Tech metaphors
Jun. 17th, 2020 08:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
greenstormI've been doing a dive into open-source seeds, modern landrace creation and grexes, and deliberate crafting of locally-adapted species. This is definitely my kind of thing: my land philosophy sits comfortably in the "throw shit at the wall and see what sticks/the land is your partner in selection/change the genetics to suit the land and not the land to suit the genetics/lots of different locally-adapted cultivars" space that a lot of these experiments live in.
I definitely have a direction to take my tomato trials next year: whatever produces this year, plus some of the multicultivar groups. Seems like one of the holy grails of this style of tomato breeding is to get tomatoes that cross-pollinate easily rather than self-pollinating. There are a couple varieties that do this (the specific flower architecture is recessive) and if I pull one of those in with my survivors from this year, then at the end of next year I should have some crosses, and some of those will be heterozygous for the cross-pollination flower architecture but won't display it, plus have a bunch of my survivor tomato traits. Those will self-pollinate, and about a quarter of them should be cross-pollinators with a bunch of my incorporated trailts.
So that's a bit of a direction, which is nice.
It means I really want a tunnel greenhouse, though. I mean, for other reasons too: birds in winter, snow-free area for hay storage, not dealing with these weird last frosts, etc. The cheapest I can find that'll handle snowload is ~$3500, which would be manageable but not this year.
Anyhow, for next year when buying seeds: wild mountain seeds and the experimental farm network, and maybe lofthouse if he's selling them. They're a bunch of high-altitude, cold-night breeders of squash and tomatoes who release biodiverse sets of seeds that can hopefully adapt to what's going on up here. At least they'll have a leg up.
I definitely have a direction to take my tomato trials next year: whatever produces this year, plus some of the multicultivar groups. Seems like one of the holy grails of this style of tomato breeding is to get tomatoes that cross-pollinate easily rather than self-pollinating. There are a couple varieties that do this (the specific flower architecture is recessive) and if I pull one of those in with my survivors from this year, then at the end of next year I should have some crosses, and some of those will be heterozygous for the cross-pollination flower architecture but won't display it, plus have a bunch of my survivor tomato traits. Those will self-pollinate, and about a quarter of them should be cross-pollinators with a bunch of my incorporated trailts.
So that's a bit of a direction, which is nice.
It means I really want a tunnel greenhouse, though. I mean, for other reasons too: birds in winter, snow-free area for hay storage, not dealing with these weird last frosts, etc. The cheapest I can find that'll handle snowload is ~$3500, which would be manageable but not this year.
Anyhow, for next year when buying seeds: wild mountain seeds and the experimental farm network, and maybe lofthouse if he's selling them. They're a bunch of high-altitude, cold-night breeders of squash and tomatoes who release biodiverse sets of seeds that can hopefully adapt to what's going on up here. At least they'll have a leg up.
