Re: Shule's 2025 growlog
Posted: Fri Apr 11, 2025 8:51 am
Have you found monocropping to be superior to simply bagging a few flowers when it comes to producing seeds of a specific variety with no crossing?
Well, I haven't truly tried monocropping, yet, but I have tried growing a lot of the same variety along with some others that would be easy to tell if there were a cross (due to major differences in size/color or leaf type).
Monocropping should in theory be quite superior to just bagging blossoms (except in that you can't save seeds from as many pre-existing kinds of tomatoes). There are a few reasons for why I say it's superior:
- It's less work. I mean, one label for zillions of plants instead of a label for each one. One kind of variety to save seeds from instead of zillions. Predictable plant behavior (so, you can make your garden look more uniform, and treat all the plants optimally more easily).
- It has less of a learning curve.
- It should be close to 100% effective, even if you're new to it.
- When you bag blossoms, you don't know what the fruit is going to be like before it appears, so unless you're bagging every blossom, you don't have as many fruits to do selective breeding between. And if you don't bag blossoms on every plant, you're disadvantaged even more.
To really understand why monocropping would be more advantageous, you need to understand how selective breeding works. There are at least two major methods here, and they're both important:
- Selection by plant
- Selection by fruit
We also need to talk about the importance of growing multiple plants when maintaining a variety.
Selection by plant:
This is where you grow multiple plants and you choose a specific plant to save seeds from (doing this repeatedly over the years).
The most obvious place where selection by plant is needed is when stabilizing a hybrid, since each plant is significantly different. The basic idea is to pick the plants you like the most for your goals (but you can refine your selection better if you know a lot about genetics like @bower does). However, it's a lesser known fact that even with stable varieties, each plant can still be different, for whatever reason (e.g. mutations, if nothing else). For instance, one plant may be more productive than another, or grow larger than another. One plant might have larger or smaller fruit. One plant might have fruits with a consistent niche fruit shape. One might resist disease better. Most of them should be pretty similar if it is stable, but occasionally, you'll get one that's different. Hence the importance of growing a lot of plants (to find the ones that are different). To maintain a variety, it's important to grow lots of varieties, so you can ensure production is maintained, or ideally, improved, as opposed to having the production decline (some plants are less productive than average, too).
It's my personal observation that if you just grow one plant every year, this isn't a good way to maintain a variety. You risk the variety's vigor, production, fruit size and such declining.
If you only grow one plant, you can't select by plant.
Selection by fruit:
This is when you choose which fruit to save seeds and grow from, within a single plant (or even from among multiple plants).
The most obvious situation where selection by fruit is important is when you find an obvious sport or a mutated fruit among a bunch of regular fruits on the same plant. Then you grow that out and see what becomes of it (whether it has heritable changes or not).
However, even in less obvious cases, selection by fruit is still important. However, you're basically doing the same thing as above, except you're looking for subtle differences, too (not just blatantly obvious ones). It doesn't always pay off each and every time, but it does pay off often enough that it is a good practice. Selection by plant is more likely to give you heritable changes, however, unless you have different soil quality per plant.
You can select by fruit even if you only grow one plant, but it's better to grow more, so you have more tomatoes to select from. I had about 17 to 20-something Galapagos Island tomatoes last year, and each plant produced zillions of fruit. I only found one abnormally large fruit from among those, but I saved seeds and am growing them. I hope it's genetic. Some varieties produce sports and mutations a lot more often than Galapagos Island does.
You can select for whatever you want. For instance, I could select for Galapagos Island tomatoes that produce sports by finding sports, and then exclusively growing the sport, and finding a sport on that. Then do the same thing with its sport, and so on.
You can select for larger fruit, smaller fruit, more production, heat-tolerance, disease-resistance, pest-resistance, salt-tolerance, faster germination, etc. Some traits are easier to select for than others.
Maintaining a variety:
We already talked about this above, but I also wanted to mention that this seems to be a common practice commercially, but less common among home gardeners. However, home gardeners can do it, if they're willing to sacrifice the garden space. But just because you're maintaining a variety and avoiding hybridization doesn't mean you can't selectively breed effectively from it, in a way that is enjoyable.
