ESSENTIAL SEED SAVING TECHNIQUES

[Tom Wagner]

Readers,

My apologies for being less than active on the forums of late, my work with the potato and tomato planting is very time consuming.

That said, I find that road trips are a necessary evil to gather ideas for future speaking engagements. I am attending a workshop in Corvallis May 20. See quote below

ESSENTIAL SEED SAVING TECHNIQUES FOR HOME AND SMALL FARM May 20 10-3pm
Instructor: Carol Deppe, Ph.D. (geneticist, plant breeder, advocate for sustainable agriculture and farm based research, and author of Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener’s and Farmer’s Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving.)

Sunbow Farm in Corvallis, Oregon is sponsoring this event. I have Carol Deppe's book and I felt that I could easily expand on the breeding aspects of her book, especially in regards to tomato and potato breeding.

If anyone on this forum would like to attend and/or has questions for me to address to Dr. Deppe, please intervene.

This quote from Carol should excite anybody to have questions:

Selection is very inadequately covered in the seed-saving literature. Most people who save seeds don’t successfully select for the characteristics they want, and do select accidentally for others, often exactly the opposite of what they want.

I personally know all too well how this applies to plant breeding and seed saving/selection. A huge amount of my seed selection efforts this year are in con★★★★★★★★ with various organic farms.

Tom Wagner

[amideutch]

Tom, anything you could pass on from the workshop would be much appreciated. Ami

[JimM_SC]

I know that many of us would like to believe that there is advantage to be had by saving seeds from the best fruit from the strongest plants whether from stable OP's or from crosses. Any thoughts, yours or Carol's, would be appreciated.

[Tom Wagner]

Jim

...many of us would like to believe that there is advantage to be had by saving seeds from the best fruit from the strongest plants whether from stable OP's or from crosses. Any thoughts, yours or Carol's, would be appreciated.

I will address this concept to Dr. Deppe tomorrow.

Since there are exceptions to nearly every rule, why not be the so-called Devil's Advocate, and tear your sentence down into key words or phrases:

many of us
would like to believe
advantage to be had
saving seeds
best fruit
strongest plants
stable OP's
crosses

Speaking for myself, and as a plant breeder and seed saver, I am likely not part of the many. Although I probably would agree with your statement as fairly much not nonsensical, better choices of words might more accurately assist the seed saver to make wiser selections. Instead of the best fruit from the strongest plant, perhaps selecting for "type" would be more advantageous.

Some of the "many" may suggest saving seed from as many plants as possible rather than from just one plant.

Saving seeds carries the under appreciated responsibility and trust that goes with growing your own plants again or with trading seeds with others. That is why many choose to buy seed from a "reputable" seed source rather than inflict bad seed saving choices onto others and themselves.

Since I have saved seed throughout the last six decades, I have seen the results of saving seed from the best fruit from the strongest plant. Sometimes it was a natural cross or mixed seed that caused me to recongnize how simplistic platitudes can get you into trouble. Natural hybrids often exibit better fruit and plant strength that draw a fella's eyes to that plant. It stands out, your eyes connect, and you forget the norm. The next year you really have some selection work to do..a lot of better fruit and strong plants to choose from!!!! This is especially prevalent where both parental types are quite similar to the untrained eye.

I am guilty, Jim, of doing exactly what you stated when I am observing hybrids and F-2 populations. If I have 10 plants or a thousand plants in potato crosses and OP's, I have to reduce my savings to the best potato from the strongest yielding vine just to keep from trying to save everything.

Tom Wagner

[Tom Wagner]

Just a quick re-cap of the
ESSENTIAL SEED SAVING TECHNIQUES
class given by Dr. Carol Deppe at the Sunbow farm near Corvallis, Oregon.

The class was about 6 hours long, but I was able to visit with Carol for a bit before and after her lesson. I have a fair number of notes and photos of her illustrations and hints of seed saving which was directed mostly for personal seed saving agendas. She talked about corn, tomatoes, squashes, beans, brassicas, garbanzo beans, and other crops.

A special corn called the Abenaki was featured, with homemade cornbread offered a treat to boot. See history;

http://www.cs.org/publications/win/w...le.cfm?id=2908

The question that Jim offered on this forum was given to Carol word for word. The resulting conversations lasted for about 20 minutes. One of the responses was about people (herself inclued) who try to save seed from a variety they have never grown before and don't know the heterogeneity involved. She also said a lot of people save seed from a single plant that may of had a plop of manure by that plant. She advised for saving seed from a number of plants and rouging out off type plants early before you are tempted to save seed from them. She said that seed savers and seed company suppliers often change the dynamics of a given variety with sometimes dismaying results: extra seediness, larger seed cavities as in squash by selecting for larger fruits.

For the most part, Dr. Deppe covered issues regarding inbreeding, inbreeders, out crossers, isolation distances, drying, storing, freezing, winnowing, germination tests, corn shelling equipment, all imbued with good humor.

My guess is that I could field questions for her pretty well now.

Tom Wagner

[michael johnson]

What I would like to know- is-if one saved seeds from the fifth truss on a tomato plant, which is nearly always a forked branching truss instead of a single truss, through several seasons, would the resulting progeny start to throw forked branch trusses in the main, rather than single none branching trusses.

Another experiment I did once or twice- is that on some trusses you get a tip shoot that continues to grow off the very end of the truss- I have cut off that shoot and rooted it in a pot and grown it on to maturity-what you get is a fairly normal plant with a thin woody mainstem a bit like the truss stalk.

[Tom Wagner]

Michael,

What I would like to know- is-if one saved seeds from the fifth truss on a tomato plant, which is nearly always a forked branching truss instead of a single truss, through several seasons, would the resulting progeny start to throw forked branch trusses in the main, rather than single none branching trusses.

Allow me to be the Advocatus Diaboli (Devil's Advocate) for a brief moment.

It should not matter when the seed is extracted..from the first truss to the very last as to inheritability. Unless there was some inherent variability and/or genetic aberration, segregating genes, etc.; this is most likely not a viable effort. Many tomato vines (as they reach a certain physiological or morphological maturity) tend to produce multiple truss structures. One would have to grow out many plants of each phenotype (control and selection) over many generations and disappointments would be the case. To get this heterogeneity one would be best served to use a series of backcrosses. See a photo below to view a non-single truss:

http://seeds.thompson-morgan.com/pix/m/seeds/4/404.jpg


If someone here with TomatoVille.com is an expert on Parametric 3D CAD Software for Tomato Plant Modeling, maybe we could divise a compilation of what we are talking about.

This 3D software would present a new approach for modeling tomato vines and the truss development using a hybrid method integrating laser scans, CAD tools and mathematical models to yield an architecturally accurate and human manipulable tomato plant model reflecting crop growth and management over time. This hierarchical structure would be used to visualize the tomato plants into weekly-growth-sections (WGS) to relate age with plant growth geometry and solving forked truss development. A mathematical plant growth model would be deployed to define geometry and topology of the plant components (trusses), WGS and the plant as a whole. Perhaps this model would show some statistical likelihood for potential true seed departures.




Getting back to other diabolical issues:

Acquired characteristics can be inherited?


Lamarck's hypotheses (dead wrong here, but remembered for his wrong hypothesis.)



The idea of a direct response of organisms to an environmental stimulus is still accepted by the public today.


Lysenkoism bears a strong similarity to this hypothesis, and I remember the USSR's Tofim Denisovich Lysenko's theories were all the talk in botany classes when I attended the University of Kansas in 1964 during which Lysenko fell from power.

Lysenko would of said that subjecting a tomato plant to extreme conditions and selecting from the resulting growth differential would result (in time) in the desired effect, namely, forked trusses in primary inflorescences.

Sorry for the humor, but maybe if I keep selecting for funny things about tomatoes, just maybe they'll come true!

Tom Wagner