I’m looking for seeds for a broccoli landrace, or possibly a combination of cool broccoli seeds to start my own. I’d like to acquire them through trades if possible.
I currently have all kinds of seeds including my own landrace cantaloupe, watermelon, and corn. They’ve all been germination tested at between 90 and 100%.
I live in South Carolina zone 8 where it is hot, humid, and rainy. I grow using very minimalist inputs, soil is red clay.
I should specify I’m looking mainly for broccoli that forms heads. The heads don’t have to be large, but my children prefer eating the heads. I’m also looking for seeds from nitrogen fixing plants like pigeon pea.
Thanks!
I will have Broccoli seeds once my current crop dries down. I mixed four different varieties to start my own landrace. Eventually, I will be mixing them with kale to gain greater winter hardiness, but that hasn’t happened yet, since the kale won’t flower till the spring. I think there were three heading broccoli varieties and one sprouting broccoli, which does produce heads, just small ones.
I don’t need cantaloupe, corn, or water melon seeds. But I’d be happy to give you some of these seeds once they are ready if you send me a SASE—there will probably be far more than I need.
Okay that sounds like a good start, and I appreciate the offer! I have seeds for pretty much anything, so if there is a particular thing you need/want just throw it out there cuz I might have it.
I don’t have seeds from any heading Brassica oleraceas yet, but I have brussels sprouts x kohlrabi and kohlrabi x brussels sprouts seeds that I saved a few months ago. I’m excited to see what the cross in both directions gives me. All six of the plants (three brussels sprouts, three kohlrabis) flowered profusely, so I expect they’d be great as sprouting broccolis. None of them formed heads. The leaves were tasty, even in late spring, when it was starting to get too hot for most brassicas to taste decent. Would you be interested in some of them?
I don’t have a lot of carob seeds, but I’d be willing to send you a few, if you’d like them. It’s a nitrogen-fixing tree. It’s hardy to zone 9, so it would probably winterkill down to the roots in your zone (if you mulch the roots well) and grow back every year, so it would never get huge in a garden bed.
I also have a few moringa seeds I can send you, if you’re interested in another nitrogen-fixing tree that would likely winterkill down to the roots and grow back every year in your zone.
Thanks Emily but I’ve actually tried to grow moringa here several times and it seems to be more trouble than it’s worth to keep it alive. I mainly using locust now since they are native and I’m not really interested in having to put in extra work to keep trees alive. Hopefully someone from this group can breed a cold hardy moringa. They’d be famous!
Can anyone tell me if it’s worth saving seeds if these flowers produce? This is my first time growing broccoli. It seems like some of these are skipping the providing food value stage and going straight to producing yellow flowers.
My brocolli went to seed the first year with my unusual hot weather and I saved seeds from those. I read that some people plant in hot weather to get seeds faster and have more seeds to experiment.
At least those seeds are 1 year more adapted to your context. Maybe you some crosses but tendency to flower esrlier?
I usually do not save seed from plants that bolted in their first year if they are plants that should bolt after overwintering, such as kale and the like UNLESS I’ve induced them. (I know that some broccoli doesn’t need to overwinter to set seed, but still, even then it does have a “normal” life cycle and I think those bolted quite early compared to that.)
By inducing I mean that I can deliberately shock them into bolting, but 1) it usually takes quite an extreme shock, like in my case planting 2 full months earlier than normal and then exposing them to extreme cold for several weeks in a row while babies and teens, and 2) then I also sow a control patch to make sure that the control patch doesn’t bolt (like, same variety sown at normal time) so I know it was my induction that worked as intended. Otherwise, I may inadvertently be selecting for early bolting.
I don’t know how extreme your shock this early in the season can be… also Brassicas are usually “shockable”, I mean receptive to bolting sitmuli like extreme stress at a certain stage as “teen plants” but not as “baby plants”. So that makes me lean towards thinking that you really are selecting for early bolting genetics there…
This year I think I will do a seed-to-seed increase on a certain type of winter radish, so I will push them directly into bolting, but only because it’s very hard to reliably overwinter radish at my location and I need to multiply the seed stock quickly…
If they overwintered, I would probably save seed from them; but I might keep it separate from more productive plants, and plant it separately to see if it was more prone to early bolting. But it might be that some desirable characteristics are “trapped” within varieties with an obviously undesirable characteristic; letting everything cross for a couple of rounds before selection might be helpful. (Unless the negative characteristic is something really bad, like bitterness or toxicity.)
Also, some wimpy plants might just be inbred; their genetics could provide a great contribution to an eventual landrace, but they just need to be allowed to produce a second, outcrossed generation and get rid of the accumulated genetic flaws. At least, that is the thinking I am trying to apply in my garden; we will see if it works!
Oh, that explains a lot. I indeed didn’t realize that they were that “old”. Got a bit confused by your summer-looking (my summer, that is…) pictures!
I need to recalibrate! Here it’s like this. If things are green and grow like that, and if the soil is not frozen, it must be “summer”.
I plant those late last year. Those who are more protected have had less stress and have not going to seed in the first year. My lettuce, spinach also flower very quickly. I sense that it has been my no water winter with spring temperatures.
Are you weeding that patch? Or have you done anything to remove the weeds seeds? Or is it because it is winter? My plot has a lot variety of weeds in different growing stages.
I had turnips growing in there a couple months ago. I have hoed the weeds in there but they keep coming back. I have significant weed pressure. I usually try to grow food everywhere I can. I only let weeds persist as a free cover crop only when I don’t have plans for the area in short periods of time.
How’s the irrigation system working for you? I have come up with a solution for me. I have put a tall post in the ground. I will zip tie a landscape 360 turn sprinkler to it. Then I will connect my water hose to it. I’ve tested it out already. It looks like it will cover the whole bed when mounted in the center.
It turns out the sprinkler has a different thread type than the hose but I figured it out with an adapter.
I have these two sprinkles. I got very low presure, so only 1 and a half works in full power. They are conected to 50 meter / 164 feet hose, so I move them every time. I have not need to put them over a bar for now. I need a new motor to put presure. My conectors are the same as regular water hose.
Also there are 1,2km/0.7 miles of drip lines all over the garden. You can see them in the last photo of brasicas, the brown hoses.
I have about 800 square feet of garden beds. I highlighted my redneck pole in the middle of the garden, with a sprinkler zip tied to it, connected by water hose. I have a shut-off by the back porch, so my wife can flip it on and off when I am not there.
