Landrace and Heirlooms

Robin Wild wrote:Any advice on plants to keep those tiny moth larva off my cabbage/kale/broc? Thanks!

What if you grew the brassicas at a time of year when the larva are not active in the garden? Over winter perhaps.

What if you grew only red-leaved brassicas? So that the green bugs are more visible to predators?

What if you closely examined every plant, then saved seeds from the plants with the fewest bugs? What if you did that for several years in a row? Would you select for plants that are not attractive to the moths? Would the plant still be edible?

What if you changed your moral code, and decided that eating bugs is OK? Or washing the bugs off broccoli is OK? I peel my cabbage heads, until I get deep enough into it that there are no caterpillars.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:

Robin Wild wrote:Any advice on plants to keep those tiny moth larva off my cabbage/kale/broc? Thanks!

What if you grew the brassicas at a time of year when the larva are not active in the garden? Over winter perhaps.

What if you grew only red-leaved brassicas? So that the green bugs are more visible to predators?

What if you closely examined every plant, then saved seeds from the plants with the fewest bugs? What if you did that for several years in a row? Would you select for plants that are not attractive to the moths? Would the plant still be edible?

What if you changed your moral code, and decided that eating bugs is OK? Or washing the bugs off broccoli is OK? I peel my cabbage heads, until I get deep enough into it that there are no caterpillars.

I'll add one more - encourage wasps and don't destroy wasp nests unless absolutely necessary. I've watched wasps hunting through my brassicas, harvesting those pesky larva and they do a way better job than I do!

When I switched to maintaining landraces, instead of curating varieties, I wished for exactly that sort of scale, to be included in seed catalog offerings... It would be really useful to know how stable is stable.

The goal of Open Pollinated varieties if for the offspring to look like an exact clone of the parents.

The goal of F1 hybrids is for every plant to look like an exact clone of it's siblings.

Some of the older varieties of corn, squash, and grains were somewhat diverse. Then the heirloom purists got hold of them, and spent 50 to 100 years inbreeding them to eliminate the diversity.

Some of the traditional landraces of peppers, corn, squash, and beans have maintained a lot of phenotype diversity till the present day.

My personal landraces vary a lot in the amount of genetic diversity within them. The diversity of my turnips is very low. The diversity of my corn is astonishing. The diversity of my beans is somewhere in the middle.

When I select for local adaptation, my plants shed a lot of mal-adapted genetic diversity.

People like to pretend like they are preserving heirlooms "true to type". Uh, there are disturbances caused by cosmic and earth radiation. There is contamination from un-noticed cross pollination.

I value stability of traits like the ability to mature seeds in my ecosystem, and with my habits. I don't care much about leaf shapes, or fruit colors, unless it affects flavor. I care a lot about stable flavors.

This graph shows what happens to the genetics of a typical domestic tomato after 4 generations of (Open Pollination) selfing, compared to what happens to the genetics of an out-crossing promiscuous tomato. The graph represents a chromosome within the plant, with it's two strands of DNA.

The domestic tomato (bottom) loses essentially half of it's genetic diversity within 4 generations, and the genetics get stuck in that configuration forevermore. Every plant in the population is essentially a clone of any other plant.

The promiscuous tomato retains 4 times the allele diversity of the inbred tomato, and the genetics of every plant are scrambled even more in every generation. Every plant has a unique combination of genetics that is much different than any other plant.

How to interpret the graph. In the domestic line, Red/Green represent one chromosome from the mother (red) and one from the father. The mother and the father have two strands each, but because they are inbred, the two strands in a parent are identical. The genetics get randomly sorted during mitosis, with 1 to 2 crossover events per generation. The next generation, alleles pair up with alleles from the parent, and diversity is lost.

In the promiscuous line, four strands of DNA might contribute to the original hybrid. They are represented in the graph by the yellow strand, the green strand, the blue strand, and the red strand. In the promiscuous line, the strands of DNA in a parent are different from each other. The independent assortment leads to conservation of the genetics, because it is rare for a strand of DNA to pair up with one from the same parent. Also, because the population is 100% out-crossing DNA is shared and exchanged instead of getting lost.

love this ... xohugxo

Robin Wild wrote:
Any advice on plants to keep those tiny moth larva off my cabbage/kale/broc? Thanks!

I have had pretty good luck planting red leaf lettuce among my brassicas. I just let it grow and bolt, leaving it in until I harvest the broccolini, kohlrabi, cabbage, etc

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:

Robin Wild wrote:Any advice on plants to keep those tiny moth larva off my cabbage/kale/broc? Thanks!

What if you grew the brassicas at a time of year when the larva are not active in the garden? Over winter perhaps.

That is exactly what I have done and after several failed years it has finally worked. We have swarms of those little white and yellow butterflies laying eggs all the time. I do see wasps occasionally hunting the larva but no way they can keep up.  

Success this year is because I planted seed in late summer instead of spring. Plants never even developed heads or sprouts they got their needed cold period and immediately started flowering when growth resumed this spring. It isn't cabbage or Brussels sprouts or kohlrabi any more. Instead it is an extremely productive crop of very tasty leaves, tender stalks and flower heads.

The cabbage flies larva are munching a little now but that's ok as the plants are past prime eating stage and soon to yield an abundance of seed and they didn't bother the fresh stalks anyway, just the leaves. The adult butterflies are great pollinators. I've seen them on pretty much all flowers in the garden, including the brassica themselves. They are pretty little bugs and their babies are welcome to the old tough cabbage leaves.

Debbie Ann wrote:...I can remember what 'real' vegetables tasted like. Back in the day they tasted really good. ...

Heirloom seeds were the things that mostly... a lady brought with her in a covered wagon across the country centuries ago. “People would come from all over the county to ask Missus Taylor for her zucchini seed because they were so good.” And they really were so damned sweet! She collected them and coveted them because the vegetables tasted awesome and her family would actually eat them and remain healthy. They were something special.

Not like the hybrid stuff they sell in the stores today that all seem to taste like cardboard. Over the decades I've read a lot and listened to lots of interviews about the newest, greatest hybrid varieties. Their origins are not a secret. They are specifically bred (and I'm not talking GMO here) to give better yields, bigger fruits, be more resistant to diseases, easier to transport, longer shelf life, etc. etc. etc.  And in the case of a lot of the seedlings you can buy at your local nursery today they are even bred to specifically be exactly 8  inches tall at 6 weeks old because that is the height of the shelves in their trucks and they want uniform sizes to pack in as much as possible. I'm not kidding. God's honest truth.

Hybrids are bred to be the best, super, duper plants.... but they are not bred TO TASTE GOOD! Yes, that trait is on the list but only in last place. I grow heirlooms because they taste so damned good! Like in the olden days when I was a kid. Yes, they can be susceptible to more issues and they usually have very little shelf life but....THEY TASTE REALLY, REALLY GOOD! Most of them are so damned sweet and my tomatoes taste like candy!

Someone mentioned inbreeding. If you are only using seed year after year, decade after decade from your small yard then you would have inbreeding. If you are sharing seeds with others all over the county, all over the country, all over the planet there is no inbreeding. Just great vegies. Some end up in Alaska and adapt to cold temperatures. Some go to Algeria and learn to grow under very different conditions. The important thing is that they still all need to, must TASTE REALLY GREAT. That's why we grow heirloom vegies...

Let me see if I can answer some of your concerns. You are actually talking about a number of different things, all packed in with a "modern" understanding of food production. Those delicious fruits and vegetables you remember from your childhood--chances are very good that they were from localized landraces.

A landrace is generally considered a local variety that is adapted to a particular area and climate. Our ancestors traded around their seeds so that nothing became too inbred, and while the results might look (or taste) similar, they were in reality genetically diverse. A farmer sells a pumpkin to a family a mile or two away, they like it so they plant the seeds. By planting those seeds with their own favorite pumpkins, the population becomes more diverse and the two landraces diverge just slightly. Years later, Farmer A gets some seeds back from Farmer B and the two populations may look very different, even though they have the same root. Both are technically hybrids.

A hybrid, by definition, is a cross between two different "varieties" of a plant. If those varieties are not already closely related they will create a diverse population.

The modern common definition of a hybrid, on the other hand, is a farmer selecting two specific types of plant in order to create the same plant "clone" that he's been selling for 25 years. Hybrid tomatoes have specific parents, and their ancestors have been bred specifically for SALE, not for consumption. They don't taste like a tomato. This is the definition of "hybrid" that we have come to see as standard.

You stated, "If you are sharing seeds with others all over the county, all over the country, all over the planet there is no inbreeding. Just great vegies. Some end up in Alaska and adapt to cold temperatures. Some go to Algeria and learn to grow under very different conditions. The important thing is that they still all need to, must TASTE REALLY GREAT. That's why we grow heirloom vegies."

And right there, in that paragraph, you have defined a landrace. The "Missus Taylor" you mentioned above was growing a localized landrace, specific to her area and her family, her tastes, which she then spread around. Smaller populations moved in different directions, perhaps to the "taste" preferences of another family, then rejoined. They were crossed with other favorites, and new tastes emerged.

A diverse landrace does TASTE great. A landrace is about people food, not corporation food.

The problem is that most of those old heirloom/landrace varieties have been lost. Some say 95%, some say as much as 99% of our food variety has been lost in the modern search for (super)marketable food. Diversity and taste became secondary to the money that could be made. The marketers hijacked the idea of a hybrid, and because the hybrid food on the grocery store shelves is tasteless the idea of a hybrid became tasteless as well.

The idea of a landrace once would have been synonymous with what you think of as an "heirloom," with the caveat that those landraces were never meant to be either static or inbred. Those who bred them knew well that if they self pollinated their plants for too long those plants would not survive in the face of change. Those plants were meant to feed their families, and if the plants failed they would die. That being the case, they would give seeds to neighbors, family, friends, then those people would send seeds back.

There is a story of an old farmer who every year won the contest at the fair for the best corn. A reporter spoke to him and was stunned to discover that he always provided seeds to his neighbors. He asked why, and the old man replied, "Their corn pollinates mine. If they have bad corn, after a few years so will I."

Many modern heirlooms have been inbred for so long, people deliberately breeding them back to themselves for so many generations that they can no longer be called landraces. They are varieties, nothing more. In many cases they have lost their ability to adapt. In fact, that very inability to change is now considered a hallmark of an heirloom variety--always the same, same taste, same behavior...same weaknesses, same struggles, same pests.

With landrace breeding, we are moving closer to the heirloom standard, but without the modern understanding of heirloom risks. Which is a really longwinded way of saying that we're talking about the same thing, just with different words.

L Anderson wrote:
If this isn’t a good reason to stop tilling, I don’t know what is. Free plants, no labor, suited to my garden conditions, and the great fun of the wonder and anticipation.

I have a funny story about an aspect of tilling.  I have a friend who tills at least once a week all growing season - to keep the weeds down.  He doesn't recognize the damage caused to all of the soil life, but that is for a different post.  I was at his garden before his first till of the year, and I was marveling at his volunteer spinach.  He said he was going to till it under the next day, and I asked if I could dig it up.  He agreed and I was on my way to a wonderful new aspect of gardening.  For my friend, the spinach was in the 'wrong' place.  He had something else he wanted in 'that' location.  Along with everything else he planted, he planted that year's spinach.

I took his 'wrong' spinach plants home and put them in my garden.  They flourished!  I was (consistently)  eating spinach from his plants for a month and a half before he was eating spinach from the replanted seeds in the 'right place'.  I explained to him what I had done, but he still tills everything under and starts over because he wants to be in control of where everything is.

I not only learned about spinach from this event, I learned that it works for many things.  We now let some of the lettuce and other greens go to seed intentionally, and in the Spring we are rewarded early with garden salads before the ground has thawed enough to be worked.  We get the delight of discovering fresh food in lots of areas, some far away from where the previous year's plants were.  Yes, it is unplanned - in part - but the abundance allows us to uproot plants where we really don't want them (this is rare), and we truly have more of a polyculture garden.

In addition, we are purposely allowing all the cross-pollination and adaptation that happens year after year.  We continually add to the mix with new varieties so we now have some delicious lettuce that doesn't have a 'proper' name.  They are crosses with crosses, with some (what do you call it?) down-breeding from the hybrids tossed into the mix.  I guess we are landracing?

I have a question: I remember Joseph Lofthouse said on a different post that he grows the hullless lady godiva squash. Is it part of the landrace gene pool? When crossed with other winter squashes, will the hull less trait still preserved in certain F2s? Or is it recessive?  I am growing kakai for the first time, so far I hand pollinated to make sure it didn't cross pollinate.

Even if it's recessive it may show up in later generations as the lines recross.

I did not incorporate the hulless-seed trait of Lady Godiva into my landraces. The seeds lack a seed coat, leading to fickle and unreliable germination. Therefore, the trait self-eliminated from my garden. Some of the F2 offspring show the trait, to some degree or other.

In like manner, I stopped working on sugary enhanced sweet corn because of unreliable germination.

"There is certainly more diversity in one cob of my sweet corn than in 100 acres of a commercial sweet corn variety".

What? A single cob has different traits in each kernel? I have a lot to learn, hahahaha.

Hey thanks everybody for the education here. This might be the most I have learned from an internet thread EVER.,

yes...my understanding is that for every tassle that gets pollinated (by wind or insects) a viable kernel develops ...why some cobs are missing some kernel development... and why it's better for pollination to plant corn in a block rather than rows in a home garden... I save seed from cobs of the plants in the middle of the block in my garden...

Dee Kempson wrote:yes...my understanding is that for every tassle that gets pollinated (by wind or insects) a viable kernel develops ...why some cobs are missing some kernel development... and why it's better for pollination to plant corn in a block rather than rows in a home garden... I save seed from cobs of the plants in the middle of the block in my garden...

This is why I sometimes harvest around the perimeter for baby corn, but leave the stalk in place. Baby corn is harvested before it's had a chance to pollinate. Ears from plants around the perimeter of the corn patch tend to be poorly pollinated anyway.

Dan Fish wrote:
What? A single cob has different traits in each kernel?

Yes, and interestingly, I've read in more than one book, that corn is unusual in that the pollinating father can actually change the quality of the kernel itself, unlike most other plants where you won't see much effect of the pollen source until you grow out the seed next year.

Is this true of other crops where we consume the seed,  like other grains?

Mk Neal wrote:Is this true of other crops where we consume the seed,  like other grains?

Yes, because the embryo and endosperm contain the genetics of the father and the mother.

It is easier to see in corn seeds, because the seed coat comes from the mother, and it is often transparent, therefore we can see the inside of the kernels which may be different colors depending on pollen donor. Also with corn, there are variations in the color of the interior of the seed. Many species only have one color of seed regardless of ancestry.

I am conducting an experiment this summer to observe whether the seed-coat color of beans varies depending on ancestry.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:I am conducting an experiment this summer to observe whether the seed-coat color of beans varies depending on ancestry.

I'm pretty sure that when Steve Jones was studying the genetics of shell pattern in snails he found out that it was controlled by the grandparents, not the parents. Just to throw a potential spanner in the works of unravelling the mysteries.  I'll see if I can find a link.

Burra: I think that I designed this summers observations to be able to observe both a parent effect, and a grandparent effect.

Due to the severe drought, germination was spotty, so I may not have sufficient plants for proper evaluation.

Joseph, do you  mind sharing your thoughts on how to do that experiment? My beans are well up their trellises and blooming and I paid no attention to anything other than immediate neighbors being different so this crop might not work but there is plenty of time in my climate to plant some more.

Mark: Regarding the experiment to see if a xenia effect can be observed in the seeds of common beans.

I sorted white seeds out of the dry bush beans.

I planted the white beans in a row 18" apart from the general colored landrace. Close enough to encourage crossing, and perhaps far enough that I don't confuse plants in different rows. Germination was iffy on the white seeds. I may replant.

When I harvest the white row, I intend to harvest one plant at a time, and one pod at a time. I expect white to be the most recessive color, therefore colored seeds are likely to be hybrids either last year, or this year.

If a plant in the white row has beans all the same color, which are something other than white, that will indicate that cross pollination occurred last growing season. Because last year, they were grown all jumbled together.  

If a plant has all white beans, except for one or two on the plant. Then I may choose to interpret that as a xenia effect: the seed color changed based on the pollen donor. I expect that if I find xenia effect seeds, that they may be some sort of pale/pastel color.

It would be really useful to me if we could identify bean hybrids when the seed is harvested, instead of after the next harvest.

Joseph and others, a good "open access" link that may have some useful references if interested:

https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/nph.15259

From the text:

"A genetic network controls seed coat color and patterning in common bean (Bassett, 2007). At the top of the network is the dominant acting P (pigment) gene first described over 100 yr ago (Emerson, 1909). The dominant P allele activates a network of dominant and epistatic acting factors that produces the multiple seed colors and patterns that distinguish the market classes (McClean et al., 2002; Bassett, 2007). The recessive p allele is pleiotropic to other genes in the network, and pp homozygotes produce white seeds together with white flowers. Four other P alleles control the spatial expression of color in seeds and flowers to various extents and are intermediate between the P and p alleles in the allelic series (Bassett, 2003). All wild beans have colored seeds, whereas white-seeded landraces and cultivars are found in all major races of common bean (Singh et al., 1991; Beebe et al., 2000)."

A way to discover crosses in the first year would be a great help to me too. The way it is now chances are that most first year crosses end up on the dinner plate or in canning jars without ever being known, especially in my sub-landrace grown for snaps rather than dry use.

Still it might be relatively easy for me screen for them in the dry bean category.  Growing pole beans, which are pretty indeterminate in production I often harvest whatever is ready on a particular day and this goes on for weeks. I also often shell individual pods by hand. I've always done that and screened as I do for the fastest maturing, biggest seeds, most blemish free pods and so on. In years past, before I became aware or had understanding of what I was looking at I have found individual beans within a pod or all the beans in a single pod that were different from the rest of the plant. All I really have to do is be a little more careful to keep seeds from individual plants separate until they have been shelled and examined.  

What I would really love to be able to do is cross bush beans with large vine pole beans and know it in the first generation.  Humm, maybe I could plant some white seeded bush beans with some of my pole bean landrace.

This might work:
Plant some pole beans without trellis, just let them sprawl.
Plant some white seeded bush beans, just a few and so that no two bush plants are near each other.
Make a point to move the pole vines around to insure that flowers of the different types are right against each other.
Look for off color individual beans in the bush to see if anything observable in the first year happened.
Plant ALL of the seeds from the bush vines the next year and see if anything shows up there.

A very fascinating topic for me.   I am also attempting to find the landrace varieties in my little gardens.    Most of my intentional breeding and hybrid focus has been with medical cannabis since I am a provider for patients, while I let my outdoor food gardens do their own thing and I simply collect and sow random seed every year.  

In my effort to chase landrace food crops I have noticed a few things.     There is much higher success of "good" plants when I let the seeds germinate outside instead of starting indoors and transplanting.    This makes sense in that only the genetics suitable for the weather and locale germinate, and of course there is no transplant shock when there is no transplant.  

I have also noticed with my hybrid efforts, that f1 hybrids are very easy to knock out of the park.   Although, quite unpredictable sometimes.  f2 hybrids are where the problems show.  What was a fantastic f1 may be a dud f2 accross the board.  Or maybe just one good plant out of 30.   The big question is how to move forwards with something that has unique taste that is only found by this sort of selective breeding.    Back cross into the parents to attempt another selection?   Cross within the f2 pool and hope for the best?   I'm sure there is no right answer.

What a deep and broad subject.  Very worthy of pursuing if we wish to have food long term.   I do not see the "agricultural revolution" doing us well when fossil fuels start to dwindle.  We will need varieties that do not need copious fertilizer, we will need varieties with wide tolerance to drought and flood, and we will need wide variation of genetics to get us through possible squeezes from unknown losses.  

One of the things that really bothers me (although I do understand the reasons behind it) is that for whatever reason a farmer's crop fails (flood, fire, insects, etc) and you can see the tractors plowing under the whole crop. Here and there one or two plants are doing great under those conditions. And yet they get plowed under with the rest. One corn plant at full height surrounded by water, one bean plant in a dried out field.

I want to scream at the screen, or rush out and stop the desecration. If someone lives in one of those areas, it might be worth it to go "rescue" those few plants and add them to a landrace, assuming they're not GMO.

john holmes wrote:I have also noticed with my hybrid efforts, that f1 hybrids are very easy to knock out of the park.   Although, quite unpredictable sometimes.  f2 hybrids are where the problems show.  What was a fantastic f1 may be a dud f2 across the board.  Or maybe just one good plant out of 30.  The big question is how to move forwards with something that has unique taste that is only found by this sort of selective breeding.    Back cross into the parents to attempt another selection?   Cross within the f2 pool and hope for the best?   I'm sure there is no right answer.  

My zucchetti is turning out interesting. First generation cross with pumpkin and zucchini on a spaghetti squash female parent. Last year the zucchini was twisted up and only partially pollinated. The pumpkin just looked like a small pumpkin but had the taste of the spaghetti squash. This year the first to bloom is the zucchetti. It's turning out the approximate size of the spaghetti squash, the shape of a short zucchini, with the stripes of the zucchini, and it's ripening much faster than a spaghetti squash. I'm excited for the next generation.

Standard for f2's is that you get some of each parent and some new combinations. If the parents were bleh, most of what you get in the f2 is likely to be the same. I've never paid much attention to the f2, except as a way to get to f3 and beyond.

As for "No right answer," I'd say instead "No ONE right answer." Lots of ways to get to z.

In terms of cannabis f2 where I've tracked crosses for each plant and very carefully controlled pollen , I can say with certainty that both grandparents and f1 hybrid parents were steller yet made very blah f2 from f1xf1.  On the average, just poor plants.

It's tough to get enough numbers for proper variety though. State law limits.  Corn doesn't have that,  lol

I haven't been here in a long while, but I saw this article and immediately thought of you folks.
https://returntonow.net/2022/02/08/rancher-finds-a-pot-of-gold-perfectly-preserved-1000-year-old-pueblo-variety-of-corn/

Someone found a thousand-year old corn variety that fixes its own nitrogen.  Perfect for permies who don't want to use fertilizer every year.