Potato Onion seedlings

I was lucky enough to receive some seed of Kelly Winterton's potato onion seed. With some nurturing, I've got about 15 seedlings up. I've held back the majority of seed to sow next spring, but just had to try some over autumn.
Since I'm going on holidays, I've planted half in the garden, and entrusted half of the seedlings in a pot to the green hands of my mother, who will look after them in my absence.

I've also got one seedling from the topset onion plants that I assiduously de-bulbilled over summer, trying to induce flower set. About 10 seeds resulted, most of them rather thin and weak looking. I got one seedling to survive, and am wondering where to plant it with a chance that it will survive 3 months of neglect.

F3 pea progress

My January and March plantings of my F3 seed from my most promising lines of yellow snows mauve snows and purple snows are just setting pods - but I'm due to go on leave this week for the next 3 months touring the desert and Kimberley. I tried to time my holidays to occur after pod set, but miscalculated. Hope my quickly instructed assistant Craig will document and pod collect in my absence.
There are some very promising lines in the earliest flowerers - a wonderful wobbly podded yellow snom, and lots of purple and mauves to explore - but none seem to be snows at the moment. I've got dwarfs, and disease resistant lines going as well, so hoping for a big growout next spring. I will have 30 metres of row at my new garden, so have decided to commit the whole big bed to peas for spring.

Late pasnip flowering

My parsnip plantings were designed to

1. cross up some promising lines, and 
2. do a seed increase of Kral.

The first planting of 4 different varieties was autumn last year - about 14 months ago, with the plan to get some  autumn growth, have plants subjected to a winter regime, then get flowering in the summer. This worked, and I've got lots of potentially crossed up seed.
The second planting to increase Kral was in the early spring about 7 months ago, with the plan to grow them out over summer, over winter this winter just approaching, then collect seed next summer - but the Krals have panicked, and most of them have put up flower stems, with buds forming. Oh woe! I'm worried that winter won't be suitable for seed to mature. And I'm not going to be around for the next 3 months to check progress. Hope they last 'til August.

Parsnip progress

A while since I posted - gardening takes time.
Finally the seeds on my Short Fat Parsnip parents are ready. The Halblange and De Gurnesey have set seed synchronously, but the Kral, and the late-planted Melbourne Whiteskin have been tardy. This has implications for parsnip breeding, since the trigger for flowering is presumably day length - manipulating these varieties so that they flower together will take a bit more thought than say for corn, where you can stagger planting times. Don't think that will work for a biennial. But I think there has been sufficient overlap in flowering to allow some cross pollination.

But this difference in flowering times has further implications. Accepted advice when seed collecting is to harvest the best seed. In the case of parsnips, it looks like the first umbels have the best seed. And recall that parsnips need a big gene pool for a healthy breeding population. So in a perfect world I would collect the seed from the first umbels of all four varieties I'm growing.  But the first umbels on the early flowerers won't have crossed with the later varieties. So I've seperately bagged the seeds from what I hope are contemporaneous seed heads - the earliest from the Kral and Melbourne Whiteskin, and the second pick from HLW and DG which started flowering earlier.

On another note, the second sowing of Kral which took place in early Spring has survived the record dry, but a number of plants have started to send up flower spikes. This presents me with a dilemma - do I havest this seed (which might develop too late in the season anyway) or do I reject this seed, since it comes from individuals that are prone to annualism rather than biennialism? I don't wish to encourage genetics that allow the parsnips to bolt in one season - I might end up with a population of bolters, giving lots of early seed, but no parsnips to eat!

Below, a picture of the DG (left) and HLW (right) parsnips I pulled after harvesting the seeds.
The HLW has tubbier tubers, so closer to my desired target.

First parsnip seed

My parsips are finally seeding, the heads drying down, and yesterday I harvested the first seeds.
The 4 varieties in the first sowing haven't all flowered or seeded together, though. Halblange Weiss and de Guernsey flowering earlier than the Kral - of which I have only half a dozen plants surviving. My late sowing of Melbourne Whiteskin, which replaced a failed Kral sowing from a different seed source, is also late in setting seed.

This difference in flowering times is a bit problematic - the early seeds from the Halblange and de Guernsey will most likely have only crossed with each other, and my plan was to get a cross with the fat-rooted Kral. The seeds from the Kral are likely to have crossed with the later flowers of the other three varieties, but half a dozen plants makes for a narrow genetic base.

My plan is to harvest the late seed from the Halblange and de Guernsey, and the earliest seed from the Kral, hoping these will have crossed up, and collecting the seed from each variety separately.

It's been the driest spring/summer on record for Bendigo, and it 's been a real struggle to keep anything alive, but the breeding stock has got most of the attention, with my tomatoes now only sad dry sticks.

So just as I want some dry weather to ripen seed, it decides to rain! Gotta love nature...

Male sterility in carrots - some photos

I've got a few pictures of carrot flowers showing the differences between normal and male sterile flower heads.





This is the flowering carrot patch.







 Here's a normal flower head or umbel. The emergent male stamens can be seen like a 'fuzz' over the top of the umbel.





 
 






This plant with coloured flowers doesn't appear to have any stamens.





This plant with coloured flowers has coloured stamens.

 
















One problem with spotting CMS is the development stage of the flowers needs to be right to be able to see the stamens. In addition, production of pollen isn't really obvious.In tomatoes for example, pollen production is pretty easy to see, but in carrots, even in plants that I know are male fertile I can't really see pollen at all.

Here's hoping CMS, in my carrots at least, is indicated by the absence of stamens.

Some Carrot (and other crop) Breeding Concerns

Carrots need to have a wide gene pool in the population or after a number of generations, inbreeding depression may occur resulting in poor, unproductive plants.  So it’s not a good idea to collect seed from only one or two plants - just like I have done with my self-seeded Baby carrots. So how many should you use? Best advice is a couple of hundred plants, but a minimum of around 50 is about as low as you should go.

I need to make a slight diversion. Hybrids, crosses between different varieties of the same vegetable, are known to be desirable. They often have better vigour than either parent, so modern agriculture has really focussed on the development of hybrid varieties. For inbreeders like tomatoes, this isn’t too hard- remove the pollen bearing bits from a flower before it has properly opened, get some pollen from another variety, transfer it to the first plant, and wait for fruits and seeds to develop. Each fruit produces numerous seeds, and each of these child plants will produce lots of fruit for market. So it’s commercially viable to produce F1 hybrid tomatoes year after year by crossing the original parents each year to produce new F1 seed.

But some vegetables, like carrots and parsnips are problematic. You need to have a big population of plants to collect seed from, the individual flowers are tiny, and they are bunched together in big bundles called umbels (thus the scientific name for this family of plants, the Umbellifereae.) So ensuring that the plant doesn’t pollinate itself is next to impossible. You could isolate individual flowers in the flowerhead, remove the pollen, and transfer pollen from another variety, but that would only give you one seed for each crossed flower, producing only one hybrid carrot for market – not a viable concern, really, and not enough to plant out a whole field of carrots or parsnips.

So how come some seed sellers advertise F1 hybrid carrots and parsnips? How do they ensure that every seed is the cross between two parent varieties?

It just so happens that there is a mutant form of some vegetables that don’t produce pollen. All the rest of the flower apparatus is in working order, they just don’t produce pollen. This is known as cytoplasmic male sterility ( I'll do a full post on this later). If this form is one of the parents, then the seed collected from these must have been pollinated by another plant. So grow one row of pollen free parsnips next to a row of a pollen producing variety, and only collect seed from the pollen free ones. Easy! But because of the nature of cytoplasmic male sterility, none of the F1 children will be able to produce pollen – this is not a self sustaining population. Unless there is some pollen producing plants around, the crop will die out.

So this is not a desirable characteristic to introduce into a breeding population if you want to develop a new variety to share.

Unfortunately two of the coloured carrot varieties I was planning on to supply coloured genes for my project are hybrids – so I can’t incorporate them into my breeding mix. But I do have a couple of dozen white, a few yellow yellow, and a couple of  purple carrots to provide some color diversity - hope they work!