Category: Breeding

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Thank you, Ames!

Just back from Heartland and, before the jetlag overpowers me, I really want to thank everyone at the North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station (NC7) in Ames, Iowa for their incredible hospitality over the past week. I know this will get to them because a couple of the people working at the station told me they visit us occasionally. Grateful for that too!

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The ARS facility at Ames is the oldest of the US plant introduction stations. It’s main crop is maize, of which it has a collection of about 20,000 accessions from all over the world.

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But there are also some 30,000 accessions of a bunch of other crops and wild species.

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Many of the crops require careful management of pollinators during regeneration and multiplication. Fortunately, there hasn’t been any colony collapse disorder among the beehives used and maintained on the station.

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Like many of the active genebanks of the USDA National Plant Germplasm System, the one at Ames benefits from an almost symbiotic relationship with nearby Iowa State University, with some staff also having university duties and many students gaining hands-on experience in the genebank.

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Also nearby is a fascinating prairie remnant, Doolittle Prairie, which houses about a dozen crop wild relatives. I’ll say a bit more about that in due course, but here’s what the place looks like at sunset.

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Thanks again to everyone at NC7!

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Pssst! Wanna pollinate pumpkins?

I was cleaning out a mailbox the other day, and came across a message from Karl Haro von Mogel, who is quite well known around these parts. He was advising me that his new pollination video — on Cucurbits — had just been uploaded to YouTube. And I forgot to write about it. Apologies to Karl, but I’ll make it up in a minute.

The video is clearly aimed at the more industrial end of the spectrum. Bringing parent plants into a greenhouse was never an option for me. On the other hand, wandering through the pumpkin patch soon after dawn to gather ripe male flowers that had not quite opened was one of the great treats of saving my own seeds. And Karl deals with more than just controlled pollination. The first 3 1/2 minutes gives a good overview of cucurbit diversity, centres of origin and wild relatives. And near the end he reveals the secrets of the seedless watermelon. All in all, well worth 10 minutes of your life, even if you plan never to pollinate a pumpkin.

In his email Karl mentioned that he had entered the video for a competition at Chlorofilms. It was one of 17 2nd prize winners. So were some of his other films, including this one on pepper breeding.

Maybe if we could rustle up “at least $8000” in prize money we’d get some entries to our own competitions. Or maybe we should just enter the next Chlorofilms competition, if and when it happens.

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Rainbow sweetcorn not so sweet

Patrick at Bifurcated Carrots reports on his experiment this year growing Painted Hills sweetcorn. to summarise, the plants weren’t very robust, the yield was poor, and the kernels weren’t all that sweet. (Perhaps he should try Red Miracle next year.) On the plus side:

Wow! Multi-colored sweet corn! Can you believe it? A variation of the famous Painted Mountain corn! Perfectly edible. Truly a visual delight, if not a tasty one.

Pat admits that it needs more work to thrive under his conditions, and that he’s not about to take that on, which is fair enough. Maybe someone else will rise to the challenge.

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Nibbles: Biofuels, Nuts, Homegardens, Urban Ag, Fruit

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What I did on my holidays: The Pluot

“Can I have one of these plums,” I asked the friend with whom we were staying in California.

“They’re not plums, they’re pluots. Some kind of cross between a plum and an apricot.”

Skeptical as ever, I rushed off to check such an outlandish claim, and, chastened, realized that there’s a lot I do not know about fruit. Not only is the pluot genuine, there are apriums and plumcots too. The one I tried was apparently called Dino Egg, a trademarked (and exceedingly fanciful — I mean, who knows?) name for a variety registered as Dapple Dandy.

Pluots are simply stunning. They are sweeter than most plums I’ve ever bought, and not in the least bit stringy. The flesh is not just sweet though; it has complex smells and tastes, slightly spicy, maybe, with — there’s no other way to put it — the taste of sunshine. And the flesh parts easily from the stone, at least the one I had did, which may be related to the lack of stringiness.

Fast forward a week and we’re barreling along I-5 from Los Angeles to San Francisco, through the heart of the San Joaquin Valley. I’ve seen intensive industrial agriculture before, but this was still an eye-opener. ((The sheer logistics of it boggles the mind; we passed 14 double trailers full of ripe tomatoes and three of garlic — about right for a tomato sauce. I need to find a way in to that story.)) We pulled over to visit the store at Murray Family Farms, and found more kinds of pluot than you could shake a stick at. Time was pressing, so we couldn’t chat long to the two really friendly guys in the store, but we did buy a couple of bags of pluots to take Back East, where we’d never seen them.

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They went down pretty well, with about as much skepticism about their origins as I had originally. That’s one of them, grown by a Nature’s Partner (and bought at a supermarket, not Murray Family Farms). The number ought to tell me which particular partner was responsible for that particular pluot, but although the Nature’s Partner web site does everything except squirt cider in your ear it doesn’t easily let you peer behind the number.

The day before my return to Rome, I noted in the local paper that the following day’s edition would contain an article entitled The hunt for the elusive pluot. Coincidence? I think not. In the end it turned out to be a review of a book about the hunt for the elusive pluot. Of course I haven’t read it yet, but judging from another review it might well be a tasty read.

Meanwhile, someone tell me whether pluots have spread beyond California? I stalk the supermarkets of the US as often as I can, but I’ve never seen it.