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.

tomato cages

just a quick post on my tomato cages constructed last week - weldmesh, wine barrels, and fine galvanised mesh covering to keep the rats and possums off.

Short, Stumpy Coloured Carrot Progress

I have been very remiss in my posts.
With spring well and truly here, the Autumn sown coloured carrots needed lifting so i can repair the bed, and move the selected plants to an out of the way corner to set seed over summer.
This project has proceeded with considerable neglect.
I originally planted Lobericher Yellow, Belgian White, a few plants - 2 or 3 I think, of 3 Colours Purple (sourced from Diggers Seeds, so who knows what it really was), and Paris Market orange carrot, allowing them to mass-cross, with the intention of creating a mix of multi-coloured, little round carrots. Why? For fun, and so growers like me, who always struggle with growing long root crops, could grow some multi-coloured carrots.
This was an exercise in extreme optimism - I had no idea about carrot genetics.
Other projects got priority, the seeding carrots got neglected, and seed packets got left in the hothouse for months at a time.  I was probably selecting robust seed, but not intentionally.
I dug a big patch of promising lookng roots a few years ago, then forgot to do anything with them for a couple of weeks, and many of them rotted. Seed produced from the few survivors was also neglected, but last autumn i planted a couple of square metres of bed, thinned them over winter, removing anything with normal foliage stems, leaving anything with purple blushes to the base of the stems.


After 3 or 4 years of selecting for short roots, I'm getting close to the goal - or at least one of the goals.

The first handful I pulled was a revelation: I couldn't believe the colours, and the stumpyness!





As I'm beginning to realise, in plant breeding the results often lead you off into different directions.
I think I now have 4 coloured carrot breeding projects!
I couldn't believe the luminescence of these magenta gems.

My original idea of multi-coloured round carrots is a bit difficult - it would mean isolating different colours, collecting seed separately, then re-mixing the seed to get different colours in the same batch, I don't really have the room or inclination.

So I think I will proceed with a Purple Paris carrot, selecting for shortness, rounded shoulders, and rounded ends - not as purple as i would like, but i think i might be able to reselect for this in subsequent seasons



Then there's a Red Wedge selection, bigger more robust carrots, broad shoulders, good colour, short roots without the round tip - well at least not as pronounced.


Then a Magenta Candles selection - narrow roots, good deep magenta colour, variable shoulders and tips.


And finally a short white  selection - but the numbers are small for this, so we will see which direction it goes in - Snow cones, or White Paris, not sure what will happen with these - and there is a bit of pale orange in the mix...


so, celebrate carrot diversity...

Portable seed winnower

A couple of seasons ago I built a seed winnower from a design published at Real Seeds U.K. . It took a bit of work to get it right, and I never got mine to work very well with lettuce seed. Additionally, it took up a fair bit of room, and to set it up I had to dig out the household vacuum cleaner, and string a power cord outside.
Looking around the 'net a week ago, I came across some seed cleaner machines built by canary fanciers, to clean husks from seed - I think because birds tend to eat seed and leave the husks, meaning a lot of good seed gets thrown out with the husks. Google them on youtube if you want to see.
I had a bit of a think, played with the design and came up with a slightly modified one that is useful for the small batch seed cleaning I need.

Advantages of this one over the larger Real Seed one is that it's much smaller, and lighter making it much easier to set up, and therefore much more likely for me to bother using it. It has a variable speed, which is handy for different seed types, and it runs off a small 12 volt battery, so i can set it up almost anywhere.

So, here is a short video showing the design. Hope you like it.

Seeds for Sale - UsefulSeeds.com site launch

I've been very quiet here lately - mostly concentrating on finalising a few breeding projects, growing out enough seed lots to distribute, and setting up a row or two of plants at a couple of friend's gardens both as insurance crops and to bulk up the seed supplies.
To facilitate distribution, and let's face it to turn a few dollars, I've finally got a website up and running, to distribute some of the product of this research and breeding effort.

You might like to drop in at www.usefulseeds.com and add a few shares and links, let's get these lines distributed, so i can move on to some new breeding projects.

Jupiter purple snow progress

A quick update to document the progress on the greenhouse-grown Jupiter purple snow peas.

"Good data never goes stale..."

Such was the advice from my thesis supervisor, regarding record keeping back in the eighties. She was right, and 20 years later I got a published paper after reworking my data on grasstrees (Xanthorrhoea sp) and fire inspired by a technique used to analyse lichen (Rhizocarpon sp) on rockfall debris in New Zealand. Go figure.

So, plant breeding? Wasting water in the shower a few days ago my mind drifted to new vegetable breeding projects. With my purple snow project well advanced, I was musing on possibilities when I recalled some of my suspended projects. In 2011 I crossed Sugarsnap Bush with Purple Podded. After a few intermittent growouts, I got two lines of purple thick podded (snap) tall peas, that unfortunately seemed to have fibre. I was contemplating crossing these back to the original Sugarsnap parent, but that would mean extensive growouts to re-find the three purple genes again so I put the project on hold.

But in the shower I had a lightbulb moment - why not cross the fibrous purple snaps to my now stable low fibre purple snows? The low fibre genes from the purple snows could be carried across to the snaps, the hard to catch dominant purple genes would be present in both parents so would be stable, and the recessive thick pod gene from the snaps wouldn't be too hard to recover. Genius.

I had been compartmentalising the projects - thinking of them as separate projects, when much of the work done in each could complement the other. A quick look through the record book confirmed my thoughts. Luckily I had kept well-labelled bags of all the stages of each breeding program, so finding the correct parents was only a matter of going through the various slightly disorganised plastic tubs in the seed fridges (yes, I now own two dedicated bar fridges for seed storage), and extracted the parents.

Ten seeds each of 4 purple snap siblings, and one selected tall purple snowpea are now soaking on the bench. With luck I will be able to grow these out over winter in the greenhouse, perform some crosses, and get F1 seed for a late spring growout. This would give me F2 seed to recover full purple fiberless snaps in Autumn 2016.

An added bonus is the slight possibility of getting large pods into a sugar snap pea. The gene for thick pod walls is very close on the chromosome to the gene for pod size - the genes are said to be tightly linked. [Edit: I went back to the original paper by Baggett et al, where I first saw mentioned the connection between thick pod walls and short pods. My memory had failed me, it's not linkage, the thick pod wall gene n is actually pleitropic  rather than being linked. That is, the gene doesn't just do one thing, rather it has effects on a number of other traits. Ah, precision...So the following dream might just be that...] Since the original sugarsnap with thick pod walls was on a small podded pea, no one has yet been able to breed a big podded sugarsnap. Although it is a low probability, my cross just might produce a big podded snap. But I'm not holding my breath.

First of the Jupiter pods

It's now 72 days after sowing, and the first of the little purple pods are forming on the greenhouse plants - the outside plants despite being about half the size, are only a week or so behind. The greenhouse plants are also showing signs of multiple branching beginning.

Purple snow pea 'Jupiter' growout

On 13 March i sowed seeds of my resistant purple snow pea, now dubbed 'Jupiter'. About 40 seeds went into foam boxes in the green house, with around 60 seeds going into peat pots, which were then transplanted to an outside bed.
Today, 15 May, the inside plants are nearly twice as high as the outside plants. A few days ago i inspected the growing tips and saw some tiny flower buds on the greenhouse plants. Today i checked the outside plants 0 these are showing buds too. Seems the number of days to maturity is not driven by growing temperatures, at least in autumn.
This trial and seed increase should give me a couple things - enough seed to sow a good crop in spring and harvest a few pods for testing and sharing, a chance to compare yields inside and out, and a couple of chances to test for disease resistance in different 'climates'.

greenhouse Jupiter, 61 days from sowing

Outside Jupiter, 61 days

the lovely purple dusted calyx

Semi-leafless coloured pea progress

The plan was to germinate the F2 seeds, whereupon the semi-leafless seedlings would show up at the second leaf stage, cull the normals and grow out the semi-lefless ones, looking for dwarfing, coloured pods, and mange tout (snow pea) pods.
Best laid plans...
The cross of my Yellow podded with Lacy Lady only gave seedlings with distorted leaflets - curious.
So I sowed another seed lot from a different cross - this time a semi-leafless field pea, Mukta, with an early generation of my Yellow Snow project.

Relief, they showed 7 semi=leafless F2 seedlings out of 55 germinated - about 1 in 8, so only half as many as I would have expected if this was a simple recessive trait controlled by the semi-leafless gene, af as noted on the John Innes pisum database.
I've planted out the semi=leafless seedlings, 5 talls, and 2 with one of the dwarfing genes into foam boxes in the greenhouse.

Tall semi-leafless seedlings

Dwarf semi-leafless seedlings

Semi-leafless or hypertendril coloured peas

The hypertendril or semi-leafless trait in peas exhibits extensive tendril formation when some of the leaves on normal peas are replaced my tendrils. The smaller leaf area on the plant allows for more air movement, supposedly reducing damp-caused diseases. Another bonus is the plants are relatively self-supporting, particularly if one f the dwarfing genes is also involved. This is an advantage to the home gardener - and farmer - since there is no need for extensive trellises.
An added bonus reported on the Mudflower blog is the reduced need for supplemental watering.

Damien from Mudflower really likes Lacy Lady, a dwarf or semi-dwarf green shelling pea of good flavour, exhibiting the semi-leafless trait, and was kind enough to send me some of his seed which I crossed to one of my yellow podded snowpea lines. Unfortunately is was only an F3 line of yellows, which went on to exhibit considerable variability in my community breeding project growouts, so not the perfect parent, but it was the only thing flowering at the time. I subsequently grew out the F1 seed of the Golden Spring F3 X Lacy Lady cross to yield a couple of hundred F2 seeds.
Today I've soaked 100 of these seeds.

The plan is pot these on when they germinate, then look for semi-leafless which shows up after the first couple of leaves, and cull anything not semi-leafless. Theoretically I should get about one quarter = 25 semileafless plants, of which one quarter = 6 should be yellow. With a bit of luck, one quarter of these should have some reduced fibre (one of the two snowpea genes), but it seems unlikely, unless the ghost of Mendel is smiling upon me, that I would get a full yellow semi-leafless snow at the F2 generation. Here's hoping.

Potato Onions - a strange seedling

Spud onions reproduce vegetatively - plant one bulb, it divides, and produces multiple bulbs at the end of the season. They aren't supposed to flower, but Kelly Winterton got them to, and distributed seed.
One of my seedlings this year has produced a quite unusual reproductive strategy - it has divided at the base, flowered in its first year and produced seeds,  and also produced topsets!
The plant in question is just above the blades of the secateurs in this picture. note thick wrappers, and divided bulb.

 But I noticed a seedhead on the top - unusual since I didn't get this from one season old seedlings last year. A closer look revealed small topset onions forming - lower left below.

 And in the seedhead, maturing capsules, and some mature seed. Not sure how to deal with this baby...

Potato Onions - second season progress

I posted earlier about potato onions, and my progress with the seedlings.
Last April, austral autumn, I replanted all the cluster or 'nests' of each onion that grew from each individual seedling, and that had survived the storage over winter - ten siblings in all, some from spring sown, and some from autumn sown seeds. I planted them 'nest to row', that is, each original seedling's secondary bulbs were planted in a separate row, so all the production out of that row was the result of two seasons of growth from the individual seedling. The Autumn seedlings and spring seedlings were planted in separate patches, but after a whole season's growth, this didn't seem to have much affect on overall production, although the autumn sown 'parents' did seem to flower a couple of weeks earlier.
These were planted at garden number 2, where for a variety of reasons they got little in the way of care - water was infrequent, and virtually stopped mid-summer.

The pictures below show the results of harvest of each row - that is, each pile or bag of onions represents all the production from 2 growing years of one seedling. Colours, shapes, and productivity varied markedly, but every plant flowered producing copious seeds, most of which got collected and has been forwarded to a number of growers to try.

Some varieties were way more susceptible to rots - although how rot set in in this driest of summers is beyond me.

Nice producer on left, diseased underperformer right

marked differences in productivity

Different colours

Left, my first selection - if it's got long storage

Left, another selected keeper, but right is the result of growing out one huge, single bulb seedling. this is special, and will be nurtured

Just for comparison, a picture of the growout of one-season seedlings - again, considerable diversity. Each cluster or single bulb is the result of one year of growth.

There are also some of these misbehaving - some are still growing madly, and some have reverted to what look like clusters of perpetual onions.

And one big flat brown single bulb, that doesn't seem to want to stop growing, that might hold great potential.

And one strange individual, worthy of separate post...

Autumn 2015 projects - resetting priorities

It has been a shocking summer for vegetable growing - and breeding. Very hot start to spring with little or no rain, then cool early summer, a single rain event, and a coolish end to summer. Tomatoes - which have been on the backburner breeding wise since my forays into dwarf Jaune Flammee - have been very unproductive. I've been wanting to cross OSU Blue to Japanese Black Trifele, looking for a better blue tomato, but the two adequate tomatoes this year were Black and Brown Boar and Brads Black Heart, suggesting they might be good parents.

left to right - Black and Brown Boar, Brads Black Heart, Japanese Black Trifele, and OSU Blue.

 All abit under-ripe

Since the tomato season is almost over, and flowers relatively few, I'd better get onto it soon if I'm going to get a ripe fruit by early winter. Plan would then be to grow out an F1 single fruit over winter, and start looking through the F2s next summer. OSU is still flowering, but the rest have finished, so i might need to go and get some pollen from some other plants I've got growing at my second, soon to be eliminated, garden. The owner needs the room for drainage works, so a salvage operation over the next couple of weeks is in order. Roots, onions and tubers including my saffron patch will need to be dug up and stored.


The parsnip project is looking hard. With only a small suburban garden, growing out sufficient roots for assessment then selection means lots of overcrowding and chances of genetic bottlenecking. One big patch of seeding snips were collected, but circumstances prevented timely processing, and most have rotted. I put the root in the bags with the seed so i could cull the off types, but ended up making everything so damp it all went mouldy. There are a few patches of other selections still with green seed, so if i can find space they might go in. By chance, a volunteer parsnip I dug up while cleaning up a bed had a lovely short stubby form, so has been transplanted into a corner hoping for seed sometime...

The purple round carrot project is also stalled. Root selection was delayed in winter, replantings of survivors went into an isolated corner with low survival, and the three that did seed where mauve skinned, but white fleshed, although mostly stumpy in form. A second patch has produced a little seed from half a dozen plants, but the deep purple carrots I got hoping to cross back to my breeding crosses were grown in a foam box in the shade to survive my late summer absence,and don't look like flowering this autumn. There isn't much seed of this left, so I'm relying on some seed to keep some of the genetics. A few volunteers in odd beds seem to have dark shoulders, but are also reluctant to flower, so not sure where this project will go.
But the search for a better potato onion will continue - post to follow soon...