I have the same question.
Last year we marked the best looking cucumbers that were on vines that didn’t seem to be bothered by striped cucumber beetles much, and finally harvested the seed when the cukes were mature. We did harvest the rest of the cukes for eating.
We did the same with our zucchinis. However, the zucchini plants all later succumbed to wilt and squash bugs. So probably we should have kept all of them for seeds to widen the genetic base, and then start selecting for insect and disease resistance in a couple of years.
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You could do it either way. The main purpose for picking your seed plants early is to reinforce early production. If that trait doesn’t matter to you, you could get your seeds at any time during the season.
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I was just thinking you could mark several plants. Like 1 through 10. Save seeds from them each, marked with the plant numbers. Then once blight or bugs etc hits you can decide to keep the seeds from only plants 1, 4, and 5 that pulled through the best.
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I’ve spent the last month reading Return to Resistance, inspired by this discussion. Finally had an “aha!” moment just now, on p. 521 of the book. Robinson is not developing landraces (in our sense of the word), he’s developing new, resistant cultivars. In a new cultivar, you don’t want any vertical resistance, because you would only have ONE type of vertical resistance and hence the entire cultivar would be failure-prone. But the way vertical resistance evolved to work in the real world was to have “many locks, many keys” - in other words, there would be many strains of vertical resistance within a population and while a parasite with a specific key might wipe out all the plants with matching locks, it wouldn’t wipe out the entire population. In a natural population, therefore, both vertical and horizontal resistance have a role to play. Because a landrace is much more like a natural population in terms of genetic diversity, we should aim for both vertical and horizontal resistance. (Or, as you put it, we should just decide not to worry about it.) Hope this makes sense.
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@MashaZ I think that is correct based on my reading of the book. Vertical resistances are common in diverse populations of wild annual plants; they are an important part of their pathogen resistance strategy. They serve to slow down the spread of pathogens from one plant to the next, minimizing the overall number of pathogens that can develop in a given season. In a diverse landrace, this strategy makes sense, even though it doesn’t make sense for an inbred mono-crop.
Of course, it would need to be backed up by horizontal resistance, just as it is in the wild. And we can make sure that happens by saving enough diversity, including plants that are slightly damaged by pests.
(And for many insect pests, there are no vertical resistances. So in those cases, any resistance will be horizontal. He mentioned aphids as being among the few insects to which plants might have vertical resistance; the kind of insects that have multiple generations in a given season and that have limited mobility in parts of their lifecycle.)
As I’m writing this, I’m thinking that combining many different varieties with functioning vertical resistances would actually be a good way of recreating the proper functioning of a vertical system; the key, I guess, would be to also include some plants that have no vertical resistance but proven horizontal resistance.
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So I have a cucumber question, hope it’s ok to ask here. Japanese cucumbers are soooo nice! Anyone familiar with them? Now I am curious, are they so good mainly just because they’re picked earlier? Or are their varieties actually significantly different? I have eaten many cucumbers in Japan, and grown them once in Japan, but never grown Western ones, let alone the two types side by side.
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I’ve never tasted a Japanese cucumber, and now you have me interested! What makes them different and better?
The skins are much thinner than a pickling type cucumber, and they tend to be juicier and have a better flavor (not really “sweeter,” maybe “cleaner”? The English language lacks the right word.) That said, I find them fussier to grow - they are even less tolerant of too-cold soils at the beginning. I’ve moved away from them and am focusing on the Armenian and Carosello (Italian cousins of Armenian) cantaloupe-relative types. I’m starting to collect seeds for to start a landrace a year from now.
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Hmm, fussier to grow isn’t ideal. I wonder if that’s just because of being optimized for a different ecosystem, or if they’re fussier to grow everywhere?
To me they are not at all sour, as cucumbers can be elsewhere. And they’re maybe crisper and … hmm just better! Maybe has to do with the seedy part too, which might be to do with age at harvest? And yes maybe thinner skin.
Japanese cucumbers are genuinely different from European types all the way through their development. They have softer skin, sweeter flesh, no bitterness, and the seeds take longer to develop relative to the fruit (so you can harvest long cucumbers that still have tiny soft seeds).
Unfortunately, I’ve found them a lot fussier to grow - more sensitive to cool soil temperatures and more bothered by cucumber beetles than the tougher basic “field cucumber” varieties. And they get kind of limp and mushy if you make pickles with them.