permaculture

[Toby Hemenway <hemenway@jeffnet.org>]

[I sent this out July 12, but my computer has lately been shifting to my wife's account without my noticing, so I believe it got blocked from the list]

I spent a couple of hours yesterday talking to Alan Kapuler about his plant breeding work. He's not doing any de-hybridizing these days, but is playing around with the plasticity of the plant genome in several genera, looking at new crosses. Here's a fun one: He got a tomato variety called "stakeless" from Delaware, which, as the name implies, has a fat stalk, and also has huge leaves that shade the fruit from sun scald. This he crossed with a variety of tomato (or species, I wasn't sure which) called humboldtii, which has huge tresses of small orange fruit, like clusters of grapes, 50 flowers to a tress. The F1 generation is coming up with many individuals that are short, thick-stalked bushes covered with many clusters of up to 100 flowers each. Imagine--if he can stabilize this, he's got an wonderful new tomato variety. He's also looking at Asian lettuce. Europeans prefer lettuce that is soft, moist, and forms rosettes, for eating raw. Asians bred a lot of lettuces that are more like huge dandelions, with thick, pointed, enormous leaves that are good for stir frying. So Alan is playing with those crosses too: tons of variability.

I've come to understand uses of kinship gardens better, too. Think of individual species and varieties as specific results of evolutionary conditions (combined, probably with innate tendencies of genes to sort in particular configurations, and also of certain physical forms (patterns) to be more likely given the laws of nature). These species don't occupy all the possible configurations of genes and forms, just the ones that selection has pushed into being. If you diagrammed them against all the possible combinations, they'd form an array of widely spaced points, with plenty of room in between. Plant breeders have all that room between the known varieties to play around in, an incredible opportunity. (I've been fantasizing about a cross between tree collards--a perennial kale that forms a big bush with many thick stalks, and broccoli: imagine a big perennial bush studded with broccoli.) So a kinship garden shows you where the spaces are, and hints at the possibilities (hmm, thick stalk? And over here, big clusters? What's in between?)

I appreciate what so many breeders are doing, going in the opposite direction of industry, which is breeding uniform varieties that sort of work anywhere (and suit almost nowhere really well). Heirlooms, and what new breeders are doing, are meant to suit very specific needs for very local groups. Imagine that your culture uses a particular cooking vessel. Don't you want varieties that fit that pot? Or an onion that bulbs two weeks early in your valley? We may have lost a lot of these, but people like Alan are repairing the damage. 


Toby
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For a look at my book on ecological gardening,
Gaia's Garden: A Guide to Home-Scale Permaculture, visit
http://www.chelseagreen.com/Garden/GaiasGarden.htm