the heat does it good. Some varieties are as long as 130 days to maturity which is almost the entire length of our frost free growing season (more or less 140 days). In bad years, those won't mature in time. Like in 2018, we had an extreme wet year, literally 60 inches of rain in comparison to our average which is 30 to 35. I grew a sorghum that was 120 days but due to the weather, it didn't mature and I harvested it literally a day before the frosts moved in and 75% of the grain wasn't mature. So a short season sorghum is great. The other factor is color of grain. Red sorghum has more tannins and is more bitter. I don't really want to eat it because it makes my stomach upset in larger quantities (more than a half cup whole grain)
I grew a total of four varieties: Ba Ye Qi Sorghum, 75 days but a red. White Pearl Sorghum, white but 100 days, Sand Mountain, a dual purpose syrup and grain variety, mostly red, around 100 days (it's mostly as a trap crop/cover crop so the birds eat it instead of the things I care about, it makes smaller grains than the others), and Kassaby sorghum, white, huge grains but 120 days.
None of these quite do what I'm looking for in sorghum. The 100 day variety is probably fine but maybe I can improve it. Maybe a shorter day variety. Or work with the Kassaby to get it earlier. I'm going to see if I can pollinate the White Pearl with the Ba Ye Qi to get a shorter season white sorghum. I don't know what will happen but it might be neat!
Second one: Tomatoes. I eat paste tomatoes only by processing them into sauce or paste. This is personal preference and I eat a lot of things that use sauce or paste in them. I currently have a lot of options for paste tomatoes but none of them quite fit what I want. Determinate tomatoes produce so many but most of the fruit is small. What a pain to cut the tops off a lot of tiny tomatoes. Indeterminate's have larger fruit, up to hand sized, which I love. My favorite is Amish Paste But they are slow to put fruit on and they mature pretty slowly. Plus the vines end up enormous and then dead.
I recently found out about the dwarf tomato project. Dwarfing is actually just a trait that is in an indeterminate plant but makes the nodes very short. So they produce like an indeterminate but are very short and easy to manage vines. The problem is that they've focused almost exclusively on fresh eating tomatoes. Very few of their tomatoes are paste. I ordered one of the few paste varieties that produced 4-6 oz fruit. I want 8-12 oz fruit at the minimum. So I'm going to crossbreed until I can get the dwarfing gene into the amish paste tomato. I'm thinking that once I get it stabilized I can pledge it to the Open Source Seed Initiative who led me to the project and just do really good work.
I also want to start selecting and working with peas. My thoughts for next year are to collect as many bush pea varieties as I can (which will be many haha) to create a over wintering shell pea landrace.
Plus just working with shell peas to find ones that actually taste good. I've grown some out that legit don't taste good because I suspect they've drifted in genetics if they're maintained by mass seed selection. Or mislabeled by the companies that sell them. Blue Podded shell pea does have somewhat wrinkly seed but not enough to be a very sweet variety. In both peas and corn, the sugars do something while drying down and the seed is extremely wrinkly.
So much to do!
no subject
Date: 2019-01-17 02:52 pm (UTC)Just growing your own seed for a sequence of years will get you landraces. Might as well use science! to go quicker.
Pea taste often seems to come down to how much fat it gets cooked with.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-17 03:04 pm (UTC)For most of the other stuff I'm doing, I'm definitely selecting for adapted varieties, just harvesting the earliest/largest fruit and seed.
I'm actually looking for fresh peas! So no cooking. I love going out to the garden and shelling them as I look around and eating them right there. Secondary is freezing for fresh peas through the winter like I do for sweet corn. Definitely different than soup peas which I'm just starting to fiddle with. I've been treating them like beans, in soups and stuff and I'm uncertain if I like them. It might just be that they're slightly different than expected and I just need to get used to them.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-17 07:53 pm (UTC)Get wildly ambitious and try crossing in a NorAm Lathyrus pea? (of which there are stacks.) There's a bunch that First Nations folks would eat. Wild peas have explody pods but if you want to eat them as garden peas that might not be a problem.
no subject
Date: 2019-01-17 09:40 pm (UTC)I'll dig into the NA Lathyrus! I haven't thought much about working beyond the current "vegetable" genetics but I know of some folks doing interesting things with wild tomatoes. I'm going to look into it!
I've also got university library access so I'm going digging :)
no subject
Date: 2019-01-17 10:07 pm (UTC)May you have excellent luck, too!
no subject
Date: 2019-01-17 08:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-01-17 09:31 pm (UTC)