Here it is, close to the end of the garden season. (Agh, already!) It's time to assess how our breeding projects have worked out this year, both the planned and unplanned ones. To get started, here's our (cucurbita pepo x cucurbita argyrosperma) F2:
I thought I had posted about this last year, but I can't find that I did. This was an amazing cross that turned up in the garden last year from some seeds we had saved from Lebanese White Bush zucchini a few years earlier. We knew they would be crossed... we didn't know it would apparently be an interspecies cross with Tennessee Sweet Potato squash! The resulting squash were pretty horrid, frankly, but they were not bitter which has frequently been a problem on the seemingly very rare occasions when these two species (pepo and argyrosperma) cross. Argyrosperma is a squash grown mostly in the southern USA and Mexico, and freqently just for the seeds. We only grew it one year, and weren't too impressed. The flesh is bland, and the squash rapidly get a a very hard shell. If they are like the few of the cross that we tried as zucchini, they also develop their seeds very early. However, they are heat tolerant, drought tolerant, and bug and disease resistant. Getting some of those qualities into summer squash struck us as very desirable, and here we were with the means to work on that.
We planted 4 seeds, of which 3 germinated. One produced squash that appeared to have crossed again with an acorn squash; this was not a happy combination and got pulled pretty promptly. The other two plants appeared very similar, apart from the fact that one of them had a bush habit and the other was a bit more rambunctious, although I wouldn't call it a full-on vine. The fruit the produced was extremely similar, but that's a squash from the vining plant above and below.
Here it is cut open. We found the stems attaching the fruit to the plant extremely tough, and the skin hardened fairly quickly too. This is no doubt the influence of the
argyrosperma. That's a bit dismaying; if the plants are resistant to bugs and disease because they are physically hard that won't make for good eating. Still, these little squash were much better than last year in terms of tastiness and edibility. I won't say they were particularly great, but there is a big improvement.
We saved one fruit from each of the remaining plants. You can see how similar they are. Obviously, we intend to save seeds and continue next year. These are going to be very hard to cut open; they are still hard when ripe like the argyrosperma squash. I did manage it last year so I presume I can do it again.
We planted a bunch of
potatoes from seeds in the spring, all of which got munched by flea beetles and leap hoppers, and generally didn't make it apart from a few stragglers that got left in a pot and which we have not examined yet. However, we replanted a number of seed potatoes from seed-grown plants. Here are three of the best four; one of them seems to have disappeared. I need to check the potato boxes to see if I can find a few to plant again next year. It was a dark purple skinned one, with a nice mauve and white interior.
The others are all offspring of Pink Fir Apple. I wonder about that dark mauve skinned one; it looks like the other parent could be Purple Viking, which is known for producing some real lunkers. But maybe not; who knows what genetics are lurking beneath the surface in potatoes? The one at the top retains a hint of the waxiness of Pink Fir Apple, but the other two are quite light and fluffy in texture. They are all reasonably productive. These are the last remaining few selected from quite a few seed-grown potatoes. We discarded one I was quite interested in. It only grew about 6 or 8 inches high. It also produced about 6 very small potatoes per plant too, and that just wasn't going to cut it, unfortunately. Still! I'm pleased with the ones that remain.
Our
watermelon project continues. I appear not to have posted an update last year; bad me! I feel like we've made a lot of progress, but we just aren't there yet. We planted only seeds from yellow-when-ripe watermelon this year, but we got some green skinned ones too. It's just a matter of time to sift them out, since the green skins are dominant, and once there are none, it will mean that gene is out. However, since we can't tell until the fruit ripens, they are still casting out their pollen. It sure slows us down on getting them out.
Flavour-wise, we were a little disappointed in them this year. In spite of all the heat, they were good, but not great. Very sweet, but we thought a little on the mild side. So, we will have to see what we get next year. Right now they are moderately consistent; most of them are round to slightly oval, with either solid green turning to yellow rinds, or faintly striped green turning to yellow rinds, or "tiger" stripes in two tones of green turning to yellow and yellowish-green. And the ones that don't turn at all, of course.
As for beans, I thought it was kind of an exciting year. Our project of growing out the Blue Lake - Cherokee Trail of Tears for a more anthracnose-resistant Blue Lake type bean continues. Our anthracnose is as bad as ever, I would say, but the Blue Lake seemed especially unresistant this year. They are not really any worse than they have ever been; it's that our crosses that are growing out next to them really are more resistant and it's starting to show!
I've sorted the crosses into 4 groups: the one I wanted the most was a pink-flowered, white-seeded, round (in cross-section) bean - there was exactly ONE. I have saved the seeds from that plant, up at the top right. Below it are the best from the much more common pink-flowered, black seeded, round bean. The beige seeds produce plants with purple pods; that's been the case since the cross first happened. I'd be more excited about them, because they are productive, tasty, and disease resistant, but for the fact that there are already quite a few purple-podded pole beans out there, and I don't know that mine are any improvement on them. Finally there are a lot of white-flowered, white-seeded plants and I saved seeds from the best of them. The seeds tend to be larger than those of the original Blue Lake, and the pods even more variable from round to really quite flat. There's also a lot of variability on the anthracnose resistance front, so we will be continuing to winnow out the disease-prone ones for a few years, I expect. But over all, they really are looking quite good.
It's some other beans that have me really full of glee, though; two in particular. The two top sets are from a cross that turned up in the garden last year, and dried down to an amazing marbled mauve. It was in a patch that was a cross between Deseronto Potato and Blue Lake; I made the decision to discard that cross because it had turned out to be extremely lack-lustre but I kept the beans from the one plant. I determined that it was most likely ((Deseronto x Blue Lake) x (Anellino Yellow x Cherokee Trail of Tears)) OR ((Deseronto x Blue Lake) x (Blue Lake x Cherokee Trail of Tears)). Yes, I've mis-labelled that seed bag - must fix it.
On the top left are the seeds I'm keeping to try again, from a number of plants. These were the most disease resistant and reasonably productive ones, and they are mostly small and round like navy beans. I did keep one larger, flatter one just because it had such an unusual slate-blue colour. It looks black in the photo but it really is not. The ones in the tub were the rejects, which will be eaten this winter.
There was one bean in this set that was truly amazing. That's the taupe seeds from it in the bottom right of the photo. All those seeds come from one plant. There would have been even more, except that the deer made a bee-line for it every time they broke into the garden and ate a bunch of it. I've never seen such a large, robust, branching bean plant. It was also quite disease-resistant. It has big, fat purple pods, and the seeds are a reasonably large size in addition to being numerous. Its sole flaw is that it was rather late to dry down, but we'll see how its offspring do - because you can be very sure those seeds are getting planted.
The final bean in this set was another one that stood out as extremely productive. I wrote about spotting this one in the Octarora beans earlier this summer. The pile of seeds is about half the size of the other primo cross, but they are smaller generally and more dried down at this point. That's still an impressive amount of beans from one plant, and if the offspring are anywhere near as good as this plant was, they may actually replace the entire Blue Lake - Cherokee Trail of Tears project, even though it did so well this year, as being better. Amazing! A dark horse, so to speak. On which note, I'd like to ask how people feel about green beans with black seeds. They have not been admired in modern agriculture particularly, I know that, but they do seem to be what I am getting to some degree.
The final beans are the Lima beans. The photo is a bit of a mess, but the original seed I got for Alabama is in the packet at the top. I was trying to determine how much, if any, they have crossed with other Limas. I think the answer is; they have. Immediately below them are what I believe to be uncrossed Alabamas. They have just not darkened as much as the older ones, but they have the distinctive black eye. The ones immediately to their right, I believe to be a cross between Alabama and Potawatomi, otherwise seen in an un-crossed state in the lower left. These look like Alabama but with a pinker tint and brown to pinkish eye, and one of them had some darker mottling like Potawatomi which was what convinced me that these are a cross.
Then there are a good number that are very pale when shelled, although they dry to a standard colour, and have no eye, or only a very faint one. I have concluded that these may be a cross between King of the Garden (those green seeds in the middle bottom) and Alabama. We planted a lot of seeds from a single plant of King of the Garden this spring, that last year was the only plant of any variety that did well, which was startling because King of the Garden is usually our latest and least productive Lima bean. It was a terrible year for Lima beans generally. However, we're just not getting very many King of the Garden beans this year, and I have to conclude that it is because it was an F1 hybrid, and the subsequent plants don't resemble it particularly. None of them are that spectacularly productive, nor do they have the green colour. However, if I'm right, I'll be interested to see how they develop next year, especially if we get any back-crosses.
Finally, our selected line of extra-hardy leeks is doing well, apart from the leek moth which now appear to be a fixture. They still look quite variable but we have a good selection of medium to large sized leeks in the bed, so it looks like we are making progress in selecting them to size up a bit earlier. Unfortunately, I left about 8 to 10 leeks from last year to go to seed, and although I haven't cleaned it yet, it looks like there will be next to no seed. Not only is that pushing it on the number of leeks to let go to seed, they did very badly at blooming at overlapping times. However, there's lots of seed left from the year before, and this years, as said, are looking good. Onward to next year...
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