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  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Hybrid seed disease resistance
  • Date: Sat, 14 Jan 2006 10:44:09 EST


> Keep planting your own
> seeds and select each year those fruits that did the best

And no mistake that right out of the seed packet, the hybrid plants resist
disease better ... all things being equal.

But I'd add these provisos:

1) Plant breeding has the chemical gardener frimly in mind when they test
plants and come up with hybrids. A plant that grows staunch and stong with a
larder of chemical salts available will not necessarily do so well in organic
soils. The phenomenon of organic soils as they relate to food production is
still largely unexplored compared to the time and attention lavished on
chemical
farming. I haven't done any actual controlled experiments, lacking the time
and interest. But I have noticed, for example, that in my stone-age method
of
growing hard corn for meal, the hybrid corn will puny and yellow if not
indulged in large amounts of chemical nitrogen. The OP corn greatly
outproduces it.

This phenomenon isn't liminted to plants. We've had people urge their over
bread milk goats on us, so overbread the billygoats have udders (I'm not
kidding). The spiel is that the goats produce so much more milk than our
hardscrabble flugle goats. And they indeed do, given a very expensive milk
inducing
diet to both goats, the super-milk goats will produce more. But once you
turn
them out to the brambles on the hillside, the difference disappears.

I've found that to hold true with so many hybrid plants as well. Given a
soil heavy with compost and humus, they don't seem to know what to do with it
and
perform not much better than the OP's. Tomatoes are an exception, but I
still grow mainly OP tomatoes. Mainly.

A lot of the whoop over the increased yields for hybrids is from commercial
growers who are using machines or (nearly) slave labor to harvest. If a
tomato
crop yields 10% more tomatoes, it means the difference between loss and
profit for the agribusiness farmer. But on the homestead, what does it
matter?
I'm going to get so many tomatoes beyond my needs and very modest market
sales
that I'm going to be feeding them to the pigs and chickens anyway. 10% or
even
40% more yield is almost meaningless.

2) It has taken years for me to confrim my suspicions about this, but I
have: a garden plant grown from saved seed, selected seed of course, will
not
only tend to give a stronger more resistant plant, but a plant adapted to
local
conditions. After trying to grow blue corn without much success, I got a
handful of seeds from the Native Seed Exchange and got a puny crop the first
year.
Small wonder, it's a desert variety being grown in the temperate rain
forest. By the fifth year, it was heavily rooted, thick stalked corn giving
10" fat
ears of corn. The biggest conformation of this was when I got some Jacob's
Cattle beans from a Mainer and saved the seeds for several years. During one
bad year I ended up with only a pint of seed beans and so asked for some more
(they sell them in grocery stores up there). Under nearly identical
conditions, the beans I had sved for seveal years grew great candelabras of
bushy plants
hanging with long pods. The plants from the new seed were not nearly so deep
green and yielded shorter ill-filled pods.




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