Our On-farm Breeding Project & Why they Matter

(for the plant geeks)

 

About 11,000 years ago, humans started farming. It was one of the most rapid transitions in human history. Why hunt for your dinner when you can keep it close to home? These were the building blocks for farming today - most of the mammals we farm were domesticated during this period, as well as major cereal crops like barley, wheat and oats.

This was a phenomenal amount of work which was done by ordinary people, before science came about and even before wheels were invented. I find this heartening to think about when I'm going about the breeding projects on our farm. Yes, I've got a background in plant sciences, but realistically, I mostly rely on my intuition to make decisions. And although they might not admit it, a lot of scientists and plant breeders do the same! 11,000 years of human evolution in conjunction with agriculture has set us up with excellent intuition when it comes to classical plant breeding.

So keep this all in mind when you're reading about our breeding projects. Here, I'm writing about 2 of my favourites.

'UNINTENTIONAL' CROSSES

Cosmos - Winnow Mix

I am a busy woman. I have two small children to look after, a farm and a business to run. All of my work needs to be done efficiently in the few hours I have each week. 

If you know anything about plant breeding (as done by most commercial breeders), it is time consuming - you need to isolate plants and hand pollinate flowers which takes ages. Often companies will have whole crews of university students hand-pollinating flowers all morning over the summer months. 

As soon as a took on the farm, I knew I wanted to run some breeding projects - it's the thing that brings me so much joy. These projects take years and years to get anywhere so I wanted to get started straight away. So I came up with a plan to do it my way, here it is:

1. In spring, I sowed 4 of my favourite varieties of cosmos and planted them together in 4 blocks (seed blue numbered blocks in the photo)
2. I let them grow all summer long and trusted the bees to do the pollination work for me. 
3. Come autumn, I harvested seeds from the plants adjacent to a different variety (areas crosshatched in red). I could be pretty sure the bees had transferred pollen from one variety to another in these areas because the flowers were so close to each other. 
4. I labelled all the seeds I collected with the parent variety (i.e. the one I collected the seed from) and the adjacent variety (which it had likely crossed with)

This is a very loose and wild approach to plant breeding - I haven't controlled any of the crosses so I've got no clue who the second parent is! But so far, we've had really interesting results. 

This year we grew out the crosses and this is what we found:

1. Some varieties seem to produce better offspring than others. Cosmos 'Apricotta' produces offspring with a stunning colour palette (pinks, apricots, creams, russet), strong stems and ruffled flowers. I think its so beautiful, I'm selling it without doing anymore breeding work - it is so wildly gorgeous as it is. We sell it as our Cosmos 'Winnow Mix' (available Jan 26) and although we can't promise the exact proportions of colours you'll end up with, we can promise it will be a lovely, majority-pink mix.
2. A very interesting russet-pink cosmos popped up in a few of the crosses. I love it so much. It's a kind of hot pink overlaid with a russet cast, different to anything I've seen before. I decided to whip out some pollen isolation bags and I was intending to cross-pollinate all of the russet-pink individuals. Of course I didn't have time and I left the bags in place. Amazingly, some of the flowers seem to have self-pollinated so I have quite a few seeds to grow out next year. Time will tell to see what comes out!

I'll continue to grow out the offspring and see what delights arise from them. There is something so exciting about sowing some mystery seeds!

   

DIVERSE POPULATIONS

I love open pollinated seeds. I love them because they are open source and you can save seed from them year after year (unlike F1 hybrids). I love that they aren't uniform, they're made up of individuals, all with their little quirks and preferences. This makes them really exciting to breed with and save seed from.

For the most part, there are plenty of open pollinated varieties available to home gardeners but there are a few crop types which are now dominated by F1 hybrids. These include Brassicas like broccoli, cabbages and sprouts as well as flower crops like stocks and snapdragons. 

Part of my mission for Winnow Farm is to make more open pollinated seed available to UK gardeners and I feel a responsibility to start to develop those on my farm. And my starting place is a crop that grows fantastically for us: snapdragons. 

Currently there are only 3 open pollinated snapdragon (antirrhinum) varieties you can buy in the UK, the rest are F1 hybrids. And I understand the draw of F1 hybrids with their massive long stems and uniform flowering. But as you might have guessed, uniformity isn't my thing and there are lots of reasons you might want to avoid buying F1 seed, not least the cost of it!

So I'm in the process of breeding something called a 'diverse population' of snapdragons on the farm.

A diverse population is a genetically diverse group which is selected for just one or two functional characteristics (e.g. fruit size or flower colour) while other characteristics are left to roam. There's very little uniformity and the individuals can look (or taste) very different. We have a diverse population of runner beans called Brit Pop which we only select for bean length. We save seeds from the plants with nice long beans but all the individuals are unique, often having different coloured flowers, different patterned seeds and producing beans at different times.

I'm using 'Landrace Gardening' principles for this breeding project, as set out by Joseph Lofthouse's book by the same name - get yourself a copy if this piques your interest. I'm very much in the beginning stages but this is the plan!

1. In spring, I sowed 20 different varieties of snapdragon, some open pollinated but most F1 hybrids. I chose varieties all in the same colour palette - apricot to pink to creamy white.
2. They grew together all season looking stunning and covered with bumble bees which were cross pollinated all the varieties.
3. In autumn, I harvested the seeds, being careful to harvest from every variety. This seed will be on offer as Snapdragon 'Winnow Mix' in Jan 26 if you want to join in with the breeding fun!
4. I will resow and collect the seed for a few more years with very little selection to allow the population of plants thoroughly cross pollinate. 
5. Once we've got a big mix, I'll begin to herd the population in one direction or another, probably focused on maintaining a cohesive colour palette. 
6. I have an inkling that maintaining a lot of diversity in the mix will be vital for robust plants and nice long stems. In my experience of diverse populations in the vegetable context, these varieties have a similar level of vigour as F1 hybrids. Keeping this vigour in our snapdragon population will be advantageous - especially if it translates to nice long stems.

I hope these projects give you a bit of inspiration for the gardening year ahead! And go ahead and send me an email if you want to chat more :)

- Ellen

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