Is anyone else considering breeding or actively breeding for varieties that are better adapted to your area? Or even just for better disease and bug resistance or even a specific desirable trait, like color?
Aimed towards open-pollinated or own-root, of
course, though of course there are the intermediate stages.
If so, what are you breeding?
Tomatoes? Elms? Gooseberries?
Mushrooms? etc.
How is your
project coming along? (Not asking for parentage or anything like that, unless you want to share.) Is it doing well, or are you frustrated?
I'm considering breeding for tomatoes, and watermelons, and melons that do better in this area. We've had a few successes with certain varieties of these, in a limited manner, but our alkaline, clay-loam, salty soil interspersed with hardpan and weirdly sand, combined with a short season and low rainfall during summers that range from the upper seventies to upper nineties when warm, to low thirties to mid-fifties when cool, and periodic high winds means that these tend to struggle on our soil.
I guess I'm asking because I'm a little intimidated by this. We lived in an apartment for over a decade where saving
seed wasn't very practical, so we've only been saving seed for two years now [other than random flowers and chives], and now <laugh> I'm considering outright breeding. Where we are now, we have a lot of sun and pollinators, and I've found that in the years my garden "struggles" other gardens in the area are failing entirely. So I would like to develop varieties that even the most amateur can plant and
water and have good success with. Tomatoes and peppers particularly don't do well direct-seeded around here, and that's both annoying and worrying for future viability.
Melons: Selecting for earlier ripening and best flavor from the Old Tennessee
Watermelons: Selecting for best and most consistent texture and flavor from Van Doren Moon and Stars (which was superior, but inconsistent, having pithy spots or spots that were too crisp/not crisp and flavorless or not sweet areas, this was from saved seed, the original seed producing one melon-out of a whole packet of seed-that fit in the palm of the hand, was not at all very crisp, and produced about eight seeds total.); Crossing Moon and Stars x Golden Midget just to see what happens (as the Golden Midget ripened much quicker, but was not very crisp or flavorful)
Tomatoes: Selecting/breeding for good flavor, good texture, consistent production, crack resistance and vigor. <-This feels like a very large undertaking, particularly given how many varieties have outright failed to do well on our soil. We've had at least 30 varieties hit "fail".
Also,
planting
apple seeds to see what comes up, survives, and if they are of any use for eating/dessert apples. (The extras to be donated to
people who just want a tree.)