This! The breeder basically keeps two parental lines that they use to make the seeds. Usually they need to do the crossing pollination by hand somehow and make sure that no foreign pollen fertilize the females. There is a great and accessible book about breeding by Carol Deppe if you're interested in breeding plants in generally https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/breed-your-own-vegetable-varieties/
I've also always been wondering about this and other questions before reading that book.
So when the breeder has a hybrid they like, let’s call that AB (F1), they want to grow and sell more of that variety.
So the following year, they will use their reserve population of true AA and BB parents and hand pollinate them. But they still won’t know if the seeds produced will be anything like AB (F1), right? So are those hybrids only available for 1 year or as long as those original seeds remain viable?
Seeds of many species, when stored correctly, can still germinate for decades. I have used seed that was 30+ years old several times before.
Breeders produce inbred parental lines by self-pollinating for 5-8 generations (or double-haploid creation).
They then do a small initial seed increase by bulking a generation. Bulking refers to combining the seeds from several plants (I used nethouse with 24 cantaloupe plants and a small young queen honeybee hive inside to produce 0.5-1kg of seed).
This is called basic or breeder seed. This lot is tested for genetic uniformity and seedborne diseases. It's also used for small hybrid seed productions to test out the inbred.
Breeder seed is increased again and bulked to make foundation seed (around 50kg for cantaloupes) This is used to make the first commercial production of the hybrid. It is then increased yet again to produce stock seed (500kg)
Stock seed is what the commercial hybrid is produced from for the rest of its life. Foundation seed is used to produce more stock seed as needed.
The breeder seed and foundation seed are stored carefully to prolong it's life. The stock seed is in the general warehouse with the hybrid seed.
As long as they maintain quality control during the inbred increase process, the resulting hybrid will always be essentially the same.
Oh that’s amazing that they can get the same results each time. Like if my wife and I tried to make 8 children that all looked the same that would be impossible.
True Hybrids (F1) will be identical. But the catch is that you can’t have a “true hybrid f1” if your parent lines are not true breeding. Usually this involves selfing the parental lines 6+ times to obtain purebred (all genes the same allele) lines.
Lots of breeders are loose with that step, so you can occasionally get some variation in your F1. But that’s usually because selfing 2 parents 6+ times, then making the hybrid cross is at least 7 generations. In an annual crop, or even biannual (onion/carrot) this can take 7-14 years.
You've underestimated it by a bit. It takes 2-3 generations to increase the inbred seed quantities after selfing. So figure 20 years. Plus the female line takes 5 generations to create so another 10 years (onion hybrid seed production requires 3 lines: Male, maintainer & female - the female has cytoplasmic male sterility). All together it used to take 30 years to create a new female line.
Today onions are self-pollinated traditionally for 2 generations, then double-haploids are produced. It takes another 2-3 generations to create the female line with marker-assisted back-crossing. It takes 2-3 generations to create enough parent seed to produce commercial hybrids. So say 12-16 years now for a female line. 10 years for the male and maintainer.
I was trying to keep it simple enough to answer OP about vegetables in general. But you are correct with regard to onions. I actually work for a vegetable breeding company, but I try to stay vague enough to protect my anonymity. It’s a pretty small word in the plant breeding community. (Even smaller in veg seeds specifically.)
You know your stuff, so I’ll have to assume you work for one of our competitors. And based on nothing other than assumptions made in bad faith, I will now consider you my lemmy nemesis.
Edit: wait… it’s somehow BOTH of our cake days? Are you actually me?
I got out of vegetable seeds about a decade ago. My tendency to make the brown-nosers look absolutely stupid became a liability once I hit upper management. Imagine a plant breeder with a talent for computers, logistics, marketing and sales. I asked all the "wrong" questions.
Currently running my own seed dealership/research activities for row crops.
Nice work getting out of the business. Corporations can really crush your soul. I bailed on my plant breeding background because I prefer the data side.
Field corn, alfalfa, cereals, hay grasses, forage crops, turfgrass, covercrops, native grasses, flower seed etc. I never quite know what I will be moving next.
What the heck is happening here? I thought everyone on Lemmy was in tech but you two are both plant breeders and you both came to Lemmy on the same day? That’s bananas.
Thank you both so much for this information. It’s kind of confusing actually! I thought I was asking a question with a simple answer but that’s not the case at all.
That’s what I’m sayin! Goofy ass world we live in. Either that or me and “v” are the same person, and we have split personality disorder and can’t remember the password to each others lemmy accounts…
I would echo the recommendations to avoid bamboo. However it's hard to recommend what else to plant without knowing 1) your geographic region, 2) sun exposure of the area in question, 3) what species of trees are in the yard.
Some varieties are ‘runners’ which spread via underground rhizomes. Some varieties are ‘clumpers’ which also spread that way but much much slower. I would be wary of even planting a clumping type, because if you ever change your mind and want to remove it, it can still be challenging.
People have great luck growing some smaller clumping varieties in containers which is probably the safest method. I’m actually trying to do that too just to jazz up an ugly concrete spot
A raised garden bed won't prevent the rhizomes from travelling, unless the bed is permanently sealed where it contacts, or near contacts, the ground. Remember that plastic can crack, split, and deform, concrete can crack also.
If you know a plant is invasive and difficult to control at the best of times (unlike an invasive that can have seeds removed or similar), then have a long think about it. It's like playing catch with a live hand grenade; the safest way is not to play. Clumping bamboo is the only choice if your climate permits it.
For me, on choosing what to plant, I would first consider that benefits me (food, flower, aesthetic, biomass) and that can be endemic, native, or exotic. If nothing suits that has a value, I would then choose a diverse small planting in endemic species to and around your area (also consider recommendations from climate scientists if you area will get warmer/colder/wetter/drier and select some species suited to that change).
Depends on the “raised bed” if you just do some board on the ground to make the dirt higher, the plants can still escape. If you have a raised “garden” where its soil in separate container raised off the ground, it’s fine. But it sounds like you want the former, not the latter, so don’t plant spreading stuff in them.
That’s fair. I worded that poorly. It’s a crappy yard because it’s drab and boring right now. It doesn’t have grass, and is mostly trees. It’s plain, and I want to spruce it up somehow.
Personally I've got a chain link fence, so I've planted ivy. In your case, any thick woody plant would probably do. Which one exactly depends on your location and climate.
The real solution would be to fix the ground level, but that's a lot of labor if you're doing it yourself by hand.
The main thing with bamboo is trimming it low, so that it bushes up instead of growing tall and bending over (where it propagates). There's a bunch of varieties, you want clumping bamboos that don't tend to spread much
They’ll answer, but I believe it just some Tposts with some wire mesh as the structure. At the bottom is some landscape fabric as a pot/bag and they use straw as the filling medium.
I am sorry if this going to sound stupid, please bare with me: So the soil is in the bottom black part and the actual potatoes are growing in the straw? Or are the potatoes growing in the soil and going through the straw?
TIA from a person without any potato growing experience.
I don’t know if it’s soil or straw in the bottom as well, but it sounds like mounding the potatoes with straw instead of dirt works pretty well. Some potatoes you need to add dirt (or straw in this case) every couple weeks). I haven’t done potatoes myself, just what I’ve seen growmies doing.
Yup! As was said, they're just cattle fence made into round cages. The bottoms I lined with some landscaping fabric for a growing medium (75/25 compost/soil) and planted the potatoes about half way down. From there I just mound up in straw.
Edit: I forgot a few details. They're held up on either side by t-posts. Nothing fancy, just driven in and wired to each post three times (top, center, bottom) for stability and support. I put sprinklers on the top because that's what I had, though I do want to do something different in the future. I don't like top watering, but I haven't quite figured out how I wanna do it otherwise. I'm thinking a strand or two of drip that gets mounded up with the potato as it grows, but that's experimenting for another time
There's some folks that will actually do a core of medium up the center for new potato roots to take hold in. I'm trying something that's a little more fertilizer-intense, but easier to scale up. Little blood meal every couple weeks while they're growing up then some 10-10-10 twice (once at the beginning and once again here in a bit).
If I can make this work in my home garden, I'm hoping to tweak it a bit for larger scale. We'll see
Our spring has been pretty wet thank god, the water restrictions are from a main break back at the beginning of June. Should be lifted this week/end and I can water outside again from the tap. Hand watering sucks, wheter it’s a can or a nozzle with pressure anyways.
Been using rain water. I’ve got 8 100 HD totes to hold out, but it’s also been really rainy so haven’t needed it much lately. At the start needed it for the seedlings/transplants.
At first I thought it was one of the "wilts". These are soil-borne pathogens that attack the plants roots. The causitive organism could be verticillium, fusarium, or phytophera. In small plants pythium or rhyzoctonia can kill them. There is also bacterial wilt that causes the rapid decline of the plants.
Then I zoomed in and took a closer look at the plant. I suspect it's nitrogen deficiency. It could be caused by over-watering (denitrification and leaching nitrate out of the soil profile). However I suspect you didn't have enough to start with.
The tomato tone looks to be a 3-4-6 fertilizer. To put it simply, it's a stupid fertilizer blend. Plants need nutrients with a ratio of around 3:1:2. So you need 3x+ more nitrogen in that blend.
Once the plant sets fruit, it starts to dedicate nitrogen into the fruit/seeds. In a shortage situation it moves them from the lower leaves (they turn yellow and die).
This is not a criticism , but they seem crowded, we all work with the space we have. Also, have you planted tomatoes in that spot before? That can cause issues too.
Don't over water, let them dry out a bit, remove the dying plants asap, use a copper fungicide, and next year replace a lot of the soil if you have to plant in the same spot. If you can, rotate your crops every year.
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