I had posted a little about my sweet potatoes on the old site and haven’t gotten around to moving it over here yet but decided to just start a new one instead.
I’m still a little conflicted on when and why to use the landrace label, but something I have settled on in my own mind as an indicator, is the point where something, especially something that originates in a climate very different from mine, becomes possible for direct seeding and or if it starts to volunteer. My sweet potatoes arrived at that point a three or four years ago. I believe also that their ability to do so is transferable, certainly to climates with longer growing season but also as far north as Michigan, Minnesota and upstate New York.
I’ve been at this for ten years now and looking back at the massive amount of research I did back at the start, it’s amazing that I’ve gotten to this point. Nothing in all those scholarly articles and records from old breeding programs gave much hope, back then, that this could happen.
I think, but I don’t know that it was due to that first self-compatible plant for lack of a better word “unlocking” seed producing ability in those I crosse it with. That plant came from an old lady in Kentucky who kept it a greenhouse for an unknown number of years and sold cuttings from it each spring. I believe it may have been an old ornamental variety called “Blackie”, but plants sold by that name from other sources that I have seen, did not bloom as profusely or make very many seeds. I regret now that I did not keep a clone of it going over the years because she and it are now gone.
But! this past year when I planted a lot of seeds and a lot of older generation seeds, I found two plants that phenotypically are very similar to that plant. They are both semi-viny, as in they are not bushy growth but also do not have long vines. Like that original plant, neither makes roots. When I say they don’t make roots, I mean they do not make large storage roots (sweet potatoes), but of course they do have roots. They both have what I call ivy leaf shape. A purple one looks pretty much identical to that original plant but blooms even more. A green one blooms more that any I’ve ever seen and is self-compatible.
This isn’t the first time I have confirmed self-compatibility in a plant, but it is the first time I documented it.
I think that the purple one, Mr Bloom is also self-compatible but don’t have good proof of that yet. In any case I think they compensate for the loss of that original plant because they have abundant blooming and self-compatibility like it did, even more so than it did. But they also have in their ancestry plants that did make nice storage roots. I speculate that might mean that when crossed to some new variety it might take just two or three years to select for high percentage of nicely rooting plants instead of eight or ten.
I will probably clone Mr and Ms Bloom for some years to come and conduct some new experiments with them.
