Crop Wild Relatives

General Discussions Microbes
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2022-03-17T07:00:00Z
Emma C
So I’ve reached the part in the course where it states

“JW: “Take those seeds, then put them in the same hole, side by side with your cucurbit that you’re planting, and let them germinate together. What’s going to happen is the good microbes are going to come out of the plant, typically out of the germinating root hairs. They’ll come out of the seed and they’ll colonize your seedling, and then they will go into that seedling of the new plant.”
The idea that using endophytes from plants within the same family is that they are more likely to be compatible with the other members of that family, especially members that are close to that species.”

So as I understand this, I’d plant my carrot seed with say, Common Hogweed, and then cull the hogweed reasonably early on? There’s easy cross pollination in the carrot family, right? So I’d need to just do it up until the domestic carrot seedling is established?

Am I understanding this correctly?

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Megan G
That’s how I understood it. Essentially you’re using the microbes from the wilds to inoculate, or transfer, the microbes onto your cultivated plant. The methodology behind this is that they are in the same family and therefore benefit from the same or similar microbes. I would cull the wild plants before they set any pollen so they don’t contribute to the wider gene pool (unless you’re explicitly wanting to cross with wilds in the breeding project). I believe experimentation would be needed to see exactly how long the plants would need to be grown together to get the beneficial effect as much of this research is relatively new.

As a side note - Emma, I appreciate your initiative setting up your seed library resource for your community and also sharing your experience with the rest of us!

Emma C
And thanks for the explanation. I’m weirdly excited to try this. I’ll be seeding carrot in about three weeks and have plenty of wild carrot family on my doorstep to experiment with using the soil. I’ll collect some seed in the Autumn and try the co-seeding next year.

Many thanks!

Megan G
It’s my pleasure! I was reading about this in regard to soil health, but it makes sense that plants would also benefit from this. I have the challenge of low nutrient sandy soil to overcome. I have planted things in the past few years with very limited success. I also am weirdly excited about this concept. More microbes are also very beneficial in terms of soil health. I’m in quite a colder region across the pond so we aren’t starting much right now. I wish you the best and look forward to your growth!

Ray S
I collected wild carrot seed, naturalised parsley seed and naturalised fennel seed this morning. I put them through my spice grinder and sprinkled the ground up seeds in furrows along with carrot seed. Well, actually, in one half of each of three furrows. No idea of this will achieve anything but I don’t think it will hurt!

Megan G
Do you have a control group? I’d be interested to see the differences between the two groups. Thanks for sharing!

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2022-04-06T07:00:00Z
Sort of. I only sprinkled the powder into half of each furrow. The furrows aren’t that long so if carrots have extensive roots whatever microbes I may have introduced will eventually be shared I guess. There may be some differences in early growth though.
I’ll keep you posted.

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@RayS Curious if you ever noticed anything in your endophyte trials… did you ever notice any differences?

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2022-02-09T08:00:00Z
Jen Young
Fascinating… now to find our wild friends…
After reading this my partner and I began trying to think of the wild varieties of nightshades, squash, grasses, etc. around here that we could possibly use to inoculate our seeds this year. Pretty exciting to think about.

Masha Zager
I just came up with my own list of appropriate weeds and wildflowers that are growing on my property. The only thing I couldn’t find anything for was squashes/cucumbers. Cucurbits don’t seem to grow wild in my part of the country (Northeast). Here’s what I came up with:
Brassica: Tower mustard
Tomato, pepper (solanaceae): Horse nettle
Beans, peas (fabaceae): clover
Allium: wild scallions
Radicchio, sunflowers, artichoke (asteraceae): Helianthus, goldenrod, aster
Fennel (apiaceae): Queen Anne’s lace
Corn (poaceae): Indiangrass, purpletop

Jen Y
It’s like you live where I live. We have a lot of the same plants here.

Brassicas: Wild mustard
Nightshade: Horse nettle, pokeweed
Beans/legumes: Birds foot trefoil, partridge peas, lespedeza
Alliums: walking onions (not exactly wild but they definitely do what they want), wild leeks
Roots/asters: chicory, goldenrod, so many
Fennel/anise: Queen Anne’s lace, sweet cicely
Corn: Indiangrass, bluestem

There’s supposedly a C. pepo ozarkana that’s native to these parts, but I haven’t found it yet…

Masha Z
Great additions! Though pokeweed is not a nightshade, according to Wikipedia (dubious source, I know). I seem to be out of the range for c. pepo ozarkana.

Jen Y
No you’re right, it’s not a nightshade. I’ve heard it’s a pretty good companion though, and I’ve seen it growing wild all over here in places where escaped tomatoes have done really well too. :slight_smile:

Dang. Maybe throw a couple seeds in random places in your yard and see which one does the best? :thinking::grin:

Lauren Ritz
Maybe take some soil from an area where your squashes grow really well, and try it that way?

Julia D
There is this site, inaturalist.org, where you can type in a plant family, and it will show you places on a map where that plant has been found and tagged in the system by others. I was driving through Death Valley on my way home from Utah, and I used it to look for Coyote Melons. Didn’t find them… wrong time of year… but this site might be useful from somebody? Looks like wild cucumber grows in the northeast. Observations · iNaturalist

Jen Y
I love inaturalist. Didn’t even think to look things up in there. I like using the companion app, Seek. They do fun challenges where you can get friends together to find certain types of plants/animals/insects/etc. For a while it was one of the highlights of my bike ride home from work - stop to look up plants and find bugs. :slight_smile:

Masha Z
Thanks so much! Great resource. I even found a sighting of wild cucumber a few miles from me. Maybe I can persuade this person to let me dig one up… assuming it’s on their property and not on state land or something.

joseph z
iNaturalist is so wonderful. I use it for so many things. I currently have a rogue nursery woody plant that, for whatever reason, I can not identify. I often am working with rare and exotic ethnobotanical plants so this isn’t all that strange BUT typically through a season or 2 I can determine what it is through basic Botanical sleuthing. I am working with 2 persons on iNaturalist at present as we keep funneling it into a ‘higher’ phylogenetic category. It’s been a fun meander down ‘WTF is this?!?’

Julia D
I collected seeds from these wild brassicas, I call them Sea Kale, but no idea if that’s correct. Anyway, they grow in salty beach sand, often with no precipitation from May-Oct. , and some are giant. I’m starting some in sand at home now with and without cabbage seeds :slight_smile:

Ray S
It’s late summer here and I’be been out collecting seeds of wild carrot and wild lettuce. The wild lettuce doesn’t have any dormancy that I’ve noticed.Seeds drop and up they come. I think the wild carrot might though as it only seems to emerge in spring. I’ll know in a few weeks because I’m about to sow carrots for winter and will sow a row of wild carrot between the carrot rows.
This all dovetails nicely as my farming partner and I have both just finished reading Jo Robinson’s Eating on the Wild Side and are looking to ‘rewild’ our food!

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None of the carrots made it beyond seedling stage as slugs wiped them out. I haven’t tried again yet but intend doing so with the next carrot sowing.

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A wild Solanaceae relative that also produces edible fruit: Solanum americanum (Luther Burbank developed a cultivar he named “Wonderberry.” Seeds of it are still sold). Often confused with Eurasian Solanum nigrum ( aka black or “deadly” nightshade - not actually very deadly though). There are also various native Datura species which are quite toxic but have lovely flowers and attract hummingbird moths. The toxic plants within Solanaceae are extremely bitter tasting and accidental poisoning is very unlikely because you would not willingly eat a lethal dose and would probably vomit before you got that far.

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My grandma, who was not Native American but grew up in the time when indigenous still lived the area, told me that the indians used shallow baskets to collect a little dirt here and there from certain places and then they sprinkled that on the hills of dirt that they made to plant their beans, squash and corn in. Maybe they were collecting endophytes. There was no one left for me to talk to by my lifetime so I am only speculating.

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iNaturalist is indeed a great resource for us plant people. I use it in several ways. Identifying on the site is a great way to learn the plants. I just set the default region to my state, and go to the Identification tab every so often, and put down an ID on anything that I can confidently identify. Over time, you can learn the local flora this way. You can also learn about what exotics and escaped garden plants are able to grow in your area, which is helpful if you want to use those plants. They might be invasive in a bad way, or able to reproduce naturally in a good way, showing adaptability to your region, and the site can help you decide whether something is worth trying, or is too invasive or perhaps not as well-adapted as some related species.

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