If it is possible and not too much hassle, I might be a candidate for keeping the varieties in separate packets. That way my greenhouse sowing trial can report on their individual responses to being sown over time as the daylength and temperatures change. But if not I can just sow one seed per pot and produce seed batches sorted by flowering response.
I highly recommend people check out the wiki page on C. berlandieri. This is the ancestral population that quinoa, huauzontle and a range of lost ancient crops were derived from. I can’t access wild/weedy berlandieri in Australia but many forms are in the GRINS database, and it grows widely in the USA, so maybe somebody else can try introducing some wild genes into the quinoa grex. That might be one way to get around import restriction for me- if the plant is over 75% quinoa genetics then it is pretty much quinoa. The Chia strain of huauzontle grown in Mexico for grain would be a dream for me to get my hands on.
I left a voice message with Wild Garden Seeds about whether we could get a discount on a bulk order of quinoa varieties. They are a small company (as most of the really interesting seed companies are!) and so they might not get back to us right away. I will keep you updated.
@ShaneS I could possibly keep the quinoa varieties separate for shipping to you.
C. Berlandieri was featured in the very interesting book Rivers of Change—it was domesticated by native groups across the Eastern USA, though it was more or less abandoned by the time of European contact. There was just one brief European reference to something that may have been this plant being minimally cultivated on sand bars in the lower Mississippi.
Yay- A fellow Australiasian. Do you know what the quarantine rules are for importing quinoa seed into NZ? It is one of the few crops that are relatively easy to import into Australia at the moment.
I would be interested in participating in this also. I’m in zone 6a, soil is glacial till so poor nutrition and high mineral content. Summers are hot and dry. And short.
This species is a diploid, so could be used to create novel tetraploids with many of the hundreds of weedy chenopodium species. She could be a potential guest for an interview in the future. I’ll send out an email and see if we get a bite.
This photo portrays my local weedy Chenopodium. Possibly C. berlandieri. It grows in my rural area of Southeast Kentucky USA although it has been shrugging off my efforts to get it established along with grain chia in areas where I would like it.
I would like to say that I could share seed from this species, but that hinges on my getting it established somewhere accessible to me where I can then gather seed. Here’s hoping.
I might have found a quinoa/lambsquarters cross on a farm nearby, In any case it looks like it, and when I cooked the buds they didn’t have the bitterness that my lambsquarters meal had.
How would I know if they’re actual crosses or some variation on lambsquarters?
I think they can leave these for me until seeds mature. There are other lambsquarters in the vicinity with the normal size heads, a pretty obvious difference.
From here that does look a lot like Amaranthus palmeri, aka pigweed, which grows in my area. The palmer amaranth here has pleasant leaf flavor, I have not yet tasted the seeds. I’ve found the leaves of our local amaranth pleasant enough for salad greens use in addition to spinach greens.
I think in the Caribbean, it would be appropriate even without knowing the exact species to call that generically a ‘green callaloo’ amaranth. Maybe the equivalent in Appalachian English would be spinach amaranth.
If it is palmer amaranth, you might enjoy that it is one of the species that has developed its own resistance to Roundup herbicide, which folks believe is because it is an obligate outcrossing species that is prolific in seed production. In other words, it happened through natural mass evolutionary pressure.
Is there any special guidance for drying and processing amaranth and chenopodium seeds? Or is it simply to let the seed heads go brown and separate seeds from chaff as with typical small hard seed plants?
Edit: I didn’t realize the last photo was the same plants as the earlier ones. Those leaves have an obvious goosefoot shape that does not match pigweed.
Hi Julia, that would be really cool if it was! But I’m not sure; chenopods are a very diverse group. I don’t know how we would figure this out for sure, other than growing out the seeds from the plant and seeing if quinoa-style traits segregate out alongside more lambs-quarters-like plants.
And a note for everyone; we’re currently in the process of buying a diverse mix of quinoa seed! We decided for this year to focus on buying the mixes offered by Wild Garden seeds, since most of their single varieties are selections from the mixes/grexes. That way, we could get almost all the diversity at a fairly low cost, and we can always get more next year.
