Highlights of 2008

PLANT BREEDING:  I’ve been working to both develop new varieties and improve existing varieties.  This work has mainly been in sweet peppers, and it involves 3 major strategies: selection, crossing, and dehybridizing.  Selection is the main strategy, and requires huge amounts of time and effort evaluating and recording qualities of individual plants, and saving seeds separately from many plants and lines (groups of siblings).

In 2008 I saw significant progress in some of my breeding work.  Several lines of my “Sweet Jemison” and “Long Yankee Bell” are surpassing my hopes for quality, especially in the categories of fruit size, flavor, and storage life.  At our “Pepper Tasting Extravaganza” in October, several of my varieties were way out ahead of all the new Dutch and Japanese hybrids in flavor ratings.  Most of the Sweet Jemison lines also have superior storage life; for example, if you subject the ripened fruits to the abuse of leaving them out in open air at room temperature, they retain marketable condition for several days, and eventually, instead of rotting, they will just dry out and become leathery, still edible and sweeter than ever, though not marketable.

My work to “dehybridize” several commercial hybrid varieties has been extremely rewarding in a couple cases.  The F2 generation of “Giant Marconi” appears virtually identical, if not more vigorous, than the F1.  Having a productive open-pollinated version of this huge, tasty pepper, could be very valuable to the seed trade.

Four years of selecting and seed saving of an Asian collard-like green called “Senposai” has resulted in a major milestone for my work:  After trialing my selected variety next to the original Japanese hybrid variety, the FEDCO Seed Company considered mine an improvement, so they ordered seed from me.  They would like me to grow a larger seed crop for next year.  I have put special effort into this variety, as I believe it can potentially become a major vegetable crop, superior to traditional Southern collards in several ways: much more tender, faster growing, and useful both raw and cooked.  Here’s the description from the FEDCO catalog:

“Senposai Select ECO (40 days) Open pollinated. A stabilized selection of interspecific hybrid Senposai by Doug Jones in North Carolina.  Jones has rogued out non-typical leaf shapes, early bolters and weaker plants.  We found it to be just a tad less tender than commercial Senposai, but much more bolt resistant.  Inspired by the Restoring Our Seed project to explore his muse as a plant breeder, Jones presents us here with some good first fruits”.