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Home » Gardening Information » Kitchen Gardening

Crop Breeding—Create Your Own Fruit and Vegetable Varieties

Plants & Gardens News Volume 16, Number 2 | Summer 2001

by Carol Deppe

Every gardener should be a plant breeder. Developing new vegetables doesn't require a specialized education, a lot of land, or even a lot of time. It can be done on any scale. It's enjoyable. It's deeply rewarding. You can get useful new varieties much faster than you might suppose. And you can eat your mistakes.

There has never been a better time to get involved in amateur vegetable breeding. The seed saver exchanges that have emerged during the past decade provide a rich source of raw materials for plant breeding. The smaller seed companies, many also founded recently, are eager to help perpetuate and distribute the creations of amateurs. And the professional plant breeders are all busy elsewhere. They are engaged, almost exclusively, in developing commercial varieties of vegetables—vegetables bred for uniformity and once-over picking so they can be harvested by machines, for tough skin and hard flesh so they aren't ruined by those machines, and for good storage and shipping characteristics so they can be transported long distances. These are not usually the qualities home gardeners need. Yet most of the new varieties that are released annually with such fanfare are commercial cultivars.

Gardeners buy only small amounts of seed compared to commercial growers, so seed of varieties that are best suited for gardeners is sold in only small amounts. Large seed companies often can't afford to carry it. No one can make a profit developing it. So no one is. If we gardeners want good new garden varieties, we'll have to breed them ourselves. But this is as it should be. Gardeners have been developing their own varieties for centuries. Besides, why should we let the professionals have all the fun?

Man with a Mission

Glenn Drowns was only sixteen when he started breeding plants, but he was already an experienced and enthusiastic gardener. It all started when he was two and a half, and his family planted some flower seeds. He was fascinated. By the age of four he was crawling through the fence to help his neighbor, who had a bigger garden. At eight he had a 500-square-foot garden of his own and was ordering his own seed. About then he developed a passion for vine crops. Each year he ordered every squash variety he could find. By age eleven he was selling all the produce his family didn't need and using the money to buy seed. By age sixteen he was growing fifty different varieties of squash and ten of cucumbers. He also tried about half a dozen of the shortest-season watermelons he could find.

More than anything else, Glenn wanted a ripe watermelon. His family lived in the extreme northern part of Idaho, where the growing season is short, cold, and unpredictable. His melons wouldn't ripen. "I tried everything," he recalls. "I even grew them inside little plastic tents all summer, just really baked them. But I never got a ripe melon. The only fully ripe watermelons I had ever tasted came from the stores—which didn't count."

Then Glenn took high school biology, and his class discussed crop improvement and hybridization. "Wow, maybe I could get a ripe melon that way," he thought. So he tried a cross. One of the parents was probably 'Sugar Baby'. The other was from a package of seed some friends had given him. The package was labeled "watermelon." Glenn didn't keep much in the way of records. He knew about record keeping, but he thought he was only playing around.

Within four years, growing no more than a dozen plants per year, Glenn Drowns produced a new stable variety—a variety that reliably produces similar plants from seed to seed and year to year. 'Blacktail Mountain' is a round, deep green melon with very faint stripes. The vines grow out to form a plant about 10 feet in diameter. The average melon is 8 inches across, weighs 8 to 10 pounds, and has a rind about half an inch thick. The flesh is orangish red, crisp, and very sweet. What is essential about 'Blacktail Mountain' is that it's early—quite possibly the earliest watermelon ever grown. It's about five days earlier than 'New Hampshire Midget', for example, one of the earliest watermelons.

Home Brew

Glenn laughs when he describes the breeding program that led to 'Blacktail Mountain'. He hadn't been able to find out anything at all about how to do crosses. "So I just sort of guessed," he says.

Watermelons, like most cucurbits, have separate male and female flowers. Glenn noticed that some flowers had what looked like little fruits underneath and others didn't. He figured the flower buds with fat bases must be females and the ones with skinny bases must be males. He made that first cross exactly the way he does watermelon and squash crosses today, twenty-four years and thousands of hand-pollinations later.

Glenn starts by taping the male and female flower buds shut with masking tape in the evening before the buds open for the first time. The timing is part convenience and part necessity. Late afternoon of the day before opening also is okay, but any earlier and the buds might still be growing fast enough to damage themselves on the tape. The following day Glenn untapes the buds. If they are ready to open that day, they will slowly expand after untaping. He plucks the male flower and uses it to sprinkle pollen onto the stigma of the female flower. (The stigma is at the top of the pistil.) Then he retapes the female flower with fresh tape and labels it. He never untapes the female flower; it just shrivels at the end of the developing fruit.

Glenn crossed the putative 'Sugar Baby' to the unknown watermelon. Then he saved the seed and planted it. The plants of the first generation, as he recalls, were similar to the 'Blacktail Mountain' of today. He self-pollinated each. "That was 1978," Glenn remembers. "Nineteen seventy-eight was a gruesome year." It was unusually cool, and his garden suffered a lot of deer damage. Only a few plants survived. They gave him exactly one ripe watermelon. Selecting the best watermelon from which to save seed was easy, Glenn says. "There was just one ripe melon. So I selected it."

He planted the seed from that melon in 1979. The plants that resulted, his second generation, looked pretty similar to those of 1978. He self-pollinated each and got two or three ripe melons. He planted the seed from those in 1980, but the vines were all frozen out on August 4. Fortunately, Glenn had known better than to plant all his seed in one year. He replanted in 1981 and continued to inbreed—that is, to self-pollinate each plant. By 1982 he was offering 'Blacktail Mountain' through the Seed Savers Exchange. It was already stable and was basically the same variety it is today. But he grew it for a number of years before he felt confident enough in its stability to offer it to a seed company.

Happy Accidents

Part of the fun of breeding your own varieties is the surprises. Glenn had deliberately selected for a very early watermelon. Unexpectedly, 'Blacktail Mountain' also proved to have unusual keeping qualities. Glenn found that out completely by accident. "There are long-storage melons, the Christmas types," Glenn says. "I'm surprised more people don't grow them. I always do, and eat my last watermelons in February. But the storage types all seem to have that white rind. I've always thought of the green-skinned melons as an immediate eating thing." Storage melons are harvested at just under ripe and finish ripening during storage. Glenn usually had no reason to harvest 'Blacktail Mountain' that way. But Iowa, where Glenn lives and gardens now, intervened.

In 1988 an early heat wave and drought killed all Glenn's melon vines, so he had to replant in late June. Then, the last week in August, came the torrential rains. The melon field was in a low place. It flooded. Only the earliest half dozen varieties had melons that were mature enough to harvest. Glenn grabbed those and put them in his garage. Many were not quite ripe.

Several weeks later, Glenn opened one of his 'Blacktail Mountain' melons to look at the seed. To his surprise, the melon popped open. And it was just as crisp and tasty as if it had been harvested in its prime and eaten immediately. The melons from the other five varieties had long since turned to mush. Intrigued, Glenn used the rest of his melons in a storage trial. He found they kept nicely for up to two months. That's not as long as a winter-storage type, but it's unexpected for a standard green-skinned type, and it means that Glenn can eat his last 'Blacktail Mountain' watermelons on Thanksgiving.

Glenn Drowns was just a high school kid with curiosity when he made his first cross. Now he has a Masters degree in biology and teaches high school biology. He also has a farm and small farm-based seed company in Iowa, the Sand Hill Preservation Center, where he sells more than 700 varieties of heirloom seeds. His bestseller is 'Blacktail Mountain' watermelon, still the earliest watermelon in existence. As a leader in the seed-saving movement, a father, and a teacher, Glenn is very effectively passing along his knowledge, curiosity, and many unique varieties of fruits and vegetables.

Finding Rare Seed

Small seed companies that exclusively sell heirloom and open-pollinated seed play a unique role in plant breeding and preservation. They often rediscover and reintroduce varieties that are subsequently distributed by seed saving organizations and large seed companies. Most of them are run by single families that share a passion for farming and for the land.

Growing and selling open-pollinated seed is the least profitable part of the seed business. Those who do it are essentially operating a public service. Some have formally organized as foundations. Most have not, but still appreciate and, in some cases, survive only by virtue of the occasional unsolicited donation.

Beyond their basic similarities, these small seed companies are as individual as can be, with distinctive personalities, unique areas of specialization, and inventory lists ranging from a few loose pages to a good-sized booklet. When dealing with them, don't expect slick catalogs, toll-free phone numbers, or instant service. If you ask for a catalog in late spring, summer, or fall, for example, you will most likely be put on a mailing list for the following year.

In addition, order fulfillment during the busy season can fall behind for weeks. This is not mega-corporate America—only individual families trying to promote and preserve values and varieties they believe in. They often have a limited amount of rare seed. So if you want something special, order early, and order well before the planting season.

Following is a selection of companies that I've ordered from. I personally recommend and commend them to you for your interest and support.

This article was adapted from Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener's and Farmer's Guide to Plant Breeding and Seed Saving, by Carol Deppe (Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 1993). For details on how to breed your own fruit and vegetable varieties, see the recently revised and expanded edition of the book. Book excerpts and reviews are available on the publisher's web site: www.chelseagreen.com.

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