Hello from Alberta, Canada!

[jbrobin09]

@jbrobin09 I'm curious about the landraces, I've watched a couple of Lofthouse videos that piqued my interest. Some of his ideas were quite thought provoking. I do enjoy collecting distinct varieties, but to read about how quickly the performance of a variety can change and/or improve through specific selection after a few generations is fascinating. Potager Ornamental de Catherine, one of the places I like to get seed from, does not irrigate their seed crops. Sometimes only a small percentage of a population will survive being subjected to that stress, but they say the next generation will demonstrate remarkable tolerance to dry growing. They seem to really be succeeding in getting genetics that are tolerant of little to no human intervention in the growing season.

I haven’t seen those so I will go look him up! Thank you.

 

[flowerbug]

... They seem to really be succeeding in getting genetics that are tolerant of little to no human intervention in the growing season.

it's not a bad approach if you have the space and time and are willing to lose a large percentage of a crop during a bad season.

what i've done here is kept planting a number of varieties each season while keeping an eye on how the new ones do. i give new varieties three seasons to evaluate and if they do ok then i'll keep growing them in some rotation. then there is my overall crop improvement strategy which is to grow as many of the best variety i've found so far and see how many crosses i can get and then evaluate those. since this is my first season evaluating crosses from them i can't determine yet what's up but it looks like almost all of them are semi-runners so i'll have to actually get these to cross again back with the bush bean parent to get them back to the bush habit and that means yet another round of evaluations and cullings.