I think this is one of the major factors that drives the domestication of crops. Each species has a range of compatible climates and soils. When you get far enough into the edge of that range the pressure rises to domesticate a better species to do a similar role in your agroecological system. So if your staple starchy tuber (potato) starts becoming unreliable due to weather getting warmer then you might have room to try sweet potatoes instead.
Most traditional agricultural systems feature a dominant starch crop (often coupled to a minor species that often performs better during seasons that are bad for the dominant crop). Then a staple legume, and an oilseed crop, and then a dozen or more vegetable crops of varying importance. So often things end up in a kind of power distribution- major crop produces 50-70% of calories, the next one down 10-30%, then one at 5-10 %.
Your cucumber example is an excellent one. I can easily add two similar examples to that.
I’ve only eaten durian once. I thought it tasted nasty. However, I’ve been told there are as many different varieties of durian as there are apples, and in many Asian countries, there’s a durian for almost every flavor preference.
Meanwhile, I love apples, and my absolute favorite is Red Delicious, which I see people diss all the time. Yeah, when it’s overripe, it has a mealy texture, which is unappealing. But when it’s at its peak, it has a deep flavor, a crisp juicy texture, and an intense level of sweetness. There’s a reason it was named “delicious.” That’s why a lot of the most well-loved apple varieties out there have Red Delicious as a parent. You just have to know what an overripe Red Delicious apple feels like, and what a perfectly ripe one feels like. That comes from experience. I love that variety, so I have a lot of experience with it, and can choose the best ones every time.
And by the way, the overripe ones make great dried apple slices. The mealy texture vanishes when they’re dried. This is true of all varieties, but Red Delicious particularly shines.
Funnily enough, I was also thinking about this in terms of domestication, but with a different conclusion. I was thinking that, perhaps at least, the step from using TPS that doesn’t do well in a single year but does produce small tubers, to, growing them successfully, might be a far far smaller step than domesticating a wild plant. That is to say, some people are so excited about domesticating new crops, but here most of the work is already done, and the relatively small step of pushing a diverse population that small bit away from its zone of comfort (since the region until recently grew potatoes well) is potentially really quite minimal work in comparison to the work of domesticating a wild species.
Now I say that, but everything is relative. This ‘small step’ would still take considerable time and effort! And once again I’m not trying to convince anyone 
But I thought I’d add that in as a point of consideration for this in general.
I plan to get enormous amount of tps and plant all the time and see what happens. The idea is to test as much of the diversity that is available with all 4 of my seasons. I’d rather push it against massive failure and learn from experience than read what someone else did on it. It’s on the future to do list.
Sounds cool! Hopefully you will get TPS from different sources, or at least make sure it’s a wide mix. Cultivariable has wide mixes, and … is it the Kenosha project which also supplies many varieties?
Potatoes are high value in terms of self reliance, calories and storage. Growing the same thing other people grow around here doesn’t appeal to me for some reason. I want the excitement of unpredictability, new and different. The possibility of a better future is very appealing to me. Growing regular potatoes doesn’t do that for me. The reward is what you harvest. That’s it. With TPS, the main reward is what you are building for the future.
If a tps could speak, it would say it was shipped to the wrong address. This crazy guy is trying to make us extinct. I am willing to kill 1000 plants to find the special needle in the haystack.
Hmm . . . I think there’s still plenty of domestication work that can be done (for instance, 50-60 fully wild banana species nobody else seems to be domesticating). It’s just that we’re standing on the shoulders of giants, and it often makes the most sense to build off of work that already exists.
Sometimes it can make especial sense to start from scratch with a local wild species, since there are still loads of niches in any location that aren’t perfectly filled yet. Shane’s work in domesticating bunya nut trees in Australia is a great example of that.
Here in Utah, we don’t seem to have a perfectly suited starch root crop. Jerusalem artichoke seems to do well here, but it fills a different nutritional niche, because it’s high in fiber, not starch. (Yay, because I need more fiber in my diet, and less starch!) Maybe there’s a wild plant that already does well here that can be domesticated more easily than adapting, say, potatoes to enjoy our summers or winters.
Yes I can totally relate to that! And I would think perhaps out time has more value if we are doing things that others are not doing. If we can make something unusual and hard, easy, then we expand the choices for others! And in our changing climate, I think that has a lot of value. Our options may be radically narrowed down in the near future, so making more options might turn out to be quite essential later on.
Yes, yes indeed. And this even applies to potatoes too. SO many wild species!
But there’s something fun and valuable also about expanding the zone of already domesticated crops too. I would love to be able to grow black sticky rice here for example. The Japanese interbred … I think maybe Indonesian black sticky rice with Japanese rice to make it possible to grow black sticky rice there, for example. If I get organised enough, perhaps I can cross some of that, with even earlier rice and make it possible to grow here! For me that’s more appealing than domesticating a native UK wild grass, which would be a far longer journey. But when it comes to bananas, I absolutely love your project for using wild bananas, and was keen on the idea myself - having a tastier and hardier banana than the domestics, is very appealing to me, even if it has seeds. And many wild bananas are so delicious already that I think there could be good results in just a few years, potentially, whereas some crops might take a lot longer to make tasty and non-poisonous - perhaps several lifetimes even.
Absolutely. My point was taking that as a given, but presenting the flip side, which is that one can also push the limit of an already domesticated crop, and it can be a shorter journey. I mean, take growing tomatoes in Siberia, for example! So I’m just saying that it’s good to remember we have both approaches available to us.
That is one of the main drivers to my radical seed buying patterns. It is too good to be true to have so many options, so many varieties available at so cheap a cost. This situation being the way it currently is, with the information available to us now (especially Joseph Lofthouse’s great work) the opportunity to do something great is very high.
Again, it’s too good to be true. The powers that be, when they catch wind of this, or especially if this becomes more mainstream, will create the conditions that make it more difficult. Seed availablity, diversity and pricing will change not in our favor. This is my own speculation and hope that it doesn’t come true.
Yeah regarding your first paragraph, I totally agree and feel the same!
I had one pumpkin’s worth of seeds drying on a piece of cardboard on the back porch lately, on my cat’s favorite perch. I left the seeds there for three days. Some bird managed to split open 2/3 of the seeds and eat the contents, at least.
They were a little bit fermenting and didn’t smell good so I thought I would start them drying outdoors. Lesson learned!
After happily posting here about a crimson flowered variety showing up in my fava grex… I decided to give it a little water to help ensure it’s success. And 2 days later, it was 
no more.
Not sure what happened bc adjacent plants also got the same water and are fine. But 
, guess I wasn’t supposed to have crimson flowered favas this year.
(Ongoing theme: I have very bad results with paying special attention to individual plants in this grex)
Wow. So maybe they need benign neglect to survive! That’s kind of a good thing; it can also be challenging, because sometimes you want to help.
Doctors have that adage, “Don’t just do something – stand there!” Meaning that a lot of times, watching and waiting is better for the patient than medical intervention.
Perhaps the same thing is true of a lot of gardening.
My crimson flowered fava’s haven’t set any pods. I really like the look of them so i was hoping they’d do well. I only got 2 plants that had it
I planted at least 20 varieties of tomatoes this year and almost none made it. I think it was too hot by the time the fruiting period occurred. It looked like some had the strength to hang on as if they were hoping for better times. I will plant early and often next year and see if it have better luck.
Did you use transplants? And did you irrigate? I had similar problems with tomato failure cause I direct seeded only and didn’t irrigate. Then again I think I learned so much and got just enough seeds back that the failure was worth it.
The best gardens I saw used transplants about April 1 and watered often. There still is chance of frost after that but those people took the chance. Also everything in their gardens was done sometime in July when it gets hot.
They were all direct seeded and watered. It also rained a lot during that time. It was such a high rate of failure while testing a lot of different varieties and thinning the weak ones out.
I had complete failure this year on peppers (my first try). I planted maybe 5 varieties that I bought as seed in peat moss trays. It got so hot that they withered and died probably from lack of water before I could transplant in garden.
I also direct seeded thousands of pepper seeds I collected from grocery store peppers. Most of them died in the heat. I had about 6 - 8 peppers that pulled through. Unfortunately those that pulled through produced and STILL are producing garbage tasting peppers.
There is a U-pick place in my area that we got many sweet peppers eating this year. I saved seeds from those and will probably broadcast those seeds out when the weather forecast looks like consistent rain for 10 days next year. I have so many of those seeds I want to take a shot at finding genetics that can survive this lazy approach.
Ha ha ha ha. Well, remember, you could hand-pollinate a few sweet pepper fruits and blossom bag them, and only save seeds from those.
Or you could grow a few sweet peppers as houseplants in the winter . . . 
I did the same, various seeds packets sowed under dirt. My problem was probably regular watering too.