Would you rather create a new vegetable or a new garden tool?

Would you rather create a new vegetable or a new garden tool?

If you like the "Would You Rather" game, check out this index of other questions. https://permies.com/t/238000/Permaculture-Edition

Honestly... I think there are enough vegetables. I think creating a cool tool to help people garden better or easier would be fantastic.

I would like to grow an edible, large-rooted variety of bindweed. There are plenty of good garden tools around.

Unless you mean to just make a garden tool from scratch?

I will leave it to nature to create the vegetables.

A new vegetable that is not just a small modification of the common ones but something that can be as major of a food source as potatoes, but a totally new one, doesn't relate to any of the older ones.

There are a lot of types of tools, but as a culture we eat a VERY limited palette of food variety.  

I am not tool oriented and like the tools I use so why reinvent the wheel?  Just not my cup of tea so I would rather create a new vegetable if I knew how.

I understand landrace and could create a better vegetable though...

I would like to do both.

I know that is not fair to say, but I grew up in potato country where we grew potatoes up until 1988. In my area, at one time potato farming was huge but it now has ended. Still, a neighbor bred his own famous potato, the Foote Potato off the old Foote Farm. In my childhood, this was boasted about. Sadly today there are only 3 kinds of potatoes in commercial use: White, Red and Russet. They all have thick skins so they can endure the commercial harvesting and shipping of potatoes. I would love to do what my neighbor did so many years ago and create my own variety of something!

But that being said, I love engineering and thinking outside the box to make things easier for others. Over the years I have given a lot of ideas on here to aide in that.

Steve, for potatoes this is very easy. Potatoes are outbreeding, so all you need is to get some berries, take the seeds out and let them dry--then I soak them for one to four weeks until they sprout, as they can take a while--and plant them in spring as you would tomatoes.

Pearl Sutton wrote:There are a lot of types of tools, but as a culture we eat a VERY limited palette of food variety.  

This! Not just variety, but plant families - just think of how many foods fit in just 3 families, "Brassicaceae", "Solanaceae" and "Poaceae" (grain).

If something were to take out a whole family, Humans would take a huge hit.

So creating a truly new veggie, or even a variety based on a family less used like the succulents or cacti, would be awesome. Even popularizing some of the less efficient, niche plants in other families and improving them enough to be a viable homestead contender to the above three, would be good.

What family is skirret in? I've heard of it... Have I spelled it correctly?

I like the idea of my wild-style gardening leading to some new hybrid or variety, but I don't have the scientific mind to do plant-breeding in the controlled manner that Carol Deppe talks about... rather I, "Just try things."

In my mind I have been formulating The Perfect Blackberry Wrangling Tool for decades now... while I continue using loppers, grub-hoes, and pole-saws for the job.   The specialized tool I imagine is still just a notion in my noggin....

My Grandpa used to say, "Good enough for who it's for," and I sort of just make-do with what I've got.
Though he would have gone to his shop and invented that tool in a couple of days, rather than ponder it for decades like me.

I'd actually rather get the vegetables back to their original nutrient and medicinal properties, though it would also be excellent to keep some of the easier to grow, store, and harvest properties of the current cultivars, too. So, *IF* accomplishing that would be considered "new" vegetables, then that's what I'd rather do. Otherwise, a new tool - maybe a pruning or harvesting drone, to help me take care of some of the trees and plants I can't access.

I'd like to grow a pomato or a totato,   A potato where you can eat the berries like tomatoes or a tomato with stem tubers.  Back in Ireland tomatoes struggle outdoors while some years the potatoes have enough potato berries to stink up the ground at harvest time!  Apparently the potato is the result of a cross between tomato and one of its relatives millions of years ago.  The stem tuber was a huge advantage as it climbed the Andes  mountains.  So if this cross happened once in the wild,  it might be possible again.  By the way, my Neighbour in Ireland, Harry Kehoe,  was a potato breeder.   In Ireland his most successful potato is the Rooster variety.   We used to grow "scarlet pimpernel" (a Dutch variety, and golden wonder, and 3867-7 (an early trial variety that got scrapped because it produced potatoes too close to the surface and so would never be commercial ).  3867-7 was awesome! It was extremely early, and you could just find the potatoes with your finger, and pluck them there and then while letting the plant continue to produce. I was working for Harry the day he scrapped the trial and he gave me a bag of them.   I kept them going for 4 or 5 years.  Can't remember how we lost the variety, but it was definitely a shame.  Harry had other successes too.  His greatest was Cara.   This is a dry climate variety.   It had good in dry east England and great in Cyprus, and the horn of Africa.  Harry got awards in Kenya or Ethiopian or both because Cara saved lives.   I grew it 2 years in Ireland,  a dry year and a wet year.  It did not taste good in a wet year, but in a dry year, it yielded more than double of the other varieties and they were big and tasted great. Cara would be perfect as one of the varieties you grow,  anywhere the summers are very dry, like on southern Vancouver island.