Free The Seed!

Open Source Seed Initiative

This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks – who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it

  1. 12/18/2019

    S3E4 Dulcinea Carrot- Free The Seed! Podcast

    Episode four of the third season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast Do you have questions about OSSI, intellectual property rights, or plant breeding that you would like answered on this show? Please share them with us through our listener survey at http://bit.ly/FreetheSeedsurvey This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it. In this episode, we’ll be talking about carrot breeding in general, and two breeding projects in particular. First, Claire and Irwin will tell us about the Open Source Seed Initiative-pledged carrot breeding populations that they’ve developed at University of Wisconsin-Madison. They’ll explain how the UW-Madison Goldman Lab is able to speed up the seed production process to fit it into one single year using greenhouses and vernalization chambers. Then we’ll hear from Petra about the project to develop ‘Dulcinea’, a new variety offered by Fruition Seeds, which Irwin and Claire have collaborated on. And all three of our guests will weigh in on the basic steps of any carrot breeding project.       Left: Dr. Claire Luby (Photo credit: Matthew Dillon)                  Right: Dr. Irwin Goldman (Photo credit: Matthew Dillon) Petra Page-Mann with freshly-dug ‘Dulcinea’ roots (Photo credit: Lisa Barker)                    Left: Carrot flower-heads (umbels!) (Photo credit: Claire Luby)  Right: Carrot seed head (Photo credit: Claire Luby)   Left: Pollination cages in the field (Photo credit: Claire Luby) Right: Carrot root evaluation in the Goldman Lab (Photo credit: Claire Luby)   Wisconsin Open Source Composite Nantes-population that was used as the parent material for the ‘Dulcinea’ project Episode links For folks wanting to get in touch with Irwin about potential future carrot breeding project collaborations, here is the Goldman Lab’s website:  https://goldman.horticulture.wisc.edu/ If you’d like to use the market classes as a starting point for a breeding project of your own, you can find information about procuring seed on the OSSI website. https://osseeds.org/seeds/ You can purchase seed of ‘Dulcinea’ from Fruition Seeds at https://www.fruitionseeds.com/, or get in touch with Petra at petra(at) fruitionseeds.com for purchasing larger quantities of ‘Dulcinea’. The next Organic Seed Growers Conference, which Petra mentioned, is happening in February 2020. You can register through: https://seedalliance.org/2019/registration-open-for-the-10th-organic-seed-growers-conference/ The Organic Farm School, which Petra mentioned, and which has been producing seed of ‘Dulcinea’, is located on Whidbey Island in Washington State. https://organicfarmschool.org/ Nathaniel Thompson’s farm is Remembrance Farm, in Trumansburg, NY. https://remembrancefarm.webs.com/ Organic Seed Alliance’s carrot seed production guide: https://seedalliance.org/publications/carrot-seed-production-quick-reference/ [gdlr_button href=”https://osseeds.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/S3E4_Dulcinea_Transcript.pdf” target=”_self” size=”medium” background=”#5dc269″ color=”#ffffff”]Download the Transcript[/gdlr_button] Free the Seed! Transcript for S3E4: ‘Dulcinea’ Carrot  Rachel Hultengren: Welcome to the fourth and final episode of the third season of Free the Seed!, the Open-Source Seed Initiative podcast that tells the stories of new crop varieties and the plant breeders that develop them. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren. This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks – who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it. Dr. Claire Luby and Dr. Irwin Goldman will be returning as guests today, and they are joined by Petra Page-Mann. Dr. Irwin Goldman is a faculty member in the Department of Horticulture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has taught and led research in plant breeding for the past 26 years. His breeding program focuses on carrot, onion, and table beet.   Dr. Claire Luby conducted her PhD research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Goldman Lab, and was the first Executive Director of the Open Source Seed Initiative.  Petra Page-Mann is the co-founder of Fruition Seeds, based in Naples, New York. Having grown up in her father’s garden, Petra believes each seed and each of us is in the world to change the world. Her passion, curiosity, love of food and love of people led her all over the world studying seed, song and culture worth celebrating. In 2012 she founded Fruition Seeds to share the seeds, knowledge and inspiration gardeners need to be more successful in the short seasons.  If she’s not farming, she is singing, skiing, snuggling her dogs, hunting mushrooms or sharing a feast with a friend. So in this episode, we’ll be talking about carrot breeding in general, and two breeding projects in particular. First, Claire and Irwin will tell us about the Open Source Seed Initiative-pledged carrot breeding populations that they’ve developed at University of Wisconsin-Madison. They’ll explain how the UW-Madison Goldman Lab is able to speed up the seed production process to fit it into one single year using greenhouses and vernalization chambers. Then we’ll hear from Petra about the project to develop ‘Dulcinea’, a new variety offered by Fruition Seeds, which Irwin and Claire have collaborated on. And all three of our guests will weigh in on the basic steps of any carrot breeding project. If you’d like to hear more about how the Open Source Seed Initiative came about, you can go back and listen to Season 1 Episode 2 to hear my conversation with Claire and Irwin about that history and the intention behind its establishment. ——————————————————————————————————————– Rachel Hultengren: Claire and Irwin, welcome back, and Petra – welcome to the show! Irwin Goldman: Thanks so much Rachel, thanks for having us. Claire Luby & Petra Page-Mann: (unintelligible) Petra Page-Mann: What a joy. Rachel Hultengren: We talked a little bit back in Season 1 when we had Claire and Irwin on the show about the carrot populations that, Claire, you developed during your PhD, but I’d like to talk more about the details of how those populations came to be. So, can you remind our listeners what the goal of that project was? Claire Luby: Yeah, so the goal of that project was to look at commercially-available carrot varieties, so we scoured seed catalogues from the US and got seed of as many different varieties as we could. And we wanted to look at the phenotypic, or the visual, diversity of all those varieties, and then also the genotypic diversity of all those varieties. And in addition, we were interested in the intellectual property rights that were associated with each of those varieties, and how that impacted our ability to use them or not use them for further plant breeding projects. So we had about 140 different carrot varieties that we grew out and then grouped into different market classes and color types to make these populations. Rachel Hultengren: And what are some examples of those market classes in carrots? Claire Luby: Yeah, so carrot has a number of different market classes. There’s everything from the very long, skinny carrots that are used to make the baby cut-and-peel type carrots that have become very popular, all the way to little round Parisian type carrots and everything in between. So a lot of processing types where the carrot roots get very big and can be then cut into small cubes and incorporated into frozen carrots or soup or whatever. And then there’s fresh market types, so carrots that you might see at the farmers’ market. And so we looked at all of those different varieties that we had and sort of grouped them based on some of the different market classes that are sort of the most common. So the Nantes type carrot, which is the one we ended up using for the ‘Dulcinea’ project. And there are also a whole bunch of colored carrots, so we had groupings of purple carrots and white carrots and yellow carrots, as well. Rachel Hultengren: And once you had all of those 140 varieties grouped into these different market classes, what did you do then? Claire Luby: So we had grown them out with two different organic farmers in the Madison, Wisconsin area, and evaluated them all and sort of made these different groupings. And so then based on those categories, we let the carrots in each group inter-pollinate. So carrots are insect pollinated, so how Irwin’s plant breeding program works is that carrots are grown out in the summer, and then they’re stored in a cooler, or given a vernalization period to simulate winter for about 10, 10-12 weeks, and then planted out in the greenhouse. And all the pollination is done in a greenhouse. And so, in that greenhouse we grouped all those carrots, put a net over that whole group, and let flies in to cross-pollinate amongst all those different varieties. Rachel Hultengren: So you put those cages on to keep the insects that you wanted in, and all the insects that you didn’t want out. Claire Luby: Exactly. Rachel Hultengren: And you touched on the fact that carrots need this period of vernalization in order to then be able to flower. So carrots, like many other root crops are biennial,

    1h 16m

  2. 11/18/2019

    Festivity Sweet Corn

    Episode three of the third season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it. In this episode, host Rachel Hultengren talks with Jonathan Spero of Lupine Knoll Farm about ‘Festivity’, an open-pollinated multi-colored sweet corn that he developed. Jonathan Spero Ears of ‘Festivity’ at milk stage, showing variation in color intensity. Dried mature ears of ‘Festivity’ The field prepared for planting during a year when Jonathan did ear-to-row selection Episode links – You can purchase seed of ‘Festivity’ from Siskiyou Seeds, Restoration Seeds, or by emailing Jonathan through the Lupine Knoll Farm website: http://www.lupineknollfarm.com/  – GRIN system https://npgsweb.ars-grin.gov/gringlobal/search.aspx – Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, Dr. Carol Deppe – Seed to Seed, Suzanne Ashworth Show Survey Let us know what you think of the show! Free the Seed! Listener Survey: http://bit.ly/FreetheSeedsurvey [gdlr_button href=”https://osseeds.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/S3E3_Festivity_Transcript.pdf” target=”_self” size=”medium” background=”#5dc269″ color=”#ffffff”]Download the Transcript[/gdlr_button] Free the Seed! Transcript for S3E3: ‘Festivity’ Sweet Corn Rachel Hultengren: Welcome to Episode 3 of Season 3 of Free the Seed!, the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast that tells the stories of new crop varieties and the plant breeders that develop them. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren. This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks – who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it. ——————————————————————————————————————– Rachel Hultengren: Our guest today is Jonathan Spero, of Lupine Knoll Farm in southwestern Oregon. His plant breeding work focuses on open-pollinated sweet corn, which he has been working on since 2001. On his farm of about 5 acres, Jonathan also breeds kale, broccoli, sugar beets and a few other vegetables. He was a member of the Board of Directors of the Open Source Seed Initiative from 2014-2018. Jonathan and I will be talking about ‘Festivity’, a multi-colored sweet corn. Hi Jonathan – thanks for joining us! Jonathan Spero: Hello, Rachel. Glad to be here. Rachel Hultengren: I’m excited to get to talk about this new sweet corn that you’ve developed. And maybe we can start by having you just describe ‘Festivity’ for us. What does it look like? Jonathan Spero: ‘Festivity’ is multi-colored, in that it has not only white and yellow but blue and red kernels. It has just a blush of color at the milk stage, that is, eating stage. But as the plants mature, they become more darkly colored like what we call an ornamental corn, sometimes. But it’s a sweet corn. Rachel Hultengren: Mmhmm. So take us back to the beginning. How did you get started on this, and what was your goal with it? Jonathan Spero: Well, the original goal was a multi-colored sweet corn. The colors are generally phytonutrients, or this is my premise, and therefore corn with color is more healthy than corn that’s just white. And so this was my initial purpose. I had tasted some multi-colored sweet corn that others have attempted, and thought we could create something that is sweet, open-pollinated, sugary-enhanced and has multiple colors. Rachel Hultengren: Has that been studied before, whether sweet corn that is more colorful has more vitamins that are important to human health? Jonathan Spero: Well, I’m working on a premise. I mean, there are… I read about a program trying to convince people in a certain part of Africa that yellow corn was good to eat. That they believed that white corn only was good for humans. The yellow corn, of course, has nutrients that protect the eyes. I don’t know what some of these are. I’m going to work on the assumption that these are phytonutrients, that in general you’re going to get more out of a corn that has more color to it. Rachel Hultengren: Mmhmm. That’s interesting. How did you approach this project with that goal? Jonathan Spero: How did I approach the project? Well, the first year was 2001. And I needed, I wanted a yellow or a yellow and white F1 hybrid sweet corn to use as a parent, and so the first year we didn’t do anything with color. I grew a hundred foot row of each of fifteen different F1 hybrids of the time. Came from various sources, mostly from seed companies, and evaluated them for vigor, for productivity without fertilizing – I didn’t fertilize at all that year, just to see how they would do – and other characteristics I liked. The taste, of course. And one variety kind of stood out, and that variety is called ‘Tuxedo’, which is a variety that is being removed from the market as an F1 hybrid. And so we selected that as the initial parent. And so the next year, 2002, that’s when I introduced color. I picked up 15 or 16 lines of colored corn of various types – blue corns and Indian corns, corns from the GRIN – that’s the government repository – corns from Seed Savers Exchange had the requirement that they had color. Color, that is, other than whites and yellows. And I grew those 16 rows in a field twice that size, and every other row I grew that ‘Tuxedo’. So the ‘Tuxedo’ was half the field, but was fully dispersed across the field. We detassled all of those colored corns. We took every tassle of every row of everything that wasn’t ‘Tuxedo’, and removed it. Rachel Hultengren: Can you tell our listeners a little bit about the process of detassling and why that’s important in corn breeding? Jonathan Spero: Well, detassling is critical and relatively easy and something I like to do. In a lot of plants, separating out the male parts from the female parts is a very exacting, magnifying glass and careful gloves removing anthers from flowers, etc. Corn, the male part is this tassle that’s sticking up overhead. The female part is the silks that become the ear. They’re physically separated – they’re easy. All you need to do is when a corn ear is starting to show its tassle, is you reach in and kind of jerk it vertically up and that pulls the tassle out. And that plant is only female from then on. It will produce ears of corn, as long as there’s pollen to pollinate it. But that lets you use the one pollinator, in this case ‘Tuxedo’, to pollinate fifteen different multi-colored corn. Rachel Hultengren: So through the process of detassling all those multi-colored corn varieties, you were making sure that none of the pollen of those varieties was present in the field, so that any ear of corn that you harvested, from any of those plants, could only have had ‘Tuxedo’ as the male parent. Jonathan Spero: Yes, that’s correct. Rachel Hultengren: So then what did you do? Jonathan Spero: So, okay, the next year… I now have 15 kinds of crossed corn. A multi-colored corn providing the ear, and ‘Tuxedo’ having provided the pollen. So we grew all this corn out, samples of it. And we picked the one that seemed the most interesting, or, well, in many ways was the best. Once again, we got lucky and had one outstanding choice jump out of these selections. And that was an ‘Anasazi’ corn; it came out of the Sandhill Preservation Center, and by itself, the ‘Anasazi’ corn is incredibly varied. It’s got big ears and small ears. It’s got ears that’ll tolerate drought and ears that’ll tolerate flooding and big kernels and small kernels. I believe it was created with the intent of people who wanted there to be some corn to make it regardless of the weather of that year. All that variation, in a way it’s made it more difficult but it’s created incredible opportunities. There’re all kinds of interesting, valuable, exciting corn varieties hiding in those genetics. It’s variation creates the possibility of all kinds of different traits to emerge, different corn varieties to be developed from that one cross. Rachel Hultengren: What’s the story of the ‘Anasazi’ corn? Do you know where that came from? Jonathan Spero: Well, I can tell a story of it. It’s allegedly very very old corn from ‘Anasazi’ caves, but I have no way to prove that. But like I said, it came to me from Sandhill Preservation Center, who at least as of 2010 the catalogue in front of me, once again had the variety available, as do I. Rachel Hultengren: So that second year, when you grew out the crosses, the hybrids of ‘Tuxedo’ and all of these multi-colored corns, what did the field look like? Did you grow all of those plants with all of the seed sort of mixed up, or did you grow plots of them individually? Jonathan Spero: No, those were rows. In that year, since I’m not saving any seeds that year, I did not isolate the individual corn varieties. I merely grew them out. I keep the rows four feet apart, which is enough that I probably get at least 80 percent pollination within the row. Rachel Hultengren: I’m glad you pointed that out, that you weren’t planning to save seed from these rows necessarily, you were just growing them out to test them, to look at them and see if they were the combination you wanted to go forward with. Because corn is wind pollinated, it req

    43 min

  3. 11/06/2019

    S3E2 Dakota Tears Onion- Free The Seed! Podcast

    Episode two of the third season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it. In this episode, host Rachel Hultengren talks with David Podoll of Prairie Road Organic Farm about ‘Dakota Tears’, an open-pollinated yellow-skinned, firm-fleshed storage onion that he developed. David Podoll ‘Dakota Tears’ onion Episode links – Prairie Road Organic Seed  https://www.prairieroadorganic.co/ Show Survey Let us know what you think of the show! Free the Seed! Listener Survey: http://bit.ly/FreetheSeedsurvey [gdlr_button href=”https://osseeds.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/S3E2_DakotaTears_Transcript.pdf” target=”_self” size=”medium” background=”#5dc269″ color=”#ffffff”]Download the Transcript[/gdlr_button] Free the Seed! Transcript for S3E2: ‘Dakota Tears’ Onion Rachel Hultengren: Welcome to Episode 2 of Season 3 of Free the Seed!, the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast that tells the stories of new crop varieties and the plant breeders that develop them. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren. This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks – who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it. My guest today is David Podoll of Prairie Road Organic Farm. David is a founding member of the Northern Plains Farm Breeding Club, and has worked with his brother and sister-in-law, Dan and Theresa Podoll, on Prairie Road Organic Seed varieties. Prairie Road Organic Seed is located in North Dakota, and focuses on breeding and carrying varieties that thrive in the Northern Plains of the US and under organic conditions. We’ll be talking about ‘Dakota Tears’, an open-pollinated, yellow-skinned, firm-fleshed storage onion, that David has been working on for the past few decades. Rachel Hultengren: Hi David, welcome to Free the Seed! David Podoll: Good morning, Rachel. Rachel Hultengren: So let’s get started by having you describe ‘Dakota Tears’ for us. What makes it a unique onion? David Podoll: Well, unique in the sense that there are a few open-pollinated varieties out there. It’s hard to find a good OP variety in a catalogue today. Other than that, how it’s unique is that it’s unique in the same way that every variety is unique. It has the fingerprints of whoever was the breeder and selector of it, and… Rachel Hultengren: And just to clarify, an open-pollinated variety is in contrast to a hybrid, which is a uniform variety because all of the individuals are genetically identical, whereas an open-pollinated variety is a variety where it’s a population of individuals that are very similar genetically and looking in the field, but are not identical in their genetics. David Podoll: Right. I mean, open-pollinated varieties have a wider genetic base, or they should, and that gives them more ability to adapt. Rachel Hultengren: Mmhmm. Are there aspects of your growing conditions in North Dakota or your management that influence what makes for a good onion on your farm? David Podoll: Well, I don’t know if there’s anything in particular that makes for a good onion. When I started out, I was looking for something that would keep real well, because we wanted to eat as much as we could from our farm and garden. And so I wanted something that would store a long time through the winter in common storage. And um… How I started was I was thinking, “Okay, what in the garden can I save seed from and improve it for our climate here in the northern plains?” Many varieties up to that point had been bred for other climates. We tended to be drier and hot summers, so I wanted stuff that was drought-hardy. And we had short seasons so it had to fit in with the season and still produce good quality. In short, I wanted something that was really tough. I wanted something that would endure. And so I started saving seed on any number of things in the garden, and I was completely ignorant about any requirements for seed saving. And in the case of ‘Dakota Tears’, at first I just tried to save Downing Yellow Globe, to save seed from it. I wasn’t thinking about any particular further breeding project. So I took a dozen bulbs, or 20 bulbs and planted them in the garden. I figured, “Well that’s all I need, they produce a lot of seed.” I grew maybe, seven, eight, nine hundred bulbs a year, and I could get a lot more than that from 20 seed heads. Not realizing, of course, that with onions, they are obligate outcrossers, meaning that they have to cross-pollinate. They don’t do very well selfing, you know, crossing themselves. So on any given seed head, it’s important that each floret on the seed head of an onion plant be pollinated from the seed head of another onion. And so you need a lot more onions than just 20. So there’s a mathematical formula, and I can’t explain it, but it’s been worked out by geneticists, that for obligate outcrossers like onions or like corn, you need a very minimum of 100 bulbs in order to maintain genetic diversity over the long haul. So I soon found out that planting a dozen bulbs wasn’t gonna do it. I started to see inbreeding almost immediately, within a year or two. Rachel Hultengren: I want to define inbreeding depression here briefly – inbreeding depression is when individuals within a population are too related to one another, and it occurs in cross-pollinated or outcrossing species when too few plants are grown in a population every year. So what did it look like for the onions you were growing to be showing signs of inbreeding depression? David Podoll: Well, inbreeding signs in this case were just a lack of vigor, and probably poor seed quality and germination. And so then, I don’t know, I guess I got some books and started reading. At that time, of course, there was no such thing as the internet. And I learned that, yes I had to have at least a hundred bulbs. So then I set about to do a serious project. And so I took… well what I did first was, I knew I wanted good genetic material. So I was growing a good variety already called Downing Yellow Globe, and I was already growing a hybrid called Copra that was a really good keeper. And then I searched the catalogues, and I trialed some others, and I settled on I think about three varieties of good-quality onions that I would cross. Rachel Hultengren: What was the third variety, in addition to Downing Yellow Globe and Copra? David Podoll: Well, um, Downing Yellow Globe, Copra, and Early Yellow Globe were the varieties I ended up crossing. Rachel Hultengren: You said that Copra had good storage quality. What were the traits for each of the other two parents that you were looking to combine? David Podoll: Well, of course storage was the thing. Both the Early Yellow Globe and Downing Yellow Globe were good storing. I wanted vigor and size and earliness, and a certain globe shape that was nice, and the color of the skin. Those are the main things. Rachel Hultengren: So once you had chosen the varieties, what was the next step? David Podoll: I think I had the varieties… I raised bulbs of the three varieties, and then I took really nice-looking bulbs, the kind that I wanted, you know – nice size shape and color of skin, and things that kept over the winter in common storage and weren’t yet growing by April. That was the number one criterion. And so I had a block in the garden. And so then I took probably about 40 bulbs from each of these three varieties, mixed them out there in the three row block. I think I did 1-2-3, 1-2-3 of the varieties right down the row, until I had my block. So each particular plant would have a different variety of onion beside it, both beside itself in the row and across into the next row. And so when bees visited the flowers, then they would get things mixed up really well. Of course, onions are perennial, or a biennial rather, excuse me.  So you store the bulbs over the winter time, and you make another selection there, and you plant those out and then they grow the seed heads. So that was then the genesis of what became ‘Dakota Tears’. Rachel Hultengren: Right, so onions are the first biennial species that we’ve talked about on the podcast. And they differ from annual species in that biennials require two seasons of growth before they produce flowers and seeds. So for onions, you plant the seed in the spring, you get a bulb in the fall. That bulb then has to survive the winter and then be planted back out in the spring. It will grow again and then produce flowers and seeds that second year. If you’re in conditions where the weather is more mild and plants can survive in the field through the winter, you could leave your onions out in the field and they would start growing the next year, but in North Dakota I imagine that’s not possible. David Podoll: Right, we have to harvest the bulbs here. Although, just parenthetically, we do have, after seed harvest, we just leave the stalks as they are, and the old bulbs in the ground. And some of them will actually survive the winter here with a little bit of snow cover, so they are really really hardy plants. But normally, yes. And I would recommend that most people dig the bulbs and store them so then you can do another selection evaluation. If you just leave your bulbs in the ground, how can you

    45 min

  4. 10/21/2019

    S3E1 South Anna Butternut- Free The Seed! Podcast

    Episode one of the third season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it. In this episode, host Rachel Hultengren talks with Edmund Frost of Twin Oaks Seed Farm and Common Wealth Seed Growers about ‘South Anna Butternut’, a downy-mildew resistant winter squash that he developed. Edmund Frost 2014 Variety Trial, (‘Seminole Pumpkin’ x ‘Waltham’)F3 on top, ‘Waltham’ on bottom Taste test from 2017 Virginia Association for Biological Farming conference Episode links – Learn more about Common Wealth Seed Growers’ research at  http://commonwealthseeds.com/research/ – Organic Seed Alliance’s “Grower’s Guide to Conducting On-Farm Variety Trials”: https://seedalliance.org/publications/growers-guide-conducting-farm-variety-trials/ – Information on the patent on using the PI197088 cucumber for downy-mildew resistance breeding: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9675016 – Carol Deppe’s Books: https://www.amazon.com/Carol-Deppe/e/B001K80VOQ%3F Show Survey Let us know what you think of the show! Free the Seed! Listener Survey: http://bit.ly/FreetheSeedsurvey [gdlr_button href=”https://osseeds.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/S3E1_SouthAnna_Transcript.pdf” target=”_self” size=”medium” background=”#5dc269″ color=”#ffffff”]Download the Transcript[/gdlr_button] Free the Seed! Transcript for S3E1: ‘South Anna Butternut’ Rachel Hultengren: Welcome to Episode 1 of Season 3 of Free the Seed!, the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast that tells the stories of new crop varieties and the plant breeders that develop them. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren. This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks – who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it. Rachel Hultengren: Our guest today is Edmund Frost. Edmund is an organic farmer and seed activist based in Louisa, Virginia. He focuses on several aspects of Southeast regional seed work, including seed production, plant breeding, variety trials research, and variety preservation. Edmund runs a small seed company called Common Wealth Seed Growers, and co-manages seed production at Twin Oaks Seed Farm. We’ll be talking today about ‘South Anna Butternut’ – a butternut squash that Edmund has been working on for the past 9 years. Hi Edmund – welcome to Free the Seed! Edmund Frost: Hi Rachel, it’s good to be here. Rachel Hultengren: So I’d like to start by talking about the impetus for this project. The primary trait of interest with ‘South Anna’ is its resistance to downy mildew, a fungus-like disease that affects plants in the squash family. So I’m curious – what was the process of deciding that this was a project you wanted to take on? did you talk with other farmers or gardeners that told you that this was something they needed, or was it personal experience that mainly drove that decision? Edmund Frost: So I started the project in 2011, quite a while ago now, and it was based on experiences of having Cucurbit crops that died from downy mildew. We had cucumbers, winter squash, melons and other crops especially in 2010 and 2009 that did really badly from downy mildew, so it was really on my radar from that. And I guess in 2010 we had a ‘Seminole Pumpkin’ seed crop that did quite well despite the downy mildew pressure. So I noticed that, and I was excited about it, and the next year I thought, ‘Well, I’m growing some butternut, just some ‘Waltham Butternut’ for produce, and why don’t I just plant some ‘Seminole (Pumpkin)’ plants next to it?’ So that’s really how I got started, was I just grew the two varieties together and let them cross. And I didn’t know a whole lot about plant breeding at that point, but that’s how it started. Rachel Hultengren: So I’d like to ask you how you decided on ‘Waltham’ and to describe the ‘Seminole Pumpkin’ a little bit more in just a minute, but maybe you can tell us a bit about downy mildew. So what does it look like if a field of cucumbers or squash is infected with that disease? Edmund Frost: So downy mildew, unlike powdery mildew which shows up as a white powder that’s very visible on the leaves before the plant starts to die from it, downy mildew can just look like the leaves just shriveling up and dying. You don’t necessarily see the mildew when you look at the leaf. If you look at the underside of the leaf, you can see a little bit of grey spores, but it’s a lot less visible than powdery mildew. So what you see is just your foliage start to die, and it can spread very quickly and it can easily just wipe out all of the foliage in a susceptible variety when you have downy mildew pressure that’s significant. Rachel Hultengren: And when all of the leaves die, that can basically wipe out the crop. Edmund Frost: Right, and it doesn’t directly affect the fruits, but when the leaves all die that stops the plant from being able to produce sugars that go into the fruit, so you end up with drastically lowered production and lower quality in fruit. Rachel Hultengren: When you say that it doesn’t affect the fruit directly, you mean it doesn’t cause the fruit itself to rot? Edmund Frost: Right. Yeah, it affects the fruit often dramatically in terms of productivity and in terms of sweetness, but it doesn’t cause the fruit to rot. Rachel Hultengren: How does the disease spread? Edmund Frost: So it has a really interesting life cycle, and it’s actually similar to Late Blight in tomatoes. It can’t survive freezing temperatures, so basically it overwinters in parts of the country – like south Florida or south Texas or in Mexico or Cuba – it overwinters in places that it doesn’t freeze. And then every year, the downy mildew spores blow north on the wind and gradually work their way up the east coast, often all the way up to Canada. There’s also some speculation that there might be downy mildew that overwinters in greenhouses, if there are greenhouses that don’t experience freezing temperatures, so those might also be a source of infection. And once the downy mildew arrives, in whatever way it arrives, the amount of spores keep building, and the more spores you’re producing in your crop, the more it’s gonna sort of exponentially keep affecting that crop and the crops nearby. Rachel Hultengren: So it’s not something where if you manage your soil really well and you manage the disease by rogue out individuals that have it and getting those off your farm… because it blows in on the wind every year, there’s no way for one given farm to be immune to it, other than growing resistant varieties. Edmund Frost: Yeah, that’s my assessment. I think looking for resistant varieties is central. Most varieties that we commonly grow as market farmers are not resistant. I’ve had to look further afield to find resistant sources, and that’s for ‘South Anna’ and other winter squashes, but also for the downy mildew resistant cucumbers I’ve worked on. Rachel Hultengren: Tell me more about the ‘Seminole Pumpkin’. What’s the story behind that? Where did it come from, and what does it look like? Edmund Frost: So ‘Seminole Pumpkin’ comes from Florida and it can actually grow feral in Florida. And I don’t know the exact origins of it, but native peoples have been probably growing that variety or something similar for a really long time. The strain of ‘Seminole Pumpkin’ that I’ve been growing was, I believe, introduced by Southern Seed Exchange. It’s the color of a butternut, a little deeper tan, and they’re usually 2-3 lbs, and either round or tear-drop shaped. And it’s the same species as butternut, which is Cucurbita moschata. Rachel Hultengren: That reminds me – I wanted to point out that word ‘pumpkin’ often makes people think of jack-o-lanterns, but as you’ve said, the ‘Seminole Pumpkin’ is in the same species as butternuts, and that’s actually a different species from jack-o-lanterns. Edmund Frost: ‘Pumpkin’ is not really a precise botanical term. It’s a folk name that people use for varieties in any of the Cucurbita species. Rachel Hultengren: So you started this project by seeing that ‘Seminole Pumpkin’ had really good downy mildew resistance. Was it the case that there just wasn’t any downy mildew resistance in a more traditional butternut-shaped squash? Edmund Frost: So when I started the project, I wasn’t really working with a lot of different kinds of butternut. I had tried out three or four kinds at that time. If I was to start it again, I might have used a different butternut in the cross with ‘Seminole (Pumpkin)’. Rachel Hultengren: Why’s that? Edmund Frost: There are varieties that hold up a little bit better to downy mildew than ‘Waltham’. None of them are resistant. None of them hold up well. But ‘Waltham’ is maybe one of the least resilient to downy mildew. But it was what I knew about. And I knew that it had good eating quality, it’s productive, it’s the shape that people want, so it’s what I used. And I think it’s, you know, ultimately has worked just as well as a different variety would have worked, ‘cause I’ve been able to get the full resistance of ‘Seminole (Pumpkin)’ and probably even better tha

    46 min

  5. 09/20/2019

    Announcing Season 3!

    Hi everyone! I’m here to let you know that Free the Seed! is returning soon for its third season. This time around, I’ll be talking with plant breeders Edmund Frost, David Podoll, and Jonathan Spero about butternut squash, onions, and sweet corn. Irwin Goldman and Claire Luby will be joined by Petra Page-Mann for a more in-depth conversation about carrot breeding and about collaborations that have come out of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s OSSI-pledged carrot populations. Free the Seed! is now on Spotify, and you can subscribe there, or wherever you get your podcasts. Please consider telling a friend about the show, and look for the first episode later this fall. Thanks for listening!

    1 min

  6. 03/20/2019

    S2E4 The Dwarf Tomato Project – Free The Seed! Podcast

    Episode four of the second season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it. In this episode, host Rachel Hultengren talks with Patrina Nuske Small and Craig LeHoullier about the Dwarf Tomato Project, a collaborative, all-volunteer tomato breeding project. We discuss how the project came about, the benefits and challenges of having an all-volunteer team, and the pleasant surprises of plant breeding. Patrina Nuske Small; ‘Uluru Ochre’ Craig LeHoullier; ‘Dwarf Sweet Sue’ (photo credit: Paul Fish) Episode links – To learn more about the Dwarf Tomato Project and find information about buying seeds of the dwarf tomato varieties that have come out of the project, check out the project’s website: https://www.dwarftomatoproject.net/  – Craig LeHoullier’s website: https://www.craiglehoullier.com/dwarf-tomato-breeding-project – Seed Savers’ Exchange: https://www.seedsavers.org/ – Tomatoville Gardening Forums: http://tomatoville.com/ Let us know what you think of the show! Free the Seed! Listener Survey: http://bit.ly/FreetheSeedsurvey Free the Seed!Transcript for S2E4: The Dwarf Tomato Project Rachel Hultengren: Welcome to episode four of the second season of Free the Seed!, the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast that tells the stories of new crop varieties and the plant breeders that develop them. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren. In this episode, I talk with Craig LeHoullier and Patrina Nuske Small, the co-creators of the Dwarf Tomato Project, the “first all-volunteer world-wide tomato breeding project in documented gardening history”.  We discuss how the project came about, the benefits and challenges of having an all-volunteer team, and the pleasant surprises of plant breeding. Patrina Nuske Small began gardening in her 50’s after graduating from Flinders University in South Australia, realizing that it was time to get away from research and spend more time outside in the fresh air. Patrina is currently based in New South Wales. Dr. Craig LeHoullier followed a 25 year career in pharmaceuticals with an ongoing writing career that includes Epic Tomatoes and Growing Vegetables in Straw Bales. He maintained a parallel obsession with gardening, first with heirloom tomatoes, then with amateur breeding. Craig joined Seed Savers Exchange in 1986, and serves as an adviser to the Exchange for tomatoes. Craig is based in Raleigh, North Carolina. Rachel Hultengren: Patrina, Craig, welcome to the show! Patrina Nuske Small: Thanks, Rachel! Craig LeHoullier: Thank you very much, Rachel – it’s an absolute delight to be able to do this today. Rachel Hultengren: Craig, maybe you can start by briefly telling us about the Dwarf Tomato Project. What is the project, and what are its goals? Craig LeHoullier: The project is huge, fascinating, endlessly surprising. To put it all in a sentence, the goal of the Dwarf Tomato breeding project was to offer to the gardening community the largest possible selection of interesting, delicious tomato plants that can be grown by space-challenged gardeners, while at the same time provide a fascinating project for those wishing to become involved in to experience. And in that respect, I think we haven’t only checked all the boxes we set out to check, but we’ve checked boxes that we never thought we were going to check. Rachel Hultengren: Patrina, how did the project get started, and when did it get started? Patrina Nuske Small: In 2005, I was searching the internet for gardening information because I really needed to, like I say, get outside in the fresh air and get away from books. And I found a tomato forum, and I thought that was really odd, how you could have a whole forum on tomatoes. And once I was in there, I found out so many interesting things. And Craig was one of the main posters, and one day he pointed out that we’ve got, you know, thousands of heirloom varieties of tomato, but the dwarf category is just so limited to, usually, small red tomatoes. And wouldn’t it be great if we could just do some crosses with heirlooms and dwarfs? And I thought that sounded like a really fun thing to do. And I thought, “Right. I’m going to grow some dwarfs next season, and I’m growing some heirloom varieties, and I’m going to have a go at crossing some tomatoes.” And I loved biology in high school, so it was a really fun thing for me to do. And I was successful, and we started off with eight crosses, which we named after [Snow White and] the Seven Dwarfs, and we added another one called Witty, because we needed to have names for the hybrids for ease of reference. And I sort of collaborated with Craig, and we organized to start teams – one in the Northern Hemisphere, one in the Southern Hemisphere – so we could grow two seasons in a year, and the project was born! Craig LeHoullier: Patrina opened this up really wonderfully. And I think, in parallel… my wife and I have been selling heirloom tomato seedlings for, at the time, about 15 years here in Raleigh [North Carolina], and the most frequently asked question was always, “You know, I love ‘Cherokee Purple’ and I love ‘Sungold’, but these things get 8 or 10 feet tall, and they go all over the place, and I need to garden on my deck or my patio or my driveway or I’ve got a physical issue that means I have to deal with smaller plants.” So at the same time Patrina got that spark about crossing varieties of heirlooms with dwarfs, the need was showing up for my end of being able to tell my customers, “We do have interesting, colorful, delicious, large-fruited, worthwhile varieties that will excel in a small container.” And you can use useless tomato cages, those wire cone shaped things that people put on their indeterminates and then throw up their hands after a few weeks. They’re perfect for the dwarfs. So in a way, I think, Patrina and I were meant to meet when we did and do this project when we did, because it is serving a lot of gardeners who otherwise, you know, they would struggle to grow tomatoes if they didn’t have these shorter varieties to pick from. Rachel Hultengren: You used the word indeterminate, Craig, for some of the tomatoes. And, so, tomatoes can come in an indeterminate or a determinate variety, and maybe you could remind our listeners what those terms mean, and then how those differ from dwarf varieties? Craig LeHoullier: Sure. Well, the main collection of tomatoes – probably 98% – are indeterminate, meaning they grow vertically, they sucker at every intersection between a main stem and the leaf junction (suckers are just additional fruiting main stems) until they’re killed by frost or disease. So conceivably a tomato that is indeterminate can reach 10, 15, 20, 25 feet in length, 3 to 6 feet or more in girth, and just be incredibly complex, out-of-control plants. The determinate gene really showed up for the first time in the 1920’s and a lot of the modern hybrids are determinates, in which they reach a height of about 3 to 4 feet, they throw out tons of blossoms, they fruit within about a 2 to 3 week period, and then they’re pretty much done. So people think of a tomato like ‘Roma’. It’s a tomato machine for a short period of time; you make your sauce or you do your canning. But because there are so many fruit in ratio with the amount of foliage, the flavor potential of determinates tends to be inferior to that of indeterminates. Dwarf is the third type of tomato, that just never got a lot of attention because there were so few of them around. But they combine the best traits of indeterminates, in having the ability to fruit until they’re killed by frost, with the short stature. What I like to tell my customers is, “A dwarf if a tomato that grows at half the vertical rate of an indeterminate”. So if you have a Cherokee Purple that’s 8 feet tall in your garden at the end of the season, the dwarf is going to be 4 feet tall, which means it’s easier to contain. One of the benefits is that they really don’t have to be pruned. But they do fruit gradually, and because the fruit to foliage ratio is much more in line with an indeterminate, with a dwarf you have the flavor potential there, which can equal the best of the indeterminates in the dwarf lines, something that Patrina demonstrated with one of her very first crosses, which we’ll get to – the Sneezy cross. Everything that’s popped out of that cross has been utterly delicious, and it’s not a surprise, because one of the parents – ‘Green Giant’ – is one of the best varieties we’d ever eaten. Rachel Hultengren: Can any tomato be made into a dwarf variety? Patrina Nuske Small: Uh, yes. The thing is here, and this is one of the fun things about this project, is that we were dealing with recessive traits as well as dominant traits. Dwarfism is a recessive trait, whereas the normal regular heirloom varieties, their dominant genes means that they grow so big and tall. So if you combine anything with a dwarf plant, you will get some recessive genes in the pool. So the first generation, which is the F1 generation, the dominant trait will show up only. You will not see any dwarfs in that generation; you’ll only see non-dwarfs. But in the second generation, they start dividing up between dwarfs and non-dwarfs, and you’ll get approximately 25% that are dwarfs, compared to 75% that are not dwarfs. And of those non-dwarfs, also, in the third generation you can still find a few dwarfs. So that was really interesting learning for the people

    46 min

  7. 03/07/2019

    S2E3 Rozette Potato- Free The Seed! Podcast

    Episode three of the second season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it. In this episode, host Rachel Hultengren spoke with Bill Whitson about ‘Rozette’, a new potato variety that Bill developed and pledged as open-source. Be sure to check out Bill’s blog post about selecting ‘Rozette’, which includes more photos of the candidate lines that he considered during the project: https://www.cultivariable.com/potato-the-story-of-rozette/ Bill Whitson ‘Ozette’ potato tubers; ‘Ozette’ flower; minitubers from true seed of ‘Ozette’; first generation of ‘Rozette’ (Photo credit: Bill Whitson) Episode links – Visit the Cultivariable website to purchase true potato seeds and tubers. (Please note that Cultivariable is taking a break from selling tubers this year in order to focus on growing clonal crops from tissue culture, so ‘Rozette’ will likely be available next in 2020). – Kenosha Potato Project http://kenoshapotato.com/ – Slow Food Ark of Taste https://www.fondazioneslowfood.com/en/slow-food-presidia/makah-ozette-potato/ – Carol Deppe’s Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties Let us know what you think of the show! Free the Seed! Listener Survey: http://bit.ly/FreetheSeedsurvey Free the Seed! Transcript for S2E3: Rozette Potato Rachel Hultengren: Welcome to episode three of the second season of Free the Seed!, the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast that tells the stories of new crop varieties and the plant breeders that develop them. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren. Every episode we invite a plant breeder to tell us about a crop variety that they’ve pledged to be open-source. My guest today is Bill Whitson. Bill is the owner of Cultivariable, an experimental nursery on the central coast of Washington state.  He breeds a large number of minor crop species, but focuses on the Andean root and tuber crops mashua, oca, ulluco, yacon, and potato.  In the past ten years, he has released 37 new varieties belonging to nine species and all varieties released since 2013 have been OSSI pledged. ——————————————————————————————————————- Rachel Hultengren: Hi Bill – welcome to the show! Bill Whitson: Hi Rachel, thanks for having me! Rachel Hultengren: Yeah, we’re really excited to get to chat today! So we’ll be talking about your potato breeding, and specifically about a variety you’ve just released, ‘Rozette’, but first maybe we could take a broad view to start, and then focus in. So let’s talk about the natural history of potatoes. Where in the world are potatoes from, and how long have they been cultivated there? Bill Whitson: So we don’t really know how long potatoes have been cultivated, but they originated in the highlands of the central Andes, so think southern Peru and Bolivia. And they were probably first domesticated something like 10,000 years ago. And those landraces and lines of potatoes are now a distinctive group known as ‘Andean potatoes’, or Solanum tuberosum andigenum, which are varieties that are primarily adapted to grow in short-day photoperiods. So what that means is that they don’t produce tubers until the daylength falls to 12 hours or less. And that’s because they evolved near the equator, where the day length changes very little. And this is a common feature you see in tropical plants. That’s kind of an inconvenient feature if you’re growing away from the equator, where the daylength changes a lot. Because, for example, in North America we don’t have a 12 hour day length until fall. So about September 22nd is when we get to that point. So if you’re waiting on potatoes to produce tubers until September 22nd, there are very few climates where that’s going to work out well for you. The plants are going to be killed by frost, or they’re going to be drowned in the field by rains, so there are a lot of problems to that. But there was a branch of potatoes that was established later – we’re not sure exactly when, probably several thousand years after they were domesticated in the Andes – in coastal Chile. And those became the [Tuberosum] group of potatoes, that over time adapted to the differing daylengths in coastal Chile and became capable of tuberizing under any length of day, so we call those day-neutral potatoes. And those, then, became the basis of the modern potato. So we don’t exactly know all the contributions, but most of what went into the European potatoes were contributions from Chilean landraces of potatoes, and then various diverse contributions that have been added through modern breeding. For example, there are about one hundred species of wild potato that are now sometimes used in modern breeding to further add genetic diversity. So it’s a fairly complex picture, but the homeland of the potato is the central Andes, and then the homeland of really the potato of commerce in North America and Europe is Chile. Rachel Hultengren: So the Chilean potato is the basis for the potatoes that we have here in North America at a large scale, and the potatoes that went to Europe initially. So what was the path of travel like for potatoes from the coast of South America to get to where we are now? Bill Whitson: So, yeah. The potatoes were first carried to Europe in the 1500’s. The Spanish discovered the crop as they moved their way through the Andes, and eventually they began to ship potatoes probably from both sides of South America on their trading routes. So it’s not completely clear what exactly ended up in Europe. It’s likely that potatoes from the Andes were initially taken there, and then somewhat later potatoes from Chile. And eventually, as everyone knows, they had terrible problems with late blight in Europe, which became the Irish potato famine. And that probably wiped out a lot of the original Andean potatoes that had been carried to Europe. It gets very unclear after that point, exactly what happened. There were probably contributions from both Andean and Chilean potatoes, and at this point it’s likely that more of the potatoes that survived were potatoes from Chile. One of the major progenitors of modern potatoes is a – or was, it no longer exists – was a potato cultivar known as ‘Rough Purple Chili’, which was taken from Chile to somewhere on the East Coast of the U.S., and that became the foundation of breeding for late blight resistant potatoes. And that particular landrace is in the background of something like 80% of modern commercial potato varieties. Rachel Hultengren: Wow. Apart from that ‘Rough Purple Chili’, did most potato varieties stop in Europe on their journey between South and North America?’ Bill Whitson: Right, so at first, most of them went to Europe, where some amount of work and selection was done, and then were brought to the U.S. But that ‘Rough Purple Chili’ represented a break where suddenly the United States became a center of new potato development. And then varieties that developed from that were being sent to Europe to help with the problem of producing potatoes that were resistant to Late Blight. So from that point on, it was kind of a transatlantic trade in potatoes that has just continued ever since. And of course, with the advent of modern plant breeding around the time of World War II, things have really opened up a lot. From that point forward, people started making large collections of germplasm in South America and introducing genetics from wild potatoes and broadening the genetic base of the potatoes of commerce quite a bit. But the early potatoes that we had in the United States came almost completely from European lines. Rachel Hultengren: Scientists have recently used genetic analysis to determine that there was likely another path of dissemination for potatoes in the U.S., which was up the West coast as the Spanish came. And one of these varieties is one that you’ve worked with, which is ‘Ozette’. Can you tell me the story of that variety? Bill Whitson: Yeah, so ‘Ozette’ really represents a bit of a break from the standard story of the potato, and that wasn’t recognized until fairly recently. So ‘Ozette’ is a potato that has been maintained by the Makah people of the Olympic Peninsula [of Washington State] for about 200 years. And it’s a kind of unusual-looking potato. It’s a fingerling type, so it’s longer than it is wide, and it has deep eyes, which is a feature that you commonly find in what are commonly termed ‘primitive potatoes’. So you would see that a lot in Andean potatoes and Chilean landraces, but it was usually bred out very quickly from European potatoes for reasons I’m not completely clear on. So it was a bit of a mystery, where this potato came from. It doesn’t look much like other potatoes we have in the United States, and it wasn’t… nobody was really aware that it was there until the late 1980’s, when the USDA National Plant Germplasm Repository did a collection there. And not long after, it was commercialized by Ronniger’s Potato Farm and became available pretty widely. But it wasn’t until 2010 that they did some research and looked into the genetics of this potato and discovered that it pretty clearly traces its origin back directly to Chilean potatoes instead of to those lines that were introduced from Europe or were introduced to the East Coast of the U.S. So from there, they puzzled out that it probably represents a unique introduction. The Spanish in the 1700’s

    46 min

  8. 02/14/2019

    S2E2 Lofthouse-Oliverson Landrace Muskmelon – Free The Seed! Podcast

    Episode two of the second season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it. In this episode, host Rachel Hultengren spoke with Joseph Lofthouse about his process of landrace breeding to develop varieties locally-adapted to the harsh conditions of his farm in northern Utah, and about the ‘Lofthouse-Oliverson Landrace Muskmelon’, a variety that came out of that breeding work.  Joseph Lofthouse Episode links Find seeds of ‘Lofthouse-Oliverson Landrace Muskmelon’ on Joseph’s website. Free the Seed! Listener Survey: http://bit.ly/FreetheSeedsurvey —————————————————————————————————————————————— Free the Seed! Transcript for S2E2: ‘Lofthouse-Oliverson Landrace Melon’ Rachel Hultengren: Welcome to episode two of the second season of Free the Seed!, the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast that tells the stories of new crop varieties and the plant breeders that develop them. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren. Every episode we invite a plant breeder to tell us about a crop variety that they’ve pledged to be open-source. My guest today is Joseph Lofthouse. Joseph farms in Northern Utah, where harsh growing conditions can make farming a challenge. We talk about how he has addressed this challenge through his plant breeding work, and Joseph describes ‘landrace breeding’, the process by which he develops genetically-diverse crop varieties that are particularly suited to his farm. Rachel: Hi Joseph – welcome to Free the Seed! Joseph Lofthouse: Hi! Thank you, Rachel and food-curious folks. Rachel: So I’d like to start by painting a picture for listeners of your farm in Utah and the conditions there. Where in Utah are you, and what’s the weather like through the growing season? Joseph: So I am in northern Utah, in Cache Valley, in a village called Paradise. And my growing conditions during the summer are desert conditions with intense sunlight in the daytime and intense radiant cooling at night. Super-low humidity, and I irrigate once a week. Rachel: And how long have you been farming there? Joseph: My family’s been growing in the same farm for 150 years, and I’ve been doing that my whole life as well, except for when I went away to the big city to work for a career, and then I came back home. Rachel: I understand that when you came back home, you found that the conditions that you were growing in, it limited what you were able to grow. I’m curious – what did you try that at first just wasn’t successful? Joseph: So a lot of crops, if I just buy something out of a seed catalogue, about half the varieties I buy that way will just plain old fail. And some things, like cantaloupe or watermelon, might be like 95% failures. Some things like turnips – any turnip that I plant is going to do well here. But the longer season crops, or the warmer weather crops, are hit-or-miss. Rachel: What are the aspects of your growing area that are the hardest for crops to tolerate? Joseph: Well, for warm- weather crops, it’s the radiant cooling at night. And for leafy greens, it’s the low humidity, because we might have 5% humidity in the evenings. And that leads to bitter lettuce and bitter spinach and bitter kale. Rachel: How cold does it get, with that radiant cooling at night? Joseph: We have about, sometimes, a 40 degree temperature change between the highs in the day and the lows at night. And the radiant cooling on the surface of the leaf, probably adds another- or subtracts another 10 degrees from that. Rachel: So that can get pretty chilly for a warm-weather crop. Joseph: Mmhmm. One of the tomato varieties that does really well for me folds its leaves up at night so that it doesn’t get exposed to intense radiant cooling so bad. Rachel: Hm. Yeah, that’s interesting. So different crop varieties will have different traits that make them more or less susceptible to those harsh conditions. Joseph: Mmhmm. Rachel: When you came back from the big city and got started farming there, was there much seed production or plant breeding happening in the region? Joseph: I don’t know of any seed production or plant breeding that’s happening in my valley, other than what I’m involved in. Mostly my community just gets a glitzy seed catalogue and buys a variety out of there. A lot of my community will buy varieties from humid climates, and then they get here and they don’t really do well with the low humidity, and so they burn up and they whine about not getting enough water, and things like that. And so, if I have any say to my neighbors about what catalogues they’re going to buy from, I really encourage them to find local sources of seed, to find locally-grown seed if they can, or at least regionally-grown seed, so that they start off with something that’s more suitable for our environment. Rachel: So you took things into your own hands in a way, and started undertaking breeding projects that would develop those varieties that would do well in your valley. Joseph: Yes, I did. Rachel: Tell me about that decision. Joseph: I was introduced to the idea of growing genetically-diverse crops, because I was looking for another sweet corn variety to grow. And I found a variety called ‘Astronomy Domine’, which had genetics from 200 varieties of sweet corn in it. And when I planted it in my garden, some of them grew little runty things, and some of them grew huge. And the tastes were fabulous, because there were purples and pinks and yellows and blues, and each of those has a different flavor. And I fell in love with that corn, and after a couple of years in my garden it became locally-adapted, because there was so much genetic diversity in it that there was lots of opportunities for finding things that really work well in my garden. So that set me on the idea that I need to grow genetically diverse crops and they need to be locally-adapted. And so I’m calling that, kind of, landrace gardening. And I’ve pretty much converted my whole farm to that type of growing. Rachel: ‘Landrace’ is a term that’s often used to describe older varieties that were maintained on a farm, by a farmer, over many generations of the crop. How do you use that term? Joseph: I use it in the same general pattern. I might often say the word ‘modern’ in front of it, so ‘modern landrace’ or ‘landrace development’ as in something that’s ongoing. In order for me to call something a landrace on my farm, it needs to be both genetically diverse and locally adapted. So if I grow a bunch of varieties in a field and let them cross-pollinate, the first 2, 3, 4, 5 years I often call them a ‘grex’ meaning a mixture of varieties. But then somewhere along the line they just start growing really well for my farm. They please me as a farmer, they please my community, they’ve become part of our social fabric and they integrate really well with the soil and the bugs. And that’s when I start calling them a ‘landrace’ – when they’re really part of me and part of my farm. Rachel: What do you do every year, after you’ve sown all these seeds out in the field? What do you do next? What’s the general process of landrace breeding? Joseph: So the very fundamental … that underlies everything else, is: a plant has to produce seeds in my garden, under my growing conditions and my habits. And if it doesn’t produce seeds or throw pollen into the patch, then it pretty much dies out. And so landrace plant breeding is very much survival-of-the-fittest, at its very fundamental level. For example, when I order spinach varieties out of a seed catalogue, about 50% of them will be two inches tall and go to seed. And the other half of them will be big, huge plants that flower much later. And so it’s really easy to know which ones are suited to my farm and which ones aren’t. And so the little rinky-dink plants I just pull out. And they don’t ever contribute to the genetics of my farm. Rachel: So it’s a continuous process of Nature winnowing down the population you have out in the field, so that you end up with only individuals that survive by being well adapted to your farm. And then those are the individuals that contribute seeds or pollen to the next generation. Joseph: Yes, that’s right. And I’m also continuously introducing new varieties. People will send me gifts, or I’ll get something from the seed rack or whatever. And I’ll plant that 5%, 10% next to my landraces, and it might contribute pollen or seeds or it might not. But in that way, I’m continually introducing new genetics as well as maintaining the old. Rachel: How many different varieties do you generally start with when you begin a landrace breeding project? Joseph: It depends. I like 2 or 3 or 4 or 5. Another way I have sometimes started a landrace breeding project is with accidental cross-pollinations that happened in my garden. So in that case, there would be, say, two varieties that were the parents of the landrace. Rachel: Why is it important to start with a lot of genetic diversity when you’re trying to adapt a crop to your specific location? Joseph: In order to select for traits, the variety has to have those traits inherently inside of it. And if I start with a highly inbred crop, I’ll end up with a highly inbred crop. But if I start breeding with a crop that has lots of genetic diversity, then there’s much more opportunities for the genetics to get rearranged so I can find what I’m looking for.

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About

This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks – who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it

Information

  • Creator
    Open Source Seed Initiative
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2019
  • Episodes
    14
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Show Website
    Free The Seed!