Homestead mailing list

[Clansgian AT wmconnect.com]

> 
> > 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