2008 Highlights:
VARIETY TRIALS:  These are the foundation upon which any localized efforts to develop or improve our germplasm must be built.  Our trials this year revealed a number of promising varieties, especially in the pepper and garlic groups; they also gave us a chance to further evaluate and select varieties from previous years’ work.  New additions to my list of promising varieties include cultivars in the following groups: sweet and hot peppers, eggplants, lettuce, garlic, carrots, beets, melons, summer squash, cilantro, soybeans, and mustards.  These varieties are described in the individual vegetable sections of this report.

Two of our brassica (mustard/cole) family members decided to “plant themselves” during July and thereby show us their potential for providing edible/marketable greens in the high heat of summer.  Due to normal “shattering” of some seed during seed harvest, these two subsequently volunteered in our pepper/tomato beds and gave us an impressive amount of food, thereby shattering our preconceived notions of their low chances of producing anything worthwhile in the heat.  One of them, “Rucula sel. Ortolani” is a variety of arugula I originally bought from an Italian seed company.   It resisted insects and bolting for many weeks of harvest.  The other, my own selection of “Senposai” or Asian collards, produced a surprising number of decent leaves before succumbing to insects.  (See more about this amazing plant below.)

We planted a large pepper variety trial for the Seeds of Change company for the third year in a row.  They sent us 23 varieties to plant, mostly new hybrids available to them as organic seed from Dutch and Japanese seed companies.   We grew about 35 plants of each variety, and evaluated them for many characters, including plant vigor and size, degree of canopy shading of fruit, yield of marketable fruit, fruit size, shape, color, wall thickness, and flavor.  Several of the hybrids stood out as superior for productivity and ripe fruit qualities, with the exception of flavor, which ranged from flat to moderately sweet.  This trial has been useful to me for the opportunity to observe what the industry considers top-of-the-line hybrid peppers, giving me a good look at what growers are using and finding profitable to grow.  At this point in my evolution as a breeder of my own open-pollinated peppers, I believe I will soon have several varieties that can match the best hybrids in all qualities, except perhaps in yield-per-plant of marketable fruit; and I know I already have them beat in flavor.  The challenge still remaining for me is to further stabilize some of my breeding lines.  In 2008, a certain percentage of the Sweet Jemison yellow line turned out red, and some of the red line turned out yellow.