While folks usually don’t use the term ‘plant breeding’ when referring to the simple act of seed saving, indeed that’s what it is. Each time a you save a variety for seed, you put a unique pressure on these plants to grow and adapt to your whims. Whether melons are grown for seed in a high tunnel or out in the windy fields impacts if plants will mature fruit and pass on seed to future generations. Our culinary preferences for fruit quality determine the genes passed down. Will they impart juiciness, sweetness and/or firmness? Choosing a few plants to save for seed from a large population is a breeding technique called ‘mass selection’ and has driven the evolution of our food crops for millennia.
Now, breeding completely NEW varieties usually entails more than mere selection, instead requiring novel “crossing.” For cross-pollinating crops like broccoli and spinach, this is simple: just plant two varieties near each other and wait for insects or wind (depending on their pollination mechanism) to carry the pollen between the two. Self-pollinating crops like tomatoes and peppers may require the physical transfer of pollen with a q-tip between plants, since the flowers don’t readily release pollen into their environment. This year at Deep Harvest we’ll be playing with the pollen of lettuce, nasturtiums and winter squash, making novel crosses and creating diverse, new genepools from which we can select out plants in future generations.
Want to do some easy plant breeding of you own? Many of our colleagues have already taken the first step for you by crossing multiple varieties together and selling the resulting diverse gene pools, or ‘grexes’. You can plant out these seeds and make selections based on your own unique growing conditions or preferences. It may take several seasons of selection for the genetics to stabilize into a more predictable and uniform variety, but the journey itself is rewarding and fascinating! Check out Wild Garden Seed, Adaptive seeds and Experimental Farm Network to dive into this wild world. Carol Deppe’s book “Breed your own Vegetable Varieties” is the quintessential primer for folks excited to learn about backyard plant breeding. And finally, Cornell University has a great one-pager on the same subject.
