Welcome to the Going to Seed podcast. We hold these once a month.
Today we have William Whitston with us. William is a
plant breeder. And him and I have hung around in the same
circles for the last 13 years or so. William actually makes a
living doing plant breeding. He's breeding up in Central
Washington on the coast. Crops that do really well for him
because of the climate that he's in or dahlias, Jerusalem artichoke,
mashua, mauka, and sorry about the pronunciation, and oka and
potato, sea kale, skirret, yuluko, yakon, and yampa. And
for the last decade, the most popular page on my website has
been about growing true potato seeds. And invariably when
people ask me for seeds, I send them to William. He has a
website, cultivariable.com, where he sells the seeds. And
they're such good seeds compared to the little narrow genetic
diversity that I have in my garden because William has
really taken the potatoes to heart and just does a beautiful
job with them. William writes like scientific articles about
how to breed these crops. They're really detailed and
careful. He maintains a laboratory in his home or his
farm where he removes viruses from the potatoes and things
like that. So during that time, he was working closely with
Carol Deppe. So that's William. Welcome, William.
Thank you very much. That's always interesting to hear
someone describe what I do because I think I describe it
differently every time. It seemed so much more concise that
way.
Would you like to add anything to what you do that I left out
or that you really brings you joy?
I think you did a pretty good job. The only difference, I
think, is just a realization that I'm coming to over time.
And that is that I think more than anything else, what I'm
doing is just simply exploring these plants. What I'm doing is
not ultimately always or necessarily even often
practical. I do a lot of things out of sheer exploratory wonder
that don't necessarily produce anything that anyone else will
ever want. So that's a big part of it. But obviously, I have to
produce enough that other people would be interested in growing
in order to actually make enough money to survive. So that's
certainly a big part of it as well.
Are there particular crops that are more valuable to you?
I think Yakon is my top selling crop and followed by potato.
Everything else is quite small in comparison.
Can you describe the Yakon growing? How does it grow?
Sure.
What do people use it for?
Yakon is a sunflower family plant, structurally similar to
a Jerusalem artichoke. It's a tall, typically somewhere between
five and nine foot tall plant with a structure overall similar
to the sunflower Jerusalem artichoke. It has much smaller
flowers, but it produces very large storage roots that are
sweet and are typically consumed more like a fruit than like a
root vegetable. The overall structure though is quite similar
to a Dahlia or to a Jerusalem artichoke. The plant is
propagated by a Rhizomatous crown and the storage roots are
non-propagative. You could occasionally get an adventitious
root or sprout off of one of them, but they don't have a
bud so you don't normally use them to propagate. Sexually, it
is a plant like many of these clonally propagated plants that
has lost quite a bit of its ability to reproduce over time
and was until fairly recently considered to be mostly sterile.
It turns out that a lot of these clonally propagated plants that
are widely considered to be sterile usually aren't. They
just need some work and encouragement to bring them back
into fertility.
How has your work on fertility been or has it been productive
to you to restore fertility to the Yakon?
Yeah. Initially, I grew about six varieties of Yakon that had
been collected over the years. They were South American heirloom
varieties that had by hook or by crook made it into Europe or
North America and then circulated as things do. In fact,
all of these were considered basically to be sterile. There
was some work done by hobbyists in the UK for a while. You may
know Owen Smith of Radix and some others worked quite a bit
to try to get seed from Yakon and really only succeeded in one
case where they were able to cross Yakon with a wild relative
and get a hybrid through that. But I collected some more
varieties and really made full use of my long frost free season
to get flowers really late in the year, well into December and
even January. Eventually, that produced some seed and once the
ball got rolling, I was able to go from growing about a thousand
plants and producing about a dozen seeds to growing a hundred
plants and producing 3000 seeds in just a couple of years.
That was just a matter of growing the new hybrid varieties
that had improved fertility, identifying the ones that
produced more pollen, focusing on those. Over time, I was
breeding Yakon and now all of the varieties that I offer are
varieties that I bred myself.
Very nice. How is Yakon used in the kitchen?
I think most people tend to use it a fresh fruit. It's crisp,
it's juicy, it's mildly sweet. Most of the time if I'm eating
Yakon, I'm just eating it fresh. You can certainly use it in
things like a fruit salad. You can use it in a stir fry.
Unfortunately, the major use of Yakon in the world is boiling it
down to make a syrup. I guess I shouldn't say unfortunately,
many people like Yakon syrup, but it's this kind of commercial
product. How do we boil this stuff down and turn it into a
diet food that we can hype and sell? It's not the way I would
choose to eat Yakon, but it is by far the form in which most
people would be familiar with the crop.
I don't even remember if I could buy that at the grocery
store. That would be interesting to look for.
Probably could at a health food store.
You mentioned Dahlia. Can you tell us about growing Dahlia?
Yeah, there are great similarities between Yakon,
Dahlia, and Jerusalem artichoke. They're all fairly close
relatives that are structurally similar. The nice thing about
Dahlia is that they're quite willing to make seed. That's
nice. You don't have to start from scratch. You can pick a
couple of any widely available Dahlia varieties and grow them.
Assuming that you have any pollinators, odds are you're
going to get seed. You're going to get very diverse seed
because Dahlia is our polyploid crop, most of them. Dahlia is
another quite complex group in which the common garden Dahlia
is polyploid, but there are related species that are
diploid and that can be more straightforward to breed. The
common Dahlia are polyploid, and so any seed you get is going to
be quite significantly different from any other seed. That
obviously has its upsides and its downsides. The Dahlia is
very diverse. It has its upsides and its downsides, but
it's harder to get to anything resembling stability by going
through multiple sexual generations. On the other hand,
you can get a tremendous amount of diversity in just one
generation of seed, and you can propagate it clonally. It's very
easy to fix traits that you like that way. It's definitely a
propagated crop. If you like what you can keep it, as long as
you can manage to keep propagating it. Dahlia as far as
a food crop are, I'd say, still on the edge. It's not that easy
to get really delicious, sweet Dahlia. From my seeds, which
I've done a fair amount of work on, it's maybe something like
one in 80 is a Dahlia that I would want to eat, and the rest
is a Dahlia that I never want to taste again. There's definitely
a lot of work that could be done with that crop. The other
problem with Dahlia is a thing that's common to all of these
sunflower family plants, and that is that their major
storage carbohydrate is inulin. Inulin is quite hard to digest.
It's easier for some than others, but it would be difficult
to make any of these a staple crop that you would want to eat
all the time, because they're just going to blow your guts out
eventually.
I typically use the Dahlia and the Jerusalem artichokes,
something that you add to a soup or you add to a stir fry in
small amounts, but not eating a whole plate full of it.
You definitely wouldn't want to eat them like potatoes unless
you're an unusual person. There are people who can do that. There
are people who can just pile on the Jerusalem artichokes and
never have a problem. But I have tried to adapt to those crops.
I've followed the common advice that if you add them to your
diet in increasingly large amounts, eventually your gut
microbiome will adjust and you'll simply be fine. I've not found
that to be true.
Sweet. On your Dahlia, did you end up choosing for different
flower types? Were there some flower types that are more seedy
or easier to work with than others?
Yeah, I did this indirectly in that I found it was much easier
to breed towards sweetness in Dahlia coccinella, which is a
wild relative of Dahlia. They're typically single flower Dahlia's
and they have an open center. The open center means that the
insects can get in there and do the cross pollination. You're
going to get a lot more seed. It's a nice coincidence that the
Dahlia species that tends to be the best to eat is also one of
the ones that's easiest to breed.
I also found my Dahlia breeding moving in the direction of
single flowers instead of all those petals that interfere with
pollination. Yeah, it's really difficult. If a Dahlia is
sufficiently ornamental, it's effectively sterile because no
insects are going to be able to get in there and do any
pollination. I used to get rotten seed heads and that was
really nasty. Yeah, you literally have to pluck the
petals out if you want that to work. I've done some breeding
with older garden Dahlia's that are like pom-pom types that
actually have very good flavor. But if you don't open up the
centers so that you can either manually pollinate or let the
insects do the job, then yeah, you're just going to get those
gnarly wet balls that at the end of the season that contain
nothing of any use.
While we're on the sunflower family, could you tell us about
Jerusalem artichokes? Yeah, so Jerusalem artichoke was my
original plant breeding adventure. When I decided I was
going to breed plants, I looked around, I thought, what should I
work on? What is a plant that could be improved that is not
where I'm not going to have a lot of competition or where I
can potentially do something unique and add value to a crop?
And I thought Jerusalem artichoke is really productive
and it's tolerant of a wide range of conditions and it's
hard to eat, even though it tastes good. I thought that
seems like a good candidate. And it turns out that you really
couldn't pick a worse crop to try to learn plant breeding with
than Jerusalem artichoke. I think it worked out in my case
because it compelled me to learn so many things, but it's a hard
one. It's still quite hard. The first problem is, as with so
many of these crops, is that it's polyploid, so you're not
going to get to stability easily, but it also has a type
of self incompatibility that's much more difficult to learn.
It's a type of compatibility that's much less common in most
domesticated plants that makes it really hard to make crosses
because not only is it self compatible, but it's widely just
incompatible between varieties. So you could do everything
right, but pick the wrong varieties to start with. You
could have 10 varieties and discover that you have no mutual
compatibility between any of them. You could also pick two
varieties that they immediately set seed for you. But on top of
the incompatibility problems, you have the fact that it's a
crop that is photoperiodic when it comes to producing flowers.
And so you may have a very limited amount of time at the
end of the growing season to actually do any crossing and
produce any seed before the plants just die. And in some
cases, the period is too short to do anything effective. And
there are some varieties that have long day flowering, and
those are quite useful. But also the varieties that have long
day flowering are all mutually incompatible. So somehow you
have to find a variety that overlaps enough that flowers
late in the season with a variety that flowers early in
order to make those crosses. It's a really difficult but very
interesting plant.
Have you done any work on trying to cross the Jerusalem artichoke
with annual sunflowers?
I haven't. It's not the direction that I really want to
go. I've looked at some of the results. People have done that.
But you lose so much of the Jerusalem artichoke traits in
that cross. I tend to think of that as being a cross that's
more about trying to introduce perenniality to annual
sunflowers than it is trying to gain anything for the Jerusalem
artichoke. So that's the opposite direction that I want
to go in. When it comes to the sunchokes, my overwhelming
interests are to get them to reproduce earlier in the year so
that it's easier to breed them and then to try to increase the
fraction of non-inulin carbohydrates in them in order to
hopefully make them a little bit more digestible.
Is that test available easily to a homescale gardener?
Not really. There are things you can do. You can do an iodine
stain of the tuber flesh, which it will take up more of that
stain in the event that you have a higher starch fraction in the
tuber than in unuin. That's one way to get a sense. But
honestly, one of the easiest ways to get a sense for whether
you're making any progress is just to eat them and see what
happens.
Yeah. So many times when people want me to propose a scientifical
method of doing something, I'm like, just taste it.
Yeah.
Just see what happens. Can we shift a little bit to describe
your ecosystem and where you're growing and how that affects what
you grow?
Absolutely. I'm on the coast, the outer coast of Washington
State, which is not a place where that many people live. Most
people in Washington live on the Puget Sound, which is about 80
miles inland. And so the outer coast is more of a temperate
rainforest climate. And it's chilly. It's got a long, chilly
growing season, and it's extremely rainy for about half
the year. So I've got about reliably about 300 days of
rain, 300 days frost free. And occasionally, we go the entire
year without a frost. Not this year. This year was very strange.
We had really early and hard freezes, which hardly ever
happens. Normally, I'm able to work just about year round. But
we have between October and May, we get about 120 inches of rain.
It's very soggy for that half of the year. And then in the rest
of the year, it still tends to be cool and foggy, but there may
not be a single drop of precipitation. There are some
challenges there. You have to irrigate to grow anything
because otherwise it's basically a Mediterranean climate summer
where there's just not any rain to use. And the temperatures
never get that warm. So it only reaches into the 70s here maybe a
week or two out of the year. The rest of the year, it's going to
be mostly between the 40s and the 60s. And so it's a great
potato climate. Potatoes love it here. But I wouldn't be able to
grow an ear of corn if I tried. As far as the rest of it goes,
because of the rain, this is a climate that has very poor soils.
One of the things that that enables me to do is to breed
plants to grow in poor soils. I don't do a lot of amendment.
Mostly, I work with what I have. And I select varieties that
don't need a lot of fertilizer. Typically, they'll do much
better if they are given fertilizer. But and I do some
fertilizing, it really just depends on my goals. With some
plants, if I'm going to get seed from them in order to make
crosses, I need to give them a little something to get them
across the finish line. But in general, my philosophy is to try
to do as little as possible so that I'm not introducing
conditions that I have to maintain indefinitely.
Can you tell us about your laboratory and about what you do
on that and how you clean up a potato variety?
Sure. It's hard. I guess I'll tell you why first. The first
thing, one of the worst problems that I had early on is that I
grew all these clonal crops, and they clearly had diseases. And
there's not much that you can do once you get a virus into a
clonally propagated crop. It's just going to continue infecting
that crop forever. They don't spontaneously recover. They just
live alongside each other until either forever or until the
infection becomes so severe that the crop just simply can't
reproduce anymore and it dies out. Now this is a well known
and traditional problem with potatoes. Potato varieties would
eventually run out. They simply didn't produce anymore and people
abandoned them and then they would introduce a new variety
grown from seed and move on. But because it's so hard to
concentrate rare alleles in a polyploid crop, you really do
lose something when you lose a good variety. And so there's
value in being able to clean these up to cure the diseases
and at least bring them back into production so that you can
use them in breeding. And there's really only one way to
do that, which is to grow them under laboratory conditions
where you can apply techniques like thermotherapy, chemotherapy,
and there's some other lesser known cryotherapy is another
option where you actually can freeze the growing tips of the
plants to kill viruses. Because that requires liquid nitrogen,
that's a little bit beyond my scope. But the first stage to
being able to do this for the most part is tissue culture. You
need to be able to establish the plants in culture in a form
where they are easy to work on. In rare cases, you can directly
treat a tuber. There are some viruses that are just acutely
sensitive to heat, for example, and you can actually heat a
potato tuber up to the point for long enough where the virus dies
but the tuber doesn't. But in general, the mass of a tuber is
so great, it's really hard to wipe out a virus in something of
that size. But if you can establish a very small plantlet
in tissue culture, and you can get it growing rapidly, the mass
that you have to deal with is so much less, the amount of virus
in that mass is so much less that it's more sensitive to
various techniques. And one of those is again, is
thermotherapy, you can establish small plantlets, you can get
them growing rapidly, you can put them in an incubator at a
temperature that's high enough to potentially kill a virus but
not kill the plant itself. And over time, you can clear them
viruses that way. You can also subject them to chemotherapy,
and this is one of this is typically one of the more
effective strategies, there's a common answer to this, and
antiviral known as ribavirin, if you introduce that into tissue
culture with a plant that has a virus, it over time is very
likely to clear that plant of infection. Maybe 50 to 60% of
viruses subjected to ribavirin in a high concentration over a
period of three to four months will eventually test, test
clean. Some will require a combination, so you have to
give them chemotherapy and thermotherapy. And then some are
just very difficult to clean in any other way than through
meristem culture, which is a practice where you dissect the
growing tip of the plant and take only a very small piece
about 0.1 millimeter in size from the growing tip and
establish that in a new culture and allow it to grow. And that
that meristem tip is not connected to the vasculature of
the plant. So most viruses are not yet communicated to that
part of the plant at that stage of growth. And so you're
actually slicing off a piece that is in many cases virus free
and growing that but it's really, it's really difficult.
It's my, it's my technique of last resort because I'm almost
50, my eyesight isn't that good anymore, my hands aren't as
steady as they used to be. You have to do all this work under
a microscope. And it's really, it's really a game for a younger
person. So I try everything else first. But that's kind of the
picture of a virus cleanup in general, which was my initial
application for having a lab. But it turns out there are also
many other reasons to have one. And one of the best reasons if
you're growing a large number of clonally propagated plants is
that you have a way to preserve them without growing them in the
field. Because if you have a large collection of potatoes,
for example, and you don't have a lab where you can preserve
them in culture, your only option, other than growing them
in the field every year is to try to keep them over for maybe
two years in a refrigerator. And that's far from a certain bet. A
lot of them will die sometime in that second year, sitting in the
refrigerator. And it's just so easy to lose things if you don't
have a good way to preserve them. And that's a good deal of
what I do is just simply keep plants in culture so that I have
them for the future when I want to grow them again. And when you
put the two things, the virus cleanup and the storage
together, the other part is you're able to maintain all that
work that you put into cleaning them of diseases indefinitely as
well. So you only have to do that job once because it's a real
pain to do it once much less over and over again. So that's
that's, that's the lab.
Sweet. Could you describe tissue culture a little more?
Sure. It's really a fancy way of saying that we're taking
cuttings and we're keeping them in small containers. That's
really all it is. So in my lab, I mostly grow things in 25
millimeter culture tubes, they're just large test tubes.
And in each test tube, I use an agar based media that contains
typically a blend of minerals and vitamins, it's known as
Murashige and Skoog medium. There are many different mediums
that can be used in tissue culture, but that's a common
one. It's just known as MMS most of the time. And it's just a
fertilizer, right? It's just the basic minerals that are
necessary for plant growth.
Something like Miracle Grow.
Sure. Yeah, it's, you could potentially just use a regular
commercial fertilizer in tissue culture, rather than one with a
fancy name that got written up in a scientific paper. But it's
a, it's a formulation that's widely available if you're
buying stuff from a tissue culture supply company, and it's
been widely studied. So it's easy to know how much to use in
your medium. But so we're talking a test tube with a small
amount of a gel based media in it into which you insert a
cutting and allow the cutting to grow in that hopefully
uncontaminated environment.
Yeah,
because obviously, if you have a if you have a gel based medium,
and you put a plant in it, and anything else gets in there, like
a bacteria or a fungi that is going to quickly outcompete the
plant and, and eat the medium and leave you with a mess. So a
big part of what's going on in tissue culture is getting is
getting us a sterile piece of plant to put in there in the
first place. That's actually the hardest step in tissue culture
is establishing a new culture. Once you have a plant in culture,
and it's, it's sterile, as long as you can maintain an aseptic
technique to cut it up and transfer it to new tubes, that's
very easy. You can do that all day long. You just you work in a
clean environment, you cut it up, you establish new culture is
very easy. But it's that first one that can be a real pain.
Because plants don't just have contaminants on the outside, they
have them on the inside too. And so you can clean the outside of a
plant all you like. And, and that will work in many cases. But
there is a lot of that there are a lot of endophytes that live
within plants, and some of them are beneficial, and some of them
aren't. And some of them are beneficial, unless you put them
in an environment where they can take over, in which case, they're
no longer beneficial. And there's a lot of complexity
there as well.
Thank you. Could you talk about the open source seed initiative
a little bit?
Absolutely. So the goal overall of the OSSI is to provide a
protected commons where people can can share new plant varieties
without allowing others to later lock them up by the use of
patents or, or other intellectual property
protections. So it's a simple pledge that you place on your
varieties that that says that neither you nor anyone else can
lock these varieties up in intellectual property protection
they are there forever available for anyone to use in any way
that they see fit as long as they also agree to the pledge
that no one can later take the descendants of these varieties
and lock them up with intellectual property
protections. And I thought that was a great idea. It was
something that I had been thinking about before I realized
that the OSSI existed. Because my in my previous life, I worked
in the software industry. And so I was very familiar with the
concept of open source software and copyleft ideas. And I'd also
just seen a lot of what I thought was pretty dodgy use of
intellectual property protections in that industry. So
actually not opposed to intellectual property protections
in general, but I just thought there should be an alternative.
And I think the OSSI is a great alternative. I think it's fine
to have both. I think it's fine to do either one. But I release
all of my varieties under under OSSI. I don't think that's
something that I will ever stop doing. I don't have any interest
in in releasing new varieties any any other way. And there are
a variety of reasons for that. I prefer the idea that people can
use my varieties in any way that they like. I think that's, I
would have just released them public domain if something like
the OSSI didn't exist. But I like the idea that this is a
little bit stronger in saying, no, they have to remain free to
use for everyone far into the future. I like that. But there
are also practical reasons why I would not undertake something
like plant variety protection or patents or any of those things.
And that's the way that these things are not practical for a
small plant breeder. They're expensive. You'd have to sell a
tremendous amount to justify the cost of anything like that. And
I've read very specialized things that not many people are
interested in that often don't last for very long. If I keep a
variety for five years, that's a long time. So they're just the
other types of intellectual property protection just
wouldn't be practical choices for me even if I even if there
were things that I wanted to do.
So could you talk a little about so supposing someone develops a
new variety? How do they go about getting that recognized by
the OSSI?
Sure. Yeah, that's a very straightforward process. If you
go to the OSSI website, there's a form there that you can use to
submit your variety and you just basically have to give a little
bit of background information on it. Talk about what varieties
went into the breeding, what process you went through to to
select it. And typically, I can't remember what all the
questions are, but it will ask you to talk about what your
goals were and then what the actual outcome was. And there's
nothing that's difficult to answer. But the goal there in
general is to make sure that there was actual breeding work
done. Not everyone who applies for OSSI is super clear on what
constitutes breeding and what doesn't. And of course, there
are areas where reasonable people can disagree on what
constitutes breeding and what doesn't. But for the OSSI, the
rule is you have to have started from genetic diversity. In
general, they're not going to recognize a process, for example,
where you grew an open pollinated variety for five or
six years and now claim that it is locally adapted without
there having been any introduction of more genetic
diversity to that line. You can certainly make a claim that
things have happened in that period of time that over those
five or six years, some genes have changed. Some perhaps some
epigenetic changes have occurred. There's certainly room
to say that there are differences, but it would be
very hard for to establish that as as breeding without some very
clear testing involved to show the difference. So in general,
it starts with genetic diversity and then a process of selection
to a new thing. Thank you. Let's open it up to questions. Does
anyone else have some questions for William? I do. All right. On
the Yacon that your climate you describe your climate is vastly
different than mine. But you work with Dahlia and Dahlia
grows like weeds here and produces large clumps of roots.
Is Yacon similar to Dahlia? Could I maybe expect it would
grow similar for me here? Yeah, Yacon will generally produce a
useful yield any place that you have about a four month growing
season. So that opens up most of the country, maybe even three
months. If you have a very warm summer, Yacon likes to be warm.
So it's it'll grow quite quickly in a place like like Florida
where it routinely gets up into the 80s or lower 90s, but not
scorching. Okay. I'm in southern Indiana and I can have three
months in the low 90s and easily and also periods very dry during
that. So that's why I wondered. But you're growing your Dahlia's
in your climate and then my vastly different climate they
grow great. So I was just hopeful maybe it would too. I
might have to give it a try.
Yeah, I think it would probably of all the crops that I grow
Yacon is the most adaptable to continental climates. It's
actually chilly in my climate. It would rather be in a warmer
place than here. But it's a standout because most of what I
grow is does not like to be hot. Yacon will take 80s or 90s. It
doesn't like to be dry. If you're going to have a long
drought period, it's going to need supplemental water, but
heat is not a problem.
Is it adaptable genetically adaptable or might could steer
it toward tolerating a little bit more dryness?
It's certainly possible to breed new varieties, but you need a
pretty long growing season for that. As far as adaptation
within the plant, it's possible. That'd be much harder for me to
establish here because I just don't have that much variability
year to year in climate. But it's certainly the case that
some plants show a significant amount of adaptation, even
among clonal varieties to new conditions over time. I wouldn't
bet against it.
Is it day length sensitive? It needs a...
It's not. It simply has a maturity period that is no less
than about 100 days.
Oh, I got that.
The flowers themselves, if you're considering breeding the
flowers themselves, may have some short day character. It's
really hard to tell. They require a much longer period of
maturity before it begins to flower than before it begins to
produce roots. In some cases, they may not flower at all until
days are short.
Interesting.
I have a question. I was wondering, do you know anyone or
are you still working with Apios Americana or the groundnut?
I'm working with it, which is to say that I still have some. It's
not a plant that grows well here. I have not made a lot of
progress with it. As is often the case with plants that I don't
make a lot of progress with, I tend not pay much attention to
it anymore, unless it does something unusual. It doesn't
like to be dry. That's the main problem being west of the
Rockies. It's a plant that really wants regular rainfall
throughout the summer. Even though I irrigate, it's not as
much as that plant wants. It wants to live next to a stream
east of the Rockies with regular water. It just does not like dry
summers. I have a bunch of varieties that grow very poorly
and very slowly. They are reluctant to flower, but in a
long enough season in which I've watered them enough, they
eventually do. Every single one of them requires hand
pollination in order to set any seed because the insects that
pollinate them in their native environment don't exist here.
They require a certain kind of carpenter bee that can trip the
flower in a specific way in order to make it possible to
pollinate. It's just a bit of a difficult crop. I think if you
live in a place where it grows naturally, then you're a great
candidate for working with it and improving it. Probably a
much better candidate than I am.
Do you know other people who are actively working on it?
I don't. Almost everybody I know who has tried it has eventually
given up and found it too difficult to work with. There's
a certain challenge with it in that most of the diversity that
exists is in diploid varieties that are more southern. They're
found more in the southeastern US in warmer areas. For whatever
reason, most of the people who are interested in breeding it
are in more northern and cooler climate areas where the native
varieties tend to be triploid and sterile. Most of the
breeding work that was done with Apios Americana was done at
Louisiana State University. That gives you an idea of what kind
of climate is probably ideal for breeding the crop. Unfortunately,
they abandoned that breeding program and there really hasn't
been a lot of work done with it since then. Prospects for it as
a more northern crop are probably long term at best. For
the southeastern US, prospects for it are as good as just
finding LSU varieties and starting to grow them because
they were adapted for that kind of climate. As I understand it,
in that climate are quite high producing.
Right. Yeah, I agree with some last year. The thing that people
advertise it as it's an LSU variety, but they don't tell you
which one. I'm not sure which one it is, but it did very well
for me because I'm in Tallahassee, Florida. It's
something I'm more interested in exploring more of the different
varieties out there.
I have some and I'm slowly introducing what I have into
tissue culture, which is likely the way that I will begin to
share it again whenever I do start to offer it because it's
not a crop that reproduces well by tumors in this climate. I'd
be digging it every five years to get a small crop that would
be worth selling. In the future, it will have more of the LSU
varieties. At this point, I'm just gradually taking them out
of the places where they've lived for the past 10 years and
introducing them to culture so that I can get them to people
who want to grow them. I think for you in your climate, you
could much more easily be a groundnut breeder than I could.
The world could use some groundnut breeders. I would
encourage that.
Yeah, thank you.
Okay, Bill. This is Holly. I have a question on true potato
seeds and land racing. I live in a short climate, which I
mentioned earlier that 54 days I'm pretty sure of. I may get up
to 80 depending on the year. I have successfully grown red
potatoes that you just buy the tuber seed potato at the store
wherever that you buy seed potato. Last year, I grew true
potato seed for the first time. I actually harvested quite a bit
of it was just a land race variety mix. I've looked on your
website and see all the different varieties that you
have. I just want to know how much land racing do you do with
your true potato seeds? As I go forward, are there varieties
that would be better for me to try or just try them all and see
what grows here?
That's an interesting question. I'm not entirely sure how to
answer how much land racing I do. Many of the things that I
offer are mixes. Those mixes have occurred in many cases over
multiple generations. I've saved from an initial base of clones.
I've selected for the trait of interest among those clones, then
I've crossed them to each other and then repeated the process.
I'd say that makes it a land race of a sort. I'm not selecting
in most cases for anything other than a very specific trait. If
I'm offering red tetraploid potato seeds, then I'm selecting
for red. There are some other things that I'm selecting for
just unconsciously. Generally, if a variety is not large enough,
not yielding, not whatever, I'm throwing it out, but I'm not
really applying any specific measurements to it. Mostly, what
I'm doing is trying to get genetics out of clones to make
them available as seeds. I'm not thinking too specifically about
what else is going into that mix. In many cases, I'm not growing
things for multiple generations. If you look at my website and
you see anything that's a TPS mix, that is something that has
been grown for multiple generations. For example, my wide
TPS mix is something that's been grown annually for 10 years,
where every year I'm selecting the best, then I'm saving seed,
then I'm plowing it back into that seed mix.
I think that's a pretty good case for a kind of a land race
style growing. In others, if there's a name on a variety, I
might have only grown it once just enough to get seed out of
it.
When people ask me, I typically recommend Williams tetraploid
mix and then select out of that for what you love.
Yeah, that's the idea in general is that I'm not trying to bring
you a land race that you would necessarily just continue
growing indiscriminately. I'm trying to bring you a source of
genetics from which you select your starting material and then
produce whatever you want from there.
Right. That's what I'm looking for, potatoes that I can grow
here, that I can get them to harvest. Last year, I planted
300 potato plants and harvested maybe 250. None of them went to
seed, but I'm having a short season. This year, I'll plant
some of those from tubers and hope that they will make seed.
It's just a short season. I got tubers and some as big as my
fist and some like marbles. I had a range of tubers that I
wanted to grow. I had a range of colors and sizes. I'm looking
for something that'll grow a nice tuber and go to seed that
will thrive here in my short growing season. Thank you. I
appreciate that input.
There's a particular challenge with growing potatoes from true
seed in a short season climate. That is that there's competition
between the formation of tubers and flowering. Early potato
varieties very rarely flower. When they do flower, they flower
briefly because that plant is in a race to form tubers and die.
There's very little time and very little energy for it to
form flowers. All the best known early potato varieties are a
mass to get seed from. There's probably not a great prospect
for a long-term land race type variety from seed with those
kinds of potatoes because you're just up against the very real
limitations, the reproductive sync competition between the
tubers and the seeds. What I would recommend in that case is
trying to mix in some more mid-season type potatoes with
your early potatoes and focusing on getting seeds in the years
when your climate, when your growing season is long enough to
cross over between those because you're going to get a lot of
early seed from a cross between an earlier variety and a mid
season variety and probably enough to keep yourself going
through the years when your season is short. But if you
focus entirely on really early potatoes, you'll have to
undertake specialized techniques in order to get seed from them.
Those can be things like removing the tubers as soon as
they form on the plants or growing the plants in very
shallow soil so that they can't form a deep root system,
pruning the stolons off as they form. Anything that keeps the
plant from dumping energy into the tubers gives it the potential
to form flowers that you can pollinate and get seeds from.
But there's just, it's just really hard with earlys. There's
always a lot of extra work that goes into that because the plant
is just struggling as it is to make tubers before it dies.
All right. Thank you. Before we go, can you tell us where to
find you on the web?
Yeah, you can find me at cultivariable.com. That's you
can also find me on Facebook. We have a Facebook group called
the variable which is quite active. That's mostly where I
spend any time on social media these days that we have other
presences but there's not much going on anyplace else. And of
course, all the information is available at the website. So
that's where I recommend that you go first, you can read about
any of the crops that I work with and there's pretty
comprehensive information there.
All right. Thank you, Bill. Thank you, Julia and Holly for
technical support. Oh, sorry, Anna. Thank you very much.