Some sweet corn that has grown on 66N in Luleå, Sweden
Luleå has a climate directly comparable to Anchorage, Alaska. Except I have marginally cooler days, especially in June, and even more light (longer daylength). It’s also much windier here and the plants that did best were the heavily tillered ones. The heaviest yielding plant had seven cobs, not bad for a crop I ”can’t grow” here (in the past, I had failed with both Gaspé and Painted Mountain, twice).
I cheated a bit with the melons because I grew on a friend’s pasture, without plowing or anything like it. I put down horse manure in heaps that generated some bottom heat, lasting into early July. I started the melons way way way too late by the way, at least two, three weeks later than I would have, as I had to wait for the green light from my friend. So in some way they were late, but compensated for it by the bottom heat.
The heat tapered off in early July, but I think I wouldn’t have gotten a thing, had I not started out like that. The corn was planted on the perimeter of the heaps, so they didn’t get much of the heat (or none) but they did get a ton of nutes so they turned into corn bushes. Also because I had the corn as a windbreak only, I set them out very sparsely — I did NOT count with a corn harvest at all! I just happened to have the seeds and figured why not? I can fail a third time… Instead, they turned into bushes with all that tillering and shocked me with a yield!!
I covered the melons with a lightweight fleece in August. At the time I didn’t see much fruit. I was actually quite sure I had nothing. I covered them anyway as my nights here are very cold, even colder than what one sees when they check ”Luleå climate” (I grow in a frost pocket). So I covered them and I only checked at harvest time what I had. Well, I most certainly didn’t expect 32 fruits!
I also had some maximas, pepos and chilacayote (ficifolia) in the same area. Ah and my cukes as well.
I work with the collab.semencespeps.fr and with 8 farms, located in Bourgogne Franche Comté, we start a GREX to adapt ours MELON to our quit short season compare to South of France. We work with Thomas Picard which is activ on this GTS plateform.
Bravo for your job. (sorry for my enslish, but i’m french…)
If you have some seeds of your GREX, i would be very happy to get some. And if you need seeds, just ask me, we got a catalog . Our seeds are fixed. But i start lots of GREX next year, with the french team, collab.semencespeps.fr
congratulations cathy !!
I love your multicoloured sweetcorn. Did you eat any as sweet ? Did they taste good ?
looking forward to the seed train or whatever seed exchange we will organize this year.
best
Isabelle
I hate to crush some dreams but I am planning to share both melon and corn only starting 2025.
Melon most definitely later down the line. Corn a but more up in the air as I have more of it.
These two crops ar so marginal here that I plan to do three things now that I have own seed. 1) I’ll scale up rather massively. I started with ca. 120 melon plants which quickly were down to 70-ish due to endemic Sclerotinia in my soil. Of those 70, maybe 16 gave me fruit, so the 32 fruits come from 16 or so plants. That should illustrate just how much I’m pushing every limit here. Next year I’m aiming at at least 500 melons. I also want to ”waste” large amounts of seed by direct-sowing in cold soil, because the manure helped them initially so the real test is still to come! Corn: since I aim to both incorporate more stuff I bought since and extract a sub-population of se+ and also another population that’s chinmarked, I aim at at the very least 800-1000 plants. Possibly much more because I will grow at three different places myself. This was ca 120 plants if I remember right that I started with.
We had hard frost two, three weeks later than usual which gave me (any) seed (at all) to continue with. Beyond scaling up both in numbers and 2) growing redundantly in four different locations (three places by me and one by a close friend), 3) I intend to freeze seed for at least two (scaled-up) years to come, knowing that I can’t reasonably expect a yield every year. I must have a backup. Sending away first-year grex of marginal crops to folks who don’t at all live in marginal places is not a winning strategy when it comes to adaptation right here. I think it makes sense to start sharing wide grexes in year two, even better, year three. I almost never share first-year stuff beyond very small, individual trades maybe, and even then I like those to be local. (In this case, my allotment friend will grow some of my seed which is great as she grows well within isolation distance from me.) It’s just too marginal and I need some padding, some fallback, some buffer for a future, say, if I should fail two consecutive years in a row I still need to have enough padding to be able to reboot and continue. It’s the engineer in me talking! I like redundancy…
So I do not intend to put these two into the seed train for now. I hope I’m forgiven. I take the long-term security over short-term satisfaction every time
To further clarify, barring complete crop failure in 2025 (which is always a possibility here) I’ll happily share these two next year from my hopefully massive growout. Just not right now, not right at this premature stage.
I will have maxima (both a super wide grex and seed taken from the beefiest fruits separately because I got some monsters this year), cukes (I have something like two liters of seeds), pepo (there is a thread I opened about it last year: I want a pepo that yields like a summer squash but if I miss the harvest window, it should store as a pumpkin and sweeten up in storage. Further, I want it to have carotene-rich and firm, not pudgy, flesh). Possibly some coccineus as I grew out a super wide population. I don’t know yet!
Here are some cukes and pepos (I have yet to see which ones have the kind of “pumpkin-like” flesh I want). The maximas I already posted in Tanja’s thread recently…
I understand the concept of locally adapting plants and not encouraging inbred breeding of plants as a society. I understand seed sharing and open source. I dont understand working with a plant population, discovering wonderful attributes, adapting to your climate, and then sending them away and not being able to develop them any further? The genetic code that had just combined due to your initial cross, growing style, and conditioning is out numbered and lost again? That doesn’t make sense to me.
I absolutely agree that we are doing extremely important things that are not a quick turn around. Plants need time to adapt and a population size time to develop.
Your work adapting to cool short seasons is extraordinarily wonderful! Thanks for sharing the progress and pictures!
Thank you! I appreciate the feedback. Last year I had a minor clash in a series of private messages where someone accused me of being an egoist for not willing to share something at that stage. I think it’s important to be able to be honest, able to discuss priorities, etc without being put in a corner.
Anyone I have ever sent seeds to would probably say I am rather generous in my sharing, but I reserve the right to do it at the stage that works for me.
One argument I sometimes hear is that I can always reboot from the seed train. That own seed is overrated when there’s so much diversity out there. Why do I freeze seed, why don’t I just spread all I have right now and receive back offspring instead? Because that offspring didn’t grow in conditions nearly as harsh as mine. Because adaptation, when something is truly marginal marginal, bordering on impossible for you, happens in your very own seeds, not in seeds you receive from other people, no matter how wonderfully diverse.
I would be nowhere without the diversity I received that went into a population that resulted in own seed. So I share back, rather widely, but at the right stage.
Hello @polarca Cathy, I fully understand and completely accept your position. I also sometimes hesitate to share seeds when I don’t have enough or when I have other plans form them. No worries, I will not criticize you. Thank you for your frankness. I did not know you had such elaborate plans and I know you do share seeds when you have enough !!! Your geographic position makes it difficult for you to cultivate, which in turn makes any of your experiments of the highest interest for the community. thanks again. Best regards
Isabelle
Absolutely agree to all! Plants that thrive and feel at home because they have had the opportunity to do so…adaption! If every year I have to restart with seed from other areas it will not be adapted. If there is not enough seed to further the project I am trying to accomplish than no forward motion will be made. Sending it off right away? That part never did quite make sense to me.
Here’s to forward motion for the good of us all! Thanks again for sharing pics.
You know, if anyone could just give me a bag of melon seeds that would readily grow here, I wouldn’t be nearly this much interested Part of the thrill comes from it being so marginal, but not entirely impossible (an engineer would never take on a project that is totally impossible, right?)
So where do I draw the line? Three times I try to grow something, if no worky I tend to give up. Corn has failed twice and turned into something promising the third time. I seriously only planted it as windbreak and it worked
Melons I planted for the very first time, since cukes did so well so I figured well I can always try. Not expecting much more than that, other than I love melons so I need them in my life
One melon gave me only two seeds and even those are puny! One plant had two large melons not only juicy and sweet but full of seeds. The rest, in-between these two ends.
I didn’t mix the seed. With both corn and melons, I saved selarately from each fruit/cob. This, to make sure I replant offpsring from each fruit or cob. I may do a light prioritizing for some plants. I took notes for each and stored them along with a photo. I may plant, say, at least one seed per melon heap of the few where my notes say SUPER sweet. But at this stage, I don’t want to skew anything heavily — just gently move the population into a direction I want. For that reason also, it would be hard to “share a grex” as I don’t have one. I have tons of individual seed bags
You could think of it from the point of view of individual genes. They don’t disappear that easily. The ones that are useful spread through the population and the ones that don’t are lost. Usually within species most of the genes are in any case the same and very little is actually lost, and only from that population. Better changes of getting new combinations or new uses for genes when there is more variance.
If you take Homo sapiens for on example, there are on average about 2% neanderthal in every human that is not recent african decent, but something like 60-70% of the neanderthal genome is still present in modern human. It is just spread out. So the rate of loss is fairly slow and when new genes mutate, something got to go. Personally what I try to do with new, and possible unadapted seeds, is to grow them separetely for 2 years and at least use them for pollination. This should give time for some of the genes go forward.
Absolutely. I rely on my garden to eat. I need it to be edible! For sure takes a couple seasons to establish. Especially when those seasons are shorter and cooler as mine have been growing. Nothing like what you have going on but still less than I’m used too! If a plant is adapted to your region than it will probably even grow in a cool season here for me. (Midwest, United States) I’m excited to see what we all come up with. Most definitely alot of evolving plantlife going on globably. Pretty exciting!
Thanks for sharing your growing information with us. Fascinating!
In regards to sending in a handful of seed to the program when you only have two handfuls? Do the genes just get swallowed back up? If the expression is evident do you think it should be monitored and grown on a small scale in the local environment in which it surfaced?
If I’m to understand … genetics is a numbers game and the more numbers introduced the more variables can come into play. With plant genetics desirable traits are what is strived for. This is exactly where I get off track.
I understand growing out to increase number of seed and diversity but selection still comes into play. Wouldn’t it be better to steward the seed that is expressing desirable traits than to just let them become possibly outnumbered again? I think that is what you are advocating in regards to the two year grow out?
And than if it’s allowed to stabilize it’s a Heirloom again but that’s absolutely the desired outcome as long as we don’t all grow exclusively Heirlooms as a global population!
I’ve come to the personal conclusion that like everything in life… It’s a balance !?!
I could discuss and talk all day. I really really wish there was a way we could all talk that wasn’t a formal setting or involved so much typing!
32 in total it is. Seeds taken per fruit to make sure I replant from all fruit.
Instead, they turned into bushes with all that tillering and shocked me with a yield!!
