My Favorite Seed Catalogs

It's seed catalog season, so I thought I'd let you know about some of my favorite companies to get seeds and why. Where you get your seeds from does matter. You want to get varieties that are well adapted to your climate, and a seed catalog that's based in a climate similar to yours will have more of those varieties.

When I first started gardening, I was surprised about how many seed companies are in New England or the Pacific Northwest. They advertised varieties that were quick maturing for short growing seasons, tolerant of cold, etc. Not very helpful for me here in Texas. What I need is heat tolerance and drought tolerance. After a while I finally found some catalogs based in the South that had more of what I was looking for.

Here are my favorites:

Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

More of my seeds come from here than any other company. They are based in Virginia, so most of their varieties are adapted to the Southeast. That's a little bit wetter than my climate, but many of them still do well, and I hedge my bets by also getting seeds from the next company on my list. Their website also has lots of useful information on it, and I like the cute gnome pictures on the front of their printed catalog.

Besides the usual things like squash, beans, and tomatoes, they have a great selection of heirloom collard varieties, many of which I haven't seen anywhere else. Their potato varieties have also been serving me very well, especially since potatoes are considered to be difficult to grow in Texas.

Overall, this is my go-to seed catalog that I check first if I feel like trying a new variety.

Native Seeds/SEARCH

This my second-biggest source of seeds. They are based in Arizona, which is a drier climate than mine, so combining their varieties with Southern Exposure's varieties works out great. This is actually a nonprofit organization whose main mission is to preserve crop varieties that have been grown by Native Americans in the Southwest, so I'm happy to fork over money to them to help support their mission. You can get varieties here you can't find anywhere else, plus some more common varieties that do well in hot, dry conditions.

This is where I bought 10 bulbs of I'itois onions that have continued to thrive and multiply in my garden ever since. My favorite okra, Beck's Gardenville, also came from here (and it's a local San Antonio variety). They also have a good variety of melons, but of course their biggest selection is of the three sisters: beans, corn, and squash.

There's also this really neat ADAPTS tool on their website where you can type in your address, and it will find varieties of plants that came from climates similar to yours. I've used this to help me decide which varieties to try next.


Those two seed catalogs above are where I get the vast majority of my seeds from, but here are some honorable mentions that I shop at occasionally, or get some specialty things from.

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

This company is famous for their "vegetable porn" catalog and huge selection. Yet I've found that over the years I get fewer and fewer seeds from them. Most of the varieties I did get from Baker Creek that did well for me are also carried by Southern Exposure. I've also gotten a lot of varieties from Baker Creek that did not do well. I think it's because they don't concentrate on one specific region, so I got sucked in by the beautiful pictures and bought varieties that were not adapted to my climate.

Baker Creek's strategy seems to be to try to accumulate as many varieties as possible from all over the world. That means you can get some really interesting stuff that's not found anywhere else, but you also have to be careful to pay attention to where the variety is from. Here in Texas, varieties from the Mediterranean, or the Middle East, or India will probably be OK. But not things from Northern Europe or Japan, no matter how pretty they look.

So basically, I don't actually buy a lot of things from Baker Creek, but it's still fun to browse their catalog and order a thing or two just to experiment with something unusual. They also have huge seed packets with generous amounts of seeds in them, which may be advantageous with certain crops.

Filaree Garlic Farm

This is where I go for garlic. They have the best selection I've found, including the very hard to find Creole varieties. The bulbs they send are always in very good shape, and their website has tons of information about growing garlic. They specify which of their varieties do well in warm climates, and which need cold climates, and also which ones harvest earlier or later, and which ones keep longer.

Sand Hill Preservation Center

This is where to go for sweet potatoes, though Duck Creek Farms is also good. Sand Hill has the largest variety of sweet potatoes anywhere, many varieties you can't find anywhere else. My only problem with them is sometimes they arrive a little late since they are in Iowa, and I am in Texas, so I can plant much earlier here. If you are in a hurry, try Duck Creek Farms instead, since they are in Oklahoma and ship earlier in the year.

I've never ordered any seeds from Sand Hill yet, but they do have some interesting things listed that I might like to try some day. They do have the problem of being based in Iowa, so I'd have to be careful not to order something that's not suitable for my climate.

Seed Savers Exchange

Another one in Iowa, but this gets an honorable mention because it's such an important organization. This is where the whole "heirloom vegetable" trend probably got started, and they also got me into heirloom vegetables. I used to order more stuff from them before I discovered my two favorites listed there at the top. Their retail catalog is OK. It has a lot of the more famous heirlooms, but many that either are also found in lots of other catalogs (like Southern Exposure), or wouldn't do well in my climate anyway (sorry Pink Brandywine tomato).

If you are into seed saving though, you need to get on the Exchange. I started listing some of my seeds last year. It took a while for them to finally get into the 21st century and make an online Exchange (before that it was just in print), but now that they do have it up and running, it is very easy to list your seeds. Online seed swapping is lots of fun, you get to share the excess seeds that you have saved, and you might find something really interesting listed by another member. Seed catalogs are great, but you never know when they are going to run out of or discontinue a favorite variety, so it's always good to have a network of home seed savers as a backup.


So there are my favorite places to get seeds (and other planting materials) for my garden. If you also live in the South, consider giving them a try if you haven't already. Even if you don't live in the South, maybe I've given you some ideas on what to look for when searching for your own favorite seed company.

Happy seed ordering!

Seed Saving Projects

Knowing that I wouldn't have much time to garden when I have a newborn baby, I've been trying to reduce how much stuff I had going on in the garden this past year. I decided to focus more on a few seed saving projects rather than trying to grow lots different varieties of vegetables for food. In a way growing seeds is easier than growing food because you just plant the plants and then mostly leave them alone. Instead of trying to prevent the lettuce or other greens from bolting, you just let them bolt. Instead of picking pea pods, cucumbers, or okra everyday to make sure you get them while they're still tender enough to eat, just let them all turn brown and then harvest them all at once. Instead of growing several different varieties of a species, just concentrate on growing one favorite variety so it won't cross with anything else. And if the plants get neglected a bit, tell yourself you're selecting them for harsh conditions.

So once I found out I was pregnant, I went through my seed collection and picked out varieties that were getting a bit old or that I was getting low on, which meant it's time to save a new batch of seeds from them.

I also went ahead and started listing varieties on Seed Savers Exchange. For a while I thought you had to be an actual member of SSE to list seeds, but it turns out you don't. (Or maybe that's how it used to be, but they changed their policy.) I have seeds listed on there now. I've only gotten one request so far, which is disappointing, but maybe I'll get more once the print yearbook comes out.


Here's are some varieties I've saved this year and listed on Seed Savers Exchange:

Cougar Lettuce - I got this lettuce from Bountiful Gardens. When they were going out of business I bought a packet of every lettuce they carried that said it was heat tolerant. Cougar is one that's done well for me, so I saved seeds from it this year. Lettuce seeds are easy to save. You just plant a bunch of lettuce and leave it alone and let it bolt. I've read that lettuce doesn't cross, so you can save seeds from multiple varieties, but I just saved this one variety this time around. The hardest part might be cleaning the seeds since they have this white fluffy stuff on them like dandelions. Last Christmas I requested these seed cleaning frames and screens from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, so that makes it much easier.

Tall Telephone Peas - I originally got this variety from Baker Creek in 2009, and this is the third generation I've saved. I like the big long vines this variety produces. That means I get lots of peas for the same amount of space. I grow them on a tall trellis made of cattle panels turned sideways. I didn't harvest any peas to eat this year and just let all the pods turn brown and papery, and then harvested the mature seeds all at once. Easy.

Texsel Greens - I didn't plan on saving seeds from this, since this was the first year for me to grow them, and I still have plenty of seeds left in the packet, but they did so well that when they finally bolted I let the seeds mature. They are Brassica carinata, which is a tetraploid hybrid between Brassica oleracea (which is the species that collards, kale, and broccoli are in) and Brassica nigra (black mustard), so they won't cross with any other plants I grow. And they are just like a cross between collards and mustard! The leaves are like collard greens, but thinner and a little more spicy. I got a good harvest of them and cooked them the same way I cooked collard greens, and they grew faster than my collard greens (hybrid vigor maybe?).

I also listed some seeds that I harvested in 2018 and 2017 that have been kept in airtight containers in the freezer. I mentioned that in the description just in case anyone cares about that, but they should still be good. I've got several varieties of tomatoes, Tatume squash, Seminole pumpkins, Sugar Snap peas, and Texas Hill Country Red okra. All of them are varieties that have proven their worth in my garden, so I saved seeds from them.

I tried to save seeds from Tuscan Kale, but they didn't make it. It's definitely my favorite kale to eat. It's so much better than the curly kale my grocery store carries. But it doesn't seem to like this hot climate. I think I planted my kale too late this time. It wasn't able to mature before it got hot, and I waited and waited for it to bolt, but instead it just got totally eaten up caterpillars. I have more seeds, so I'll try again some day.


Genetically Diverse Carrot Mix

Speaking of plants that have trouble making it in my climate, I've also decided to try my hand at so-called "Landrace Gardening." I found out about it from this article in Mother Earth News. I'm not sure if "landrace" is really the correct term for something like this, but that's what this Lofthouse fellow is calling it.

It takes almost an opposite approach from what people usually do with seed saving. Instead of going to all the trouble to keep separate varieties pure and free of crossing, you plant a bunch of different varieties together and let them cross. Then you save seeds from them and plant them and repeat the process until you have a population of plants that are well adapted to your climate.

This past winter I decided to try this out with carrots. I picked carrots for my first experiment with this technique for the following reasons:

• Carrots are hard for me to grow but not impossible. Joseph Lofthouse lives in a climate that is too cold for most melons to do well, so decided to try a landrace of them that do. My problem is I live in a climate where it's too hot for cool weather plants like carrots. The seeds have to be planted while it's still pretty hot outside in late summer/early fall in order to harvest them before it gets hot again in spring. I also have dense, rocky clay soil. So when I plant carrots, a lot of them don't make it, but usually at least a few of them do. That means I can plant seeds from the few survivors and maybe eventually get carrots that are better adapted to my garden.
• Carrots are strong outbreeders. Unlike tomatoes, which don't tend to cross pollinate much, carrots have to cross pollinate with each other, and they are very prone to inbreeding depression. Lack of genetic diversity doesn't really hurt tomatoes, but it does hurt carrots. So mixing a bunch of varieties of carrots together and letting them cross makes a very diverse carrot population, and I won't have to worry about inbreeding for several generations at least.
• I don't mind having a mixture of different looking carrots to eat. "Rainbow carrots" are trendy right now, and that's just a mixture of different varieties of carrots with different colors besides all orange. And then people sell them at the store and farmer's markets for twice as much money as orange carrots! So my carrots are going to be selected for surviving in my conditions (probably they'll end up having short, stubby roots, better heat and drought tolerance, and maybe faster maturity), but I'm going to try to save seed from different colors of carrots so I'll always have a fun mixture.

So this past fall I planted three varieties of carrots: Chantenay, Atomic Red, and Purple Dragon. I planted more Chantenay than the other two. It's an orange carrot with short, stubby roots, so I expected that it would do the best, so I wanted more of its genetics in my population. Purple Dragon is also a shorter carrot, but the main cool thing about it is it's purple! Atomic Red is long and skinny, unfortunately, but it's red, so I put it in too so I'll have more colors.

Then when I harvested them, I separated out the biggest, prettiest carrots, and replanted them instead of eating them. I ended up with mostly Chantenays, a few Purple Dragons, and 2 or 3 Atomic Reds that could be replanted for seed.

I'm was surprised at how long it took to get mature seeds from them. It took until late summer for the seeds to mature. That's another thing to keep in mind about seed saving. It makes the crop take up space in your garden for a much longer period of time, preventing you from planting anything else in that spot. But maybe that's a good thing for me, since it prevented me from succumbing to the temptation to plant more things in that bed to take care of while I was in in my third trimester of pregnancy. Snipping off the brown carrot seedheads and throwing them in a bucket to finish drying wasn't that hard.

Bucket of drying carrot seeds

I discovered that carrot seeds are also hard to clean. Their seeds have these sticky hairs on them, similar to a very annoying weed I get in my yard called Beggar's Lice, which looks a lot like a carrot plant, so I think they are related. The carrot seeds are not as sticky as the Beggar's Lice, but when I cut off the umbels and pull the seeds out, they do stick to my gloves. At least they smell good while I'm working on them.

I ended up with a lot of seeds from this. I filled up a pint mason jar with seeds and put them in the fridge. I wasn't able to get them as clean as commercial seeds, so there is some chaff taking up that space, but that's still a lot of carrot seeds. That's another good thing about seed saving. I always end up with many more seeds than I'll ever need, so I have plenty to share and swap, but I can also plant lots of seeds and not worry as much about some of them not making it.

I haven't planted any yet, but I plan to soon. I think I'll just toss some of them in the garden somewhere and see how they do. Since I have a lot of seeds, I can plant a lot of them and don't have to worry if a lot of them don't make it. With the new baby taking up most of my time, they'll probably end up being pretty neglected. I might not have time to water, thin, weed, and otherwise pamper these carrots as much as I have with carrots in the past. But that might be a good thing, because if any of them do make it, I can save seeds from them to select them for surviving neglect. If none of them make it, I have plenty more to try again next year.

I also plan to add more varieties in the future. I've had luck before with Danvers carrots, another short orange variety, so I'd like to add that one. And maybe I should add some more colors. I don't really like the looks of white carrots, but maybe some yellow and some other varieties of red or purple. Baker Creek Heirloom seeds has some strange and unusual carrot varieties that might be good to add to the mix.

I can only list pure varieties on Seed Savers Exchange, so I can't list my carrot mix, but I'm still looking forward to seeing what I come up with.

And maybe I'll try this with some other species in the future. I don't really see the point of growing a landrace tomato, for instance, because tomatoes don't mind inbreeding and I already have some heirloom varieties of tomatoes that do well for me, so I'm just going to keep growing those. But there might be some other plants that I might want to try doing this with for similar reasons as the carrots. Maybe landrace beets next?

One more limitation I might have is space. Joseph Lofthouse is a farmer, so he grows entire fields of his landraces. I'm just a suburban home gardener. Carrots plants aren't that big. I planted my carrots for seed about six inches apart, and they ended up taking up about a 6x4 foot space, so that's room for... about 96 carrots? I probably ended up with less than that, but that's still a good population number for right now, giving me plenty to select from. Lofthouse grows a lot of melons and squash, which take up a lot of room. I probably don't have enough room to grow 50-100 melon vines. For those species it would probably also also be best to seek out existing varieties that do well for me and doing traditional seed saving where the varieties are kept pure.

Squash Vine Borer Resistant Summer Squash

I've written about this project before, and it's still not going well. To recap, I want to cross Tatume, a variety of Mexican summer squash with long vines that can outgrow squash vine borers, with bush varieties of summer squash like zucchini or yellow squash. I'm still having trouble getting the different varieties of squash to be timed just right so they have male and female flowers on them at the same time and can cross. Tatume takes longer to mature than bush varieties, so won't cross with bush varieties if I plant them at the same time. And since bush varieties grow so fast and then get killed by the SVB's so fast, there's a very short window where they can have a chance to cross with Tatume.

I've started focusing more on trying to get my bush squash varieties to survive longer. The latest trick I've been trying out is covering them with tulle fabric to keep the SVB's away until female flowers show up. Then I uncover them so the bees can get to the flowers. This gives them a head start to grow nice and big before the borers start getting them.

I could keep them covered up all the time and hand-pollinate them, but that seems like a lot of trouble. Squash flowers open at dawn and then wilt after only a couple of hours, so I'd have to be out there hand-pollinating during that short window of time. I'd rather just let the bees do it, but that does leave them exposed.

So last year I saved seeds from Tatume so I'll have an ample supply of pure Tatume seeds to experiment with, but all my other summer squash varieties didn't make it long enough to save seeds from or even to cross with Tatume. So still no summer squash crosses.

What I've been up to lately

I've been neglecting this blog for a while, but now that I have some time I thought I'd write a few more posts about some of the things I've got going on and then schedule them for later. But first, what's been going on in my life?

Sadly, my cat Basil passed away last year. He was the grey tabby cat you may have seen in pictures in some of my previous posts, because one of his favorite things to do was help me out in the garden. Our other cat, Lily, the black and white one, is still around but she's an indoor-only cat (by her own choice; she thinks outside is very scary). Even though it's been a little over a year since he died, I still miss him a lot. He was a very friendly cat and quite a character. It was fun having him go outside with me and follow me around.

The happier news is that I've got a baby due in September! To prepare, I decided to not sign up to teach any summer classes and instead took the summer off. That will cost me a few thousand dollars, but there are so many things to do to get ready for the baby. I've been making and freezing casseroles, soups, chili, and the like to eat once she arrives. At least by then things should be cooling down and I might actually feel like eating foods like that. And that's more fun than doing some of the other things I have to do, like filling out FMLA paperwork and finding a pediatrician and researching daycare centers. Cooking is way more fun than those things, but I need to quit procrastinating and get those things done too.

I'm spending my third trimester during the hottest time of year, July and August, which isn't really the best timing. I can't do much in the garden when it's this hot and I'm lugging around all this extra weight, but this is kind of the off season for gardens in Texas anyway.

In anticipation of this big life change, I did as much strenuous garden work as I could during the second trimester when I was feeling better (and it was cooler outside), and I didn't plant as much in spring as I normally do so I'd have less to take care of. Now that I'm being forced to slow down, I'm just trying to keep what I did plant alive without adding anything else for a while.

This will be a good test to see which varieties of plants can handle some neglect.

So I've got some drafts saved of posts to finish off and schedule to publish in the next few weeks/months, and then I might have to leave the blog alone again for a while since I'll be very busy this fall and winter. I hope at least some of them will be interesting for people.

Bountiful Gardens is Going out of Business

Heads up everyone! One of my favorite seed companies, Bountiful Gardens, is going out of business. Everything is on clearance and selling out fast. Better go there are order all the varieties you want before they sell out. They are closing December 13.

My favorite thing about this seed company has always been their wide selection of greens, especially ones that tolerate hot weather. They have heat-tolerant lettuce varieties that I don't see in any other catalogs. I just ordered a packet each of all of them, plus a few other unusual species of greens that most other catalogs don't carry.

When I first got into seed-saving, I read a lot about the problem of seed companies going out of business when they're the only one that carries a particular variety of plant, and then the variety goes extinct if home seed savers don't maintain it. Honestly, I wasn't too worried about that. I thought it was an exaggeration. I mean, come on, how many times does that actually happen? And if only one catalog was carrying that variety anyway, was it even really that great of a variety to begin with?

I don't believe that anymore after finding some varieties that did really great in my garden that really are only carried in one seed catalog. I still think that it probably doesn't happen that often, but it does happen.

So go to www.bountifulgardens.org and if you see anything interesting or unusual, snatch it up now before it sells out! And then when you grow it, if it does well in your garden, save the seeds.

A Snag in my Zucchini Breeding Project

Well, you know what they say about the best laid plans.

Here's a quick update on how the zucchini breeding project has gone. It looks like this is going to take longer than I thought.

Since summer squash usually put out male flowers before female flowers, I planted Tatume a couple of weeks earlier than Costata Romanesca this spring, since I wanted to use Tatume as the female parent. What I need for that is male flowers on CR and female flowers on Tatume at the same time.

The Tatume plants were up and growing when I planted Costata Romanesca, but as soon as the CR seeds sprouted, they started growing very fast.

By the time CR started making male flowers, Tatume just started making vines.

By the time CR started making female flowers, Tatume had just started making male flowers.

By the time CR started making fruit, Tatume was still just making male flowers. At this point I thought maybe I could try switching things, and making CR the mother and Tatume the father, so at least I'd get something. So I didn't harvest any of the zucchinis for eating (like I had planned to do), and instead left them on the plants to mature.

And then the Squash Vine Borers showed up. The CR plants started to collapse. The borers even bored into the fruits themselves and made them rot before maturing.

By June or so, the Costata Romanesca zucchini plants were all dead, without even making one good mature fruit with seeds with Tatume as their father.

Now, in early August, Tatume is still around, still growing vines, and still only making male flowers!

I don't know what its problem is. Did I plant it in a bad spot? Is it not getting enough sun or nutrients? Why won't it make fruits?

It's almost that time of year where Texans can plant more summer squash for a quick fall crop before it gets too cold. Since it looks like my Tatume squash are going to survive the summer (which is one of the great things about that variety), I'm going to try planting more zucchini to try again for a cross this fall. And I might have to be less picky about which one is the father and which one is the mother and just try to get any mature fruits at all.

See? I told you growing summer squash in Central Texas is tricky!

Introducing the Squash Vine Borer Resistant Zucchini Project

It's a new year, and I'm rethinking what I do with this blog. It had gotten boring and tedious for me, but after taking a break for a while, I thought about some things I could write about that might make things more interesting.

One of my Christmas gifts was The Tao of Vegetable Gardening by Carol Deppe. I already had Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties and The Resilient Gardener, so I was really glad to receive her newest book.

When I first started this blog, I was unemployed and gardening was a way to feel like I was doing something productive with my time. Now I have a full time job, but gardening is still very important to me for a lot of the same reasons Deppe talks about in her books.

She talks a lot about seed saving and plant breeding, and says that all gardeners should do it. I've been saving seeds for years, but I think it's finally about time I try my hand at a breeding project. If nothing else, it sounds like a lot of fun, but maybe it will also result in me getting a really useful new plant variety, or maybe even distribute to other people in my region.


A project like this should have a clear goal, so my goal is to breed a zucchini squash that can produce a good crop despite the bane of all people who attempt to grow summer squash in my area: the dreaded Squash Vine Borer.

Because of SVBs, the idea of having too much zucchini so you have to sneak some onto your neighbor's porch is a fantasy to gardeners around here. Squash Vine Borers are moths (actually really cool looking moths) that lay their eggs on squash plants. The caterpillars then bore into the squash plant’s stem and eat them out from the inside until the whole plant collapses and dies. They especially like Cucurbita pepo and Cucurbita maxima. (Cucurbita moschata and Cucurbita argyrosperma are resistant.)

Most summer squash is in the species C. pepo. Whenever I try to grow zucchini, pattypans, or yellow crooknecks, I might get a squash or two before they collapse from getting eaten from the inside by those darn borers. I haven't even tried growing any of the winter squash varieties of C. pepo like delicatas or acorns because I'm sure they won't make it to maturity.

But I have an idea for a solution! Tatume is the only C. pepo summer squash variety I’ve found so far that gives me a good crop before succumbing to the borers. I think that’s because unlike most summer squash varieties, it has long vines instead of a bushy growth habit. That allows it to outgrow the borers and root at the nodes. Borers still get into it, but I still get a decent crop of squash from it. Most other summer squashes die before I get any fruit at all because they have such short stems that the borers eat them up really fast.

People like bush squash because they take up less room, but I don't think that helps any when you don't even get any squash at all from them before the borers kill them. I know I'm kind of going backwards here, but I want more vigorous, viney summer squash varieties instead of compact bush varieties.

It also makes sense for Tatume to do well here because it’s a South Texas heirloom. Having long vines is only one of its advantages. It's also much more tolerant of heat and drought than other C. pepo squash. It probably has other useful genes that help it survive in Texas besides just the gene for a vine growth habit.

The fruits of Tatume are sort of like an oval shaped zucchini. They are green when at immature eating stages, and turn yellow when mature, looking a lot like a small spaghetti squash. They taste just fine, so if Tatume is just fine, why not just grow Tatume and that will be my one variety of summer squash I can grow?

Part of the reason is just for the heck of it, so I can try out a breeding project. But I also think it might be good to have more varieties of C. pepo I can grow here than just one. Crossing other varieties of C. pepo with Tatume could give me all kinds of different fruits on Tatume's drought tolerant, heat tolerant, squash vine borer tolerant vines.

I decided to start with crossing Tatume with a zucchini. Maybe later I can try with other varieties, but I think zucchini is a good place to start because zucchini isn't as different from Tatume as some varieties. I won’t have to deal with trying to change the fruit color that way, since Tatume is already green like a zucchini. They're also both good as summer squashes. Starting out crossing Tatume with a winter squash like a delicata might be complicated because then I'd have to select for fruits that are good as winter squash. I'll see how it goes with the Tatume/zucchini cross and then think about making other Tatume crosses.

The next step was to choose which variety of zucchini to use for the cross, since there are several. Carol Deppe and several other people consider Costata Romanesca to be the best zucchini, so last year I tried it out. I got the seeds from Bountiful Gardens. I planted six plants, and got three fruits, one on one plant and two on another plant. The other three plants all died from borers before producing fruits, though they did make some male flowers that may have contributed pollen. I ate one fruit off the plant that had two to see if it really did taste as good as people say, and it did. I let the other two fruits mature to see if that was even possible, and they did manage to mature before the plants died of borers, but just barely. I saved the seeds from the survivors, and I also have 16 of the original seeds left in the packet.

Costata Romanesca seems like a good zucchini, so now I have the parents for my new squash variety picked out. Next comes deciding which will be the mother (to get fruits and seeds from) and which will be the father (to get pollen from). The choice here is obvious. Tatume needs to be the mom and CR will be the dad. It’s easier for a plant to make male flowers and pollen than a fruit with mature seeds, so the mom should always be the better survivor of the two. I just barely got any fruits when I grew CR, so it makes a lot more sense to get pollen from CR and have Tatume make the fruits.

That means this year I should make my cross. I will need to grow both varieties, and get some female Tatume flowers pollinated by male Costata Romanesca flowers. Then the F1 seeds inside that Tatume fruit will have Tatume for a mom and CR for a dad.

After I get the F1 seeds is when things get tricky. Then what do I do for the next generation? Self the F1’s or cross back to one of the parents?

I want my new variety to have long vines, not bushes, so I needed to find out which is the dominant trait. I looked it up and, bad news, vines are recessive to bush. It’s a great example of how the “wild type” is not always the dominant gene. That’s going to make it harder than if vine was dominant. You’ll see why.

I don’t know what the real abbreviation for the gene for vine vs. bush, so I’ll use B and b. That means Tatume is bb and Costata Romanesca is BB. The F1 hybrid would then be Bb. That means my F1 generation will all be bushes since bush is dominant. Not good news, since bushes are the ones that are more susceptible to SVBs.

If I backcross the F1 to Tatume I’ll get more vines but also more Tatume-like fruit. If I backcross to CR I’ll get more zucchini-like fruit but also more bushes, so it looks like the best thing to do will be to self the F1’s. I’ll grow all F1’s that time around and let them cross with each other. I’ll have to give them extra pampering so I’ll get some fruits, since they’ll all be bushes being attacked by SVBs.

The seeds I get from that batch will be the F2 generation. That’s when things get interesting. When they are grown, if Gregor Mendel was right, they will be ¾ bushes and ¼ vines. Finally the vine trait will be back! In that generation, it will be easy to weed out the bush plants and only leave the vines. Carol Deppe says one way to do this is to sow the seeds thickly and then thin out the smallest plants pretty early on. The ones left will be mostly vines, since the viney plants grow faster than the bushes, long before their final growth form is obvious.

If I cull all the bushes early on I will just have F2 vines left to produce fruits, and then I can finally start selecting for fruit characteristics. The F2 vines should have a mixture of different fruit types, so I can start selecting for the most zucchini-like ones, and not saving seed from the Tatume-like ones.

Here’s my plan year by year:

Year 1: Grow Tatume and Costata Romanesca and pollinate female Tatume flowers with male CR flowers to get the F1 seeds.

Year 2: Grow out the F1 seeds, which will all be bushes with whatever fruit characteristics are dominant. Let them cross with each other.

Year 3: Grow out the F2 seeds. Pull out bush plants and leave only vines. See what kind of fruits the vines make. Save seeds from the most zucchini-like fruits.

Year 4: This depends on what the F2’s from last year were like. I might have to grow out some more F2’s, or I might try growing some F3’s. At this point space will be my main limitation. Since I can only grow out maybe a dozen plants at a time, I'll just have to see if I get lucky and find some that have the kind of fruits I want.

This means it will be at least three years before I even have a chance of having a vining zucchini like I want. However, since both Tatume and Costata Romanesca are perfectly edible summer squashes, I can still eat any of the squashes I don't want to save seeds from. There's not much to lose.

One thing that might speed things up is if I can grow two crops a year, since we really have two short growing seasons here rather than one long one. The spring summer squash crop is usually dead by July or August of either SVBs or heat and drought, but I might be able to grow a fall crop that might have time to mature before it freezes. It would be worth a try if I have enough seeds. That means I could get to the interesting F2 generation by Year 2 instead of Year 3. Then by Year 3 I'd already be at the stage where I have only vines and am selecting for fruit characteristics.

So that's the first breeding project I'm going to do. I've got some other ideas for things I'd like to try, but I'd better not get ahead of myself. This will be a good start.

Take that, Squash Vine Borers.

Garlic and Onion Harvest 2015

The heavy rain we had this spring and early summer wasn't appreciated by all of my Alliums. Some of them did all right, but others had problems with rot. That's why I'm posting about them a bit late this year because some of them had some problems during curing.

All of my garlic and onions were planted on September 21, the Autumn Equinox, last year. I planted three varieties of perennial onions: French Red Shallots, Yellow Potato Onions, and I'itois Onions, five varieties of garlic: Red Toch, Lorz Italian, Inchelium Red, Nootka Rose, and S&H Silverskin, and two varieties of leeks: Elephant Garlic and multiplier leeks.

The Yellow Potato Onions, Inchelium Red Garlic, and Nootka Rose garlic were all new varieties I got from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange.

French Red Shallots

Harvested June 11

I got these French Red Shallots back in 2013, I think, and this the first year I got enough to eat as well as plant (and even give some away to family members). The first year I planted them, a lot of them rotted, but they must have adapted or something because now they are doing great.

They're just like little red onions, with a sweet mild flavor. They're small, about the size of golf balls, but I'm very happy with them, especially when I see the price of shallots at the grocery store.

Yellow Potato Onions

Harvested July 2

The shallots' cousins, the Yellow Potato Onions, didn't do nearly as well. Long after all the other Alliums were harvested and cured, the YPO's and Nootka Rose garlic still looked like they weren't ready. I finally gave up and harvested them anyway, and I found out that a lot of the Yellow Potato Onions had rotted. They are supposed to be easier to grow than shallots, so I emailed Southern Exposure Seed Exchange to ask them what they thought happened. They thought it was because of the wet weather, and said onions especially don't like that.

It's like we either have to little rain or too much! The onions in the picture are the ones that weren't rotted, so I'm going to try planting them again and seeing what happens.

I also grew I'itois onions again, but don't have a picture for them. These are the ones I got back in 2009 from Native Seeds/SEARCH. They did great, as usual.

Elephant Garlic

Harvested May 11

Even though the Elephant Garlic was one of the first Alliums I harvested, apparently I was still too late. As you can see from the picture, all but two of the bulbs fell apart into individual cloves as they cured. Next year I need to remember that Elephant garlic is ready very early, and I'll try digging them up as soon as they send up scapes. This year I cut the scapes and then left them in the ground a while longer, and I guess that was a bad move.

As usual, I got lots and lots of bulbils, as you can see in the picture, but so far I haven't had much luck with growing those. You're supposed to be able to plant them and they grow into larger solid bulbs, that you then plant again to grow into full sized bulbs with cloves. When I've planted them before they didn't come up at all. If I have room I'll try again this year.

The other type of leek I grew again were the multiplier leeks I got from my SCA a few years ago. As usual, they're doing great. They're almost doing too well and are becoming almost like weeds.

Inchelium Red

Harvested May 12

This was my best garlic this year. It's an artichoke variety that I'm trying out for the first time, and I'm happy. It's very similar in appearance to its fellow artichoke, Lorz Italian. I haven't done a taste comparison yet. I got several bulbs of a good size. Don't have much else to say except this one is a keeper.

Lorz Italian

Harvested May 27

I'm still happy with Lorz too. It didn't do quite as well as Inchelium Red this year, but I still got some good sized bulbs from it. It's also a keeper.

Not pictured is Red Toch, which I harvested on May 12. I only got a few undersized bulbs of that one. It's also an artichoke, but Lorz Italian and Inchelium Red are both doing so much better, I've decided to discontinue this variety.

Nootka Rose

Harvested July 2

This is the garlic that gave me the most problems. It's a silverskin that I tried out new this year, to see if it was better than S&H Silverskin. I finally gave up and harvested it in July along with the Yellow Potato onions even though it wasn't ready, and some of these turned out to be rotten too. I'm torn about whether to replant this one or not. There were a couple of bulbs that looked like they might have produced cloves, and the biggest bulbs of this one were bigger than what I got from S&H Silverskin, but it took so long before they were ready to harvest. I like to rotate sweet potatoes after my garlic, because usually my garlic is out by May or June, just in time to plant sweet potatoes, but this year I had to make my sweet potatoes wait for Nootka Rose.

S&H Silverskin

Harvested May 12

I've planted this other silverskin before, but it's never done very well. The bulbs are always very small. I wonder if maybe silverskins just aren't a good type of garlic for me. They're supposed to be the longest keeping garlics, which sounds good, but that doesn't help much when the bulbs are so tiny they're hardly worth peeling.

Summary:
Keepers - Lorz Italian garlic, Inchelium Red garlic, Elephant garlic, multiplier leek, I'itois onion, and French Red shallot
On Notice - S&H Silverskin and Nootka Rose garlic, Yellow Potato Onions - These will all get another chance, but if they don't do better next year, I'll probably discontinue them.
Discontinuing - Red Toch, due to being consistently outperformed by the other artichoke garlic varieties I have in my collection

Even with the failures, I still have plenty of Lorz Italian, Inchelium Red, and Elephant garlic to eat, plus a lot of French Red shallots.