Skip to Content.
Sympa Menu

homestead - Re: [Homestead] Carol Deppe (was: Seed Shortages)

homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org

Subject: Homestead mailing list

List archive

Chronological Thread  
  • From: Clansgian AT wmconnect.com
  • To: homestead AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [Homestead] Carol Deppe (was: Seed Shortages)
  • Date: Tue, 16 Dec 2008 10:34:29 EST



>
> > After reading the blurbs and reviews I ordered [Breed Your Own Vegtable
> Varieties].

About a year and a half ago I came into possession of a copy of the book (I
didn't come by it honestly, but that's another story). I read it, as we say,
'kiver to kiver' with great interest. And the explanation of genetics and
general seed saving techniques is very good.

But the same as many are aficionados of hierloom seeds and the whole OP
scene, the author likewise is a plant hybridizing buff, which, I found, led
her to
overstate the case a bit. Corn is subject to "inbreeding" but it isn't the
same sort of thing for a plant as it is for animals. There are instances of
OP
corn being grown for hundreds of years from the same seed with no loss of
quality.

But none the less, the premise can capture your imagination, especially the
notion of creating your own hybid variety and then stabilizing the strain
through selection and you then have an OP strain with the same desired
characteristics.

Or more to the point, since I'm in the OP 'hurray for our side' camp and thus
not all that interested in hybridizing anything, what about the few hybrid
seeds I already buy? For example, I regularly plant Tyee Spinach. I've
tried
at least twenty OP varieties and many of them are OK, but with Tyee I can
get
ten days to two weeks more time before it bolts and I can plant it in rather
warm weather with feasible results. If we can select for the desired traits,
why couldn't I just make a planting of it, gather the seeds, replant it, and
select for the desired characteristics.

So I dug further and got a clue as to why not. Even with the simplest
scenario of an F1 hybrid getting to that combination of stable genes for the
desired characteristics is a sticky wicket and the permutations are
mind-boggling.
In many cases, the favorable charateristics are dependent on more than one
gene and a very many times those genes are recessive. You must end up with
plants for a consitent genetic makeup in isolation from other plants and the
desired genes, if they are recessive, must be present in both parent plants.
This
means the if that combination of genes is four generations away, you might
get
two generations between the original hybrid and the stable OP variety which
are yellow and sickly and what clue would you have that these were the ones
to
be selected? Depending on the number of genes involved (and other
considerations) you might have to have twenty, fifty, or a hundred different
plantings
isolated from each other by the time you get all those recessive genes in one
plant.

And even then the results are often genetically unstable.

I wondered if stabilizing a hybrid into an OP was feasible enough for us
backwoodsmen to do it, why don't the professional seedsmen do it? The first
notion that springs to the cynical mind is that seedsmen don't want the
varieties
to be OP and stable since they wouldn't have a captive market for the more
expensive seeds. But I find that this explanation doesn't hold water. First
because so few people now of days save their own seeds. Every spring here
the
feed'n'seeds, produce stands, marts, Lowes, all have huge stocks of OP seeds.

Nobody (or very nearly nobody) is saves the Danvers Half-Long seeds for next
year, they simply buy more each year. So the seedsmen would be able to
continue
selling 99% of the seeds they sell whether they breed true to type or not.

Producing hybrid seed is expensive and for some types of plants it is very
expensive. If you could stablilize the hybrid character into an OP strain,
there would be a big financial incentive to do so. Yet it isn't being done.
The
question begs itself ....... why not??

Now if any of you comes up with some good strain from these practices, count
me in! I'll pay you handsomely for a few of the seeds. But I think in my
limited capacity, I'm going to do the ancient ploy of selecting for traits
from
among my OP plants.

And, oh, if you come across an OP variety of spinach that seems to be worth a
second glance, I'd be grateful for a recommendation. It was TVO that
recommended Tyeee some years ago and the local Southern States Cooperative
stocks it
in bulk every year. Three quarters or more of the spinach we eat (and that's
saying something since we eat a lot of spinach) is of that variety. I;d
rather grow an OP variety or three and save my own seeds, but then again, I'd
like
to have lots of spinach too, so I linger on with the hybrid.

James




Archive powered by MHonArc 2.6.24.

Top of Page