I’ve got a nice landrace of lunchbox muskmelons going. I would love to introduce a ‘bush vine’ trait into the mix, to get a really good ‘small spaces’ melon.
This got me thinking - what is the smartest strategy (or strategies) to stabilise a single trait into a newly establishing landrace?
My guess is this will be a bit dependent on the foundation seedstock, growing room and available time, and the desired trait. While my gardens are larger than most backyards, i still don’t have room for say 100 maxima squash or 300 corn plants, and maybe just enough room for 100 melons if i stop growing some of my other projects. so I can’t grow a huge amount then cull like there is no tomorrow - which might be necessary if i were to select for a rare trait or mixture of traits. And sometimes the trait i want isn’t discernable until the plants have already crossed and made fruit.
My first thoughts were to take a ‘survival of the fittest’ approach to the first F0 generation.
Year 2 plant the F1 seeds, and a few isolated plants of the ‘pretty’ variety with the desired trait. Do some hand pollination of the landrace F1s using pollen from the pretty plants (assuming the trait is in the nuclear DNA). Tag those fruits, then make sure some of the seed of those fruits is collected and bagged separately (I know, labelling nightmare re-raises its ugly head - but bear with me).
Year 3, plant the F2 survivor lines from the previous year, but include a small block of the crossed seed, and make sure to collect some seed from this block
Year 4, plant 50/50 of the F3, and the pretty crossed seed.
proceed as per normal
thoughts?
-Are the plants predominantly outbreeding or inbreeding?
-If outbreeding, can you cull the unwanted male parent before it sheds pollen (can you already see the traits)?
-Are the desirable traits qualitative or quantitative, and dominant or recessive?
Based on these questions, it should be easier to plan your breeding program
I also have the same goal except I want big melons with small vines.
I am going to try to figure out how to set up the conditions to where the short vines are allowed to succeed but long vines are not. For example, if any vines to outside the defined area, they get mowed. So only the short vines are allowed to reproduce. In the long run, keeping seeds from the heaviest melons using the mow strategy might produce what we are after with less thinking and worrying.
My goals are similar to those of @anon14613632. My approach is rather random. The season just ending is only my second so early days. I planted a bush type in last year’s patch and sowed seeds from it in this years patch. It’s not a very robust method but all I have to do is note which plant(s) in each patch are descended from it. Once I see a number of bush types popping up I’ll favour those.
Large fruit with short vines is my goal with all cucurbits. I am thinking about other ways to accelerate down this path.
I have logger flagging which is incredibly cheap where I live and travel. I could mark where each cucumber was harvested on the vine. That way, I can harvest cucumbers without having to remember the quantity harvested per vine.
The flagging would also let me know how much vine length was required per cucumber, per vine.
If I am doing a cucurbit where I harvest fruit at the seed maturity stage every time, like muskmelon, for example, I might not need the logger flagging.
In a prior season, I tried to note which vines produced more of what I wanted with melons, but unfortunately, it was a cobweb of criss cross crazyness that I became frustrated trying to detangle and gave up.
The main reason I pose these questions is many growers are limited by available area or time, so don’t have the luxury of extensive growouts to select from. I was looking for a shortcut to allow for trait-specific landrace development in a shorter number of generations, or with a higher likelihood of that trait appearing in small population growouts, without waiting for years and years.
Diverging slightly, Austin and Ray, is the big fruit on a small vine a good idea? By limiting the available photosynthesis area, will the plants have sufficient energy to create big fruit?
I believe you are correct in your worry of that limitation — in a general sense. I also believe some members of a species have greater ability to produce fruit in lower light settings or less foliage. Some may have more sun absorption per leaf, bigger leaves, who knows what else.
The way some varieties behave in my garden makes me think they were bred with the assumption of unlimited space and time. The way they develop themselves is like they don’t comprehend the challenges that are to come in my garden.
It’s a dangerous place out there in my garden. It’s like the caveman days out there. The boy needs to become a man early. When he gets 30, he will already be an old man. Many varieties were bred with the assumption of an easy, modern life with medicine and vitamins.
It sounds like you need to be very selective of what you sample. Under those requirements, I would write down all varieties I could find, from many different seed companies websites and catalogs. Then I would do a process of elimination by researching each variety name individually, looking at what everyone is saying about it.
When I lowered my list down to 10 unique varieties, then I would email seed companies to see which ones produce those said varieties and then ask the ones that actually have real experience with those varieties about what else they know that’s not put down on their variety description.
I think it would be a great idea to also ask other gardeners in your area if they have grown that species, and if so, what varieties they’ve really liked, and why. If they have similar goals, fantastic! Even if they didn’t save seeds, that will point you in the direction of a good variety to buy.
You may also consider asking them what seed company they bought the seeds from. Possibly you could even ask if they have any seeds left over from the packet – they may!
Also, plant variety protection applications can be very informative. I have attached a link to the application of Bonutkin, which protections were issued in 1982 and have since expired. I have now seen a variety available in seed catalogs called “Butterkin,” which I guess is different somehow, probably with a newly issued protection.
If you have a small garden, you can’t plant too many so it’ll take many generations to get that cross. Unless you hand pollinate and keep track of crosses with tape and stuff. That’s the good thing of a small garden i guess. A bit more time to do that. If you have good eyes and a steady hand, you’ll make more progress then many of us with chunks.
Thanks for your suggestions. I was posing this more as a thought experiment, and wondering how the genetics and practicalities of the growouts might have consequences I hadn’t considered. I used melons as an example, but was thinking in terms of general principles that might apply across many crops.
I’m still struggling to do successful manual crosses on melons, anyway
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I love your point that there can be advantages to both large and small growing spaces! It’s wonderful to remember that everyone, regardless of the constraints they’re working within, can do cool things to contribute.
Another option for someone in a small growing space may be to grow a ton of plants crowded too closely, in order to get a lot of genetic diversity, and save seeds from the ones who do the best in those conditions. That may be a great way to breed plants that can handle being crowded, and that may be very advantageous for other gardeners with small growing spaces.
Totally agree. We’ve been zooming with French market vegetable growers. They want to take it bigger then most of us here are doing our hobby farming or home steading level. Hectares of aubergine grexes the initiator is talking. @ThomasPicard knows more about all this.
But those guys have no time for permaculture style soil building etc on hectares. Which is necessary for superdiverse microbiological processes scientists barely understand, but admit are speeding up genatic processes we only now are starting to realise exist. The scientist lady i listened to wasn’t sure the scientific method we use even is up for the task… It’s just way to complex with millions of varieties moving into and out of roots and changing genes, putting them on and off. It’s making me religious.
So we all have our roles to play and must cooperate fully.
Yep. Will soonish make a report about that, I think.
Very enthusiast people. The leader fell in love with Joseph’s writtings a few months ago, and realised a friend of him (market garderner) was doing things similar for a decade : crossing lettuces and others, favoring the hybrids, etc. He met also with an Italian guy, who has thousands of varieties of beans, also favoring crosses…
The thing for them is:
we are market gardeners, or small scale breeders, living on seed selling…
…legislation is complex…
… there is sometime difficulties in selling too diverse products when you go to the market…
… so you can’t afford breeding efforts… and create, or welcome, diversity… unless…?!?
Then come THE ideas : "what if we concentrate on bringing diversity within a fruit appearance? For example: bring all black eggplants varieties together, let them cross and select on vigor… yield… etc. We will still be able to sell it on the market without problems… Like Joseph did with yellow croockneck.
… and (even better) … why don’t we start by focusing on a transformed product to wrote off breeding investments without this problem of selling diversified populations of fruits on markets where buyers are kind of uneducated… so why not “ratatouille”? so eggplants, sweet peppers, tomatoes, zucchinis, onions… So then why not hectares?!?
So, as we speak, coming from different standpoints, different projets seem to emerge. And I am quite sure we can always collaborate on aspects of them. If all understand that diversity is the key point it is gonna be quite easy.
It should also be remembered that much about plants is simply still unknown to science.
20 years ago when I was still a student in agricultural school, we didn’t talk about epigenetics, communication between fungi and plants, nutrient exchanges between microfauna and the root system… If anyone would have spoken of this he would have passed for an crazy teacher.
Much remains to be discovered about the emotional, sensibility, intelligence aspect of plants and their means of communication. Maybe one day humanity will find it normal to use its things there in agriculture.
This may help to yield desirable traits more quickly and easily in plant breeding.
There are some very good scientists out there who work on this subject : Stefano Mancuso (Italy)
he explains that the plant man co-evolution was made in a form of symbiosis
To return to the methods of trait introduction, I remain quite disturbed by one thing that I just read on a scientific article: 'With a population decline of more than 98% by 900,000 years, there were only 1,280 individuals of reproductive age left. This genetic bottleneck still sees it in our genome today. However, this event would have played a major role in human development, notably by accelerating the evolution of the brain. This bottleneck would also have helped shape our genome by causing the fusion of two chromosomes to form the hominin-specific chromosome 2. Indeed, while all the hominid species living today (the great apes) have 24 pairs of chromosomes, we humans have only 23! It is perhaps by being on the verge of extinction that our distant ancestors would have acquired this specificity that makes us Men."
So obviously there are two possible solutions to evolve a species hybridization with a close species to create genetic diversity or go through a genetic bottleneck that forces nature to mutate the species?
wow genetics is hot! basically there is only imobilism that is a bad thing for life…
That gives me great hope for the species that are currently endangered due to anthropogenic climate change. Maybe beauty can be born out of ashes for them.
