Landraces and hybrid swarms

I've become increasingly intersted in landrace breeding. This probably started with my Purple Ball Carrot project and my Fatso parsnip breeidng. Both of these umbel-flowered crops are very difficult to hand cross - the flowers are tiny, it's really hard to emasculate them to get rid of their own pollen so they don't self, and really hard to find the flower you have emasulated in the huge cluster of flowers they produce.
The answer is to let them just mass cross, let the insects go where they will, collect the seed, and next season just sow a truckload of seed, and select really heavily. This is a long term project if you are after individual traits - you never know the exact parentage of the plants you are growing, or whether you have homozygous or heterozygous individuals,. You just have to take more time, grow for more seasons, and hope that you selection processes are driving the population in the right direction.

An alternate approach is to not be too hung up on individual traits, and if something is good eating or attractive for some other reason, just select them and continue to grow and eat them.

A chance for a bit of landracing emerged this summer. A pile of Senposai-like individuals sprouted in a bed I was growing melons in. I let them go - the melons were an experiment, so i wasn't trying to maximize the melon crop, so i left the Senposai things alone. I love senposai, a stable cross between asian mustards and asian cabbage that is just a dream vegetable - easy to grow, doesn't bolt, tasty, never woody, and still delightful at the size of dinner plates.

I didn't give them much water over summer and our really dry autumn - some just bolted and got pulled. About half of them then got smashed by cabbage white butterfly caterpillars, but others were untouched. I figure there was a bit of resistance in the untouched ones. This is when my interest was aroused. Then a little bit of powdery mildew came along, closely followed by aphids, which are busy sucking away at the moment. The bed, and the plants look a bit untidy, but I can let the selection process run for a while longer, I don't need that bed at the moment.

A couple of the better survivors, and the whole short trial bed at the bottom. They are looking very Kale-like - I suspect some kale genes might have jumped over the greenhouse from the Tronchuda bed.

Purple ball carrot project, ongoing results

Last spring I harvested and selected my purple carrot project. One selection was Purple Balls, deep magenta, small round blunt ended carrots. They produced seed in late summer, which was replanted in March.
Today I pulled the patch, prior to fridge stratification and replanting.
Orange is still dominant, as is pointy ends. At least they are mostly short.

Little Flame dwarf tomato project results

A few years ago i crossed Jaune Flammee with a dwarf white tomato early generation of 'Snowy'.
Here's some of the results.

Seed Crop of Purple Sowpeas

It looks like my first vegetable breeding project is approaching the end.

Since I have limited garden space, I paid some friends to grow out seed crops in their more extensive gardens. Last summer, Rich and Gemma grew my first two lines, Heather Purple Snowpea, and Joni's Taxi Yellow Snowpea. I got around a kilo of each.

This season Rich and Gemma grew my Jupiter Purple Snowpea, and Delta Dusk, another purple snowpea that I've had in development. As insurance another friend Mal who lives about 200 km away grew out the same two lines.

So now I have a couple of kilograms of seed from each line from Rich and Gemma, and I am just doing a final drying down of a smaller but substantial crop from Mal's garden.

Project complete. Now I need towork on distribution.

Topset onion trials

Topset onions or walking onions or egyptian onions or perennial onions are an old style of onion, that instead (or in addition to)making flowers, produce small bulbs or bulbils at the top of 'flowering' stalks.
The ones I've grown always continue to stay green throughout summer, and only produce tiny green bulbs at the base, like a spring onion (although confusion surrounds this term, too).

I got hold of a topset that also flowers (as part of a crossing project), used my original variety, and a seedling that developed from seed i collected from my original variety when one year it produced a tiny amount of viable seed. I also got a seedling from Kelly Winterton's Green Mountain potato onion that procuced topsets.

I grew out all 4 varieties in a side by side trial.

My original and the seedling from it didn't show any difference. stayed green, produced topsets, and slightly bulbous bases.

Raymondo's flowering topset died back, loosing all green foliage, producing small 2cm lovely red bulbs, and glossy red topsets. One plant produced a few weak flowers, that might produce seed, giving the opportunity of introducing some genetic diversity.

The Green Mountain topsets are the real standout.
The topsets all developed into large pale straw coloured bulbs that ae huge for a topset onion, the size of supermarket onions. The tops senesced, but haven't really shriveled, leaving my a bit concerned about their storage ability. However not one produced any topset bulbils. These will all be replanted this autumn to see if i can get a pile of topsets next year.
This strikes me as a very useful characteristic - the bulbils are easy to look after, and robust in early growth - much as I hope the Amuri Red onions will do.

Floriferous dwarf tomatoes

Some years ago when i was growing for the Dwarf Tomato Project (which incidentally got me into vegetable breeding) I decided to try to breed a dwarf form of my favourite tomato -Jaune Flammee. I crossed it to an early generation dwarf called Snowy. Snowy didn't turn out great, yielding white saladette tomatoes of no particular note - OK, but not spectacular.

Anyway, i grew out the dwarf JF F1s and F2s, in a somewhat desultory manner, in tiny pots yielding only one or two fruit each. I might have back-crossed them to the JF parent, but i really can't remember.

I didn't progress them for a couple of years, but this spring I found the seed packet at a judicious time, and got a dozen or so plants which went into boxes in the greenhouse.

I'm still not sure of the colour or flavour, since they haven't ripened yet - there looks to be a range of fruit shapes - but surprisingly, most of them have produced multiflora-type inflorescences.

I took a few pics today, and counted one of the trusses - 102 flowers on a branching inflorescence. These aren't all setting fruit - I suspect a few more buzz pollinators might be needed - but the interesting question is where did these genes come from?

Neither of the parents is quite so floriferous - JF has nice full inflorescences, but nothing like this. The fact that it is showing up in most of the dozen or so plants suggests it might be a stable phenotype - when the days are not quite so stoiching, I will try to find time to get out and do a fuller examination.

Amuri Red Onions - unique reproductive strategy

I was given some bulbils of a very strange  variety of onion, 'Amuri Red'. It has what I think is a unique reproductive strategy - at least I haven't seen it reported before for onions. Instead of flowers, it develops small topset bulbils at the end of stalks. Some leeks will put out 'leek hair' if their flowerheads are damaged or stressed - they develop small bulbs instead of flowers, and the growing leaves of these bulbs form a fuzzy ball at the top of the flowering stem.
But Amuri is different - instead of flower heads, it develops fine stalks with a tiny bulb on the end of each stalk - like weird oniony dreadlocks.

Apart from being a pretty cool looking plant in the vegie garden, topsetting onions offer advantages to the lazy or less attentive gardener. Onions from seeds are slow to develop in their early stages, and can often be overwhelmed by weeds. The extra resources in a topset bulbil means the plants get a head start. Hover, most topsetting onions (also known as walking onions or Egyptian onions or perpetual onions or tree onions) only develop small bulbs, and have a somewhat limited range, at least in Australia. I've grown my variety for years - I can't even remember where I got them. Last year I was given a few different varieties by friends, and I'm currently doing a side-by-side growout of three varieties. By chance, a couple of lines of seedlings that came out the Greeen Mountain potato onion seeds I got developed topset bulbils, triggering my interest in finding the best ones. some are perpetual, never quite dieing off, and remaining green throughout the year. Others die back to smallish bulbs after setting their topset bulbils. All only develop small basal bulbs. A few occasionally set fertile flowers, but this is rare. The colour range is brown and pink, but I think some of the Green Mountains will be white. I'm hoping these Amuri Reds will prove useful, and add to the varieties available for home gardeners - with luck, we will get a big bulbing, red onion with good storage life.