[Seedgeeks] bioregional broccoli

[Nick Routledge]

The broccoli story is broadening. I've been in touch with Jim Myers at OSU
with some culture questions. I've been hearing from some local growers
that saving brocc seed has been problematic for them. It needs to be in
the ground a long time, and people have had big problems with aphids, and
flea beetle damage when the seeds germinate and emerge. I asked Jim if he
went organic when dealing with such problems. Not if he's going to lose
the crop, he said. He seems very friendly. Ask more questions, he said.
Here's a brief snapshot of the fellah.

http://oregonstate.edu/dept/hort/faculty/MyersHomePage.html

Methinks we should arrange a visit sometime, eh? I learned a leetle more
about the lineage of the broccoli seed that came from him through FCGP in
2002, to us.  

"In 1997, six commercially available F1 hybrids (Arcadia, Decathlon,
Excelsior, Shogun, San Miguel, Barbados) and 17 OSU inbreds were
random-mated in an isolation nursery and a representative sample of seed
was harvested from each plant. In subsequent years, types with acceptable
head quality were selected and again allowed to random-mate. Four such
cycles of mass selection were completed. The population has genetic
variation for head shape and size, exsertion and head height,
segmentation, bead size, branching, color, maturity, club root resistance,
and downy mildew resistance. In the spring of 2002 seed of this population
was given to the Oregon Tilth/Farmers Cooperative Genome Project."

I'm learning also, that broccoli is regarded as one of the most difficult
plants to breed.  Broccoli has a genetic incompatibility mechanism that
prevents self-pollination and also exhibits strong inbreeding depression,
which means that using inbreeding alone as a technique for genetic
uniformity results in small, weak plants. So, effective breeding can
involve a whole tool chest of techniques, including bud-pollinating,
crossing, inbreeding, selecting, pooling, mass-selecting and reselecting.

n.


		
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