Hi, I’m Filip, I’m coming here after watching interview with Joseph on youtube’s channel of David the Good.
There’s one thing I have problem with wrapping my mind. Let’s assume that first year is super wet and second year is super hot.
We can assume that there are plants resistant to heat and also not resistant to wetness. Also some resistant to wetness, but not to heat. Overall good genes can be discarded in first year.
So basically, instead of doing filter and then mixing, maybe we can better results by first mixing and then filtering?
I do both.
I take a lot of different types all mixed together. Plant some of that mix and allow whatever selection pressure comes that year.
Next year I plant more from the original mix and also include some offspring from the previous year.
I just continually repeat this pattern until eventually I will have seeds that are adapted to the full range of my climate.
I do slightly more than nothing, just to make sure the surviving plants have the proper conditions to cross and produce seed. I hand remove pests and set live traps for critters. I do the bare minimum to get the seeds and thats it. If disease kills it than so be it, I don’t want that in my second generation anyway. I like to let at least 20% die as the weakest of the weak, because they don’t have what im looking for. The ones on the fringe i at least want their pollen. Beyond that i don’t do much during the first year besides an emergency that might wipe out 90%+ of my population like animals.
Everyone has their own way, and their own reasons for doing it that particular way. In your garden, mixing first might be the best option. In mine, the vast majority of seeds die, so mixing is a multi-year process. I go for survival first.
For years I planted tomatoes out in the snow, under wall-o-water. Some died. Others died back to the root and returned in the spring. The last year I did this before deciding to abandon that project I had several that thrived in the cold.
I wasn’t breeding for anything, and no attempt at diversity. They just developed a new trait through generational exposure. I wasn’t even crossing them, and this was long before I started adaptive gardening.
In some cases the desired traits might be closer than we imagine.
I think it is extremely important to get F2 plants and start making your selections in the F2. Seed quality is also a huge uncontrolled variable in the initial generation. If you could equalize seed quality in the initial generation it would make for a better process. Essentially what you are doing with Joseph’s method in the initial generation is synergistically combining the step of conducting trials of available germplasm while allowing the F1 crosses to be made at the same time. Poor seed quality lots fail to contribute anything at all- sometimes not even pollen. Treating plants nicely the first year might allow them to set a little seed or pollen. and then F1 hybrids in the second year- this time with equalized seed quality and F2 hybrids in the third year. with the third year being the magic year when we might see the breeder’s grex show some adaptive segregation. Another way might be to do controlled crosses.
I bought some fresh seed for tomatillo in 2024- I may just as well have saved my money because I didn’t baby it. I also expended some old seed for tomatillo- and I might as well have just thrown it in the trash. The existing tomatillo population had so much seed that I couldn’t detect any difference in variation between the population with fresh additions and the one that just volunteered. If I had babied and made a few transplants I might have some interesting F1 seed to plant next year. Tomatillos are SI obligate out-crossers so all I would have had to do was grow a couple transplants and any resulting fruits would be heavy on crosses.
My tomato projects which are my main focus now- I make lots of manual crosses and am keeping track of a lot of segregating crosses. Domestic tomatoes, except for some of Joseph’s lines, are SC and tend to self- though a good exserted style and stigma might get you 4% outcrossing. So manually crossing tomatoes is often essential if you want to mix things up. I often have to baby the new to my garden parents- even some of the wild species.
I think it is an important point that for many of the benefits of the landrace/adaption approach to appear, one has to get to the F2. If one plants a number of varieties none of which are adapted to conditions, (and which may be strongly inbred to boot) results maybe nil. This will depend on how extreme the mismatch is between the varieties being grown and the local conditions, of course. Even mechanisms like acquiring local endophytes or the production of epigenetic variation need some time to start working. This is even more true for plants that don’t tend to outcross as much, such as beans. With those, unless one is making manual crosses, it may take several generations for enough crosses to show up to start making a difference.
Joseph talked about this in the course.
He adviced to have some survival rate in the first year, so if selecting for draught, letting them suffer a light draught first, not a severe one that could kill everything. A survival rate between 30 and 70% is fine.
This for experienced gardeners might be easy, but I have a difficult time guessing how I have to grow a seed for it to have a specific survival rate.
Since my survival rate is currently abismally low, I should be doing everything for making them survive, but right now I don’t have spare time for this hobby. I just have a bunch of different varieties of radishes growing on their own, completely neglected.
This is the easiest crop I can think of, if it can grow just with the winter/spring rains.
