Open Source Seed Initiative: Recent Episodes
Open Source Seed Initiative
Combining Cucurbits for Downy Mildew Resistance and MoreWednesday, May 11th, 2022An Open Source Seed Initiative webinar Presenters:Michael Mazourek (Cornell University) Edmund Frost (Common Wealth Seed Growers) Moderator: Rachel Hultengren ——————————————————————————————————————– Speakers’ bios Michael MazourekMichael Mazourek is the Calvin Knoyes Keeney Associate Professor of Vegetable Breeding at Cornell University. Michael is a breeder of peas, beans, squash,... Read More
Stand and Deliver: Biopiracy, Law, and the Balkanization of the GenescapePresented by Professor Jack Kloppenburg, University of Wisconsin-MadisonFebruary 22, 2022This talk was part of the University of Queensland Law School’s People, Plants and the Law lecture series: https://law.uq.edu.au/event/session/17624
Crowdbreeding! A New Word for the Unique, Altruistic, Open Source, Collaborative, Dwarf Tomato ProjectWednesday, April 13th, 2022An Open Source Seed Initiative webinar Moderator: Rachel Hultengren Presenters:Craig LeHoullierPatrina Nuske-Small ——————————————————————————————————————– Speakers’ bios Craig LeHoullierCraig LeHoullier, a native Rhode Islander, lives and gardens in Hendersonville, North Carolina with his wife, Susan, and small collection of cats and dogs. A chemist by... Read More
Where Does Open-source Seed Fit in an IP-Dominated Industry? Saturday, February 15th, 2020Oregon State University, Corvallis, OregonA session of the Organic Seed Alliance 2020 Organic Seed Growers Conference Moderator: Heron Breen, Fedco Seeds Panelists:Dr. Claire Luby, Open Source Seed InitiativeFrank Morton, Wild Garden Seeds 2020 Organic Seed Growers Conference proceedings: https://seedalliance.org/publications/proceedings-from-the-10th-organic-seed-growers-conference/ ——————————————————————————————————————– Heron Breen: Good... Read More
Hey OSSI (AKA “Grow OSSI Seed”)Lyrics by Carol Deppe (2015) (CC-By License)Performed 2020 by Carol Deppe (voice, guitar), Jack Kloppenburg (voice), Craig LeHoullier (voice)(Sing to the tune of “Hey Lolly,” by Woody Guthrie) (C, G7.) Breed new plants for you and me.Hey OSSI, OSSI-O.Pledge their seeds and set them free.Hey OSSI, OSSI-O. (Chorus)Hey OSSI, OSSI,... Read More
Dr. Carol DeppeThursday, February 13th, 2020, as part of the 2020 Organic Seed Growers’ ConferenceAt Camas Country Mill, Eugene OR Scene setting: In a one room school house that has been restored and maintained by the owners of the mill, there’s a little stage at one end, where the teacher would stand. Carol sat on... Read More
Episode four of the third season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast Do you have questions about OSSI, intellectual property rights, or plant breeding that you would like answered on this show? Please share them with us through our listener survey at http://bit.ly/FreetheSeedsurvey This podcast is for anyone interested in the... Read More
Episode three of the third season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your... Read More
Episode two of the third season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your... Read More
Episode one of the third season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your... Read More
Hi everyone! I’m here to let you know that Free the Seed! is returning soon for its third season. This time around, I’ll be talking with plant breeders Edmund Frost, David Podoll, and Jonathan Spero about butternut squash, onions, and sweet corn. Irwin Goldman and Claire Luby will be joined by Petra Page-Mann for a... Read More
Episode four of the second season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it.
In this episode, host Rachel Hultengren talks with Patrina Nuske Small and Craig LeHoullier about the Dwarf Tomato Project, a collaborative, all-volunteer tomato breeding project. We discuss how the project came about, the benefits and challenges of having an all-volunteer team, and the pleasant surprises of plant breeding.
Patrina Nuske Small; ‘Uluru Ochre’
Craig LeHoullier; ‘Dwarf Sweet Sue’ (photo credit: Paul Fish)
Episode links
– To learn more about the Dwarf Tomato Project and find information about buying seeds of the dwarf tomato varieties that have come out of the project, check out the project’s website: https://www.dwarftomatoproject.net/
– Craig LeHoullier’s website: https://www.craiglehoullier.com/dwarf-tomato-breeding-project
– Seed Savers’ Exchange: https://www.seedsavers.org/
– Tomatoville Gardening Forums: http://tomatoville.com/
Let us know what you think of the show!
Free the Seed! Listener Survey: http://bit.ly/FreetheSeedsurvey
Free the Seed!Transcript for S2E4: The Dwarf Tomato Project
Rachel Hultengren: Welcome to episode four of the second season of Free the Seed!, the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast that tells the stories of new crop varieties and the plant breeders that develop them. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren.
In this episode, I talk with Craig LeHoullier and Patrina Nuske Small, the co-creators of the Dwarf Tomato Project, the “first all-volunteer world-wide tomato breeding project in documented gardening history”. We discuss how the project came about, the benefits and challenges of having an all-volunteer team, and the pleasant surprises of plant breeding.
Patrina Nuske Small began gardening in her 50’s after graduating from Flinders University in South Australia, realizing that it was time to get away from research and spend more time outside in the fresh air. Patrina is currently based in New South Wales.
Dr. Craig LeHoullier followed a 25 year career in pharmaceuticals with an ongoing writing career that includes Epic Tomatoes and Growing Vegetables in Straw Bales. He maintained a parallel obsession with gardening, first with heirloom tomatoes, then with amateur breeding. Craig joined Seed Savers Exchange in 1986, and serves as an adviser to the Exchange for tomatoes. Craig is based in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Rachel Hultengren: Patrina, Craig, welcome to the show!
Patrina Nuske Small: Thanks, Rachel!
Craig LeHoullier: Thank you very much, Rachel – it’s an absolute delight to be able to do this today.
Rachel Hultengren: Craig, maybe you can start by briefly telling us about the Dwarf Tomato Project. What is the project, and what are its goals?
Craig LeHoullier: The project is huge, fascinating, endlessly surprising. To put it all in a sentence, the goal of the Dwarf Tomato breeding project was to offer to the gardening community the largest possible selection of interesting, delicious tomato plants that can be grown by space-challenged gardeners, while at the same time provide a fascinating project for those wishing to become involved in to experience. And in that respect, I think we haven’t only checked all the boxes we set out to check, but we’ve checked boxes that we never thought we were going to check.
Rachel Hultengren: Patrina, how did the project get started, and when did it get started?
Patrina Nuske Small: In 2005, I was searching the internet for gardening information because I really needed to, like I say, get outside in the fresh air and get away from books. And I found a tomato forum, and I thought that was really odd, how you could have a whole forum on tomatoes. And once I was in there, I found out so many interesting things. And Craig was one of the main posters, and one day he pointed out that we’ve got, you know, thousands of heirloom varieties of tomato, but the dwarf category is just so limited to, usually, small red tomatoes. And wouldn’t it be great if we could just do some crosses with heirlooms and dwarfs?
And I thought that sounded like a really fun thing to do. And I thought, “Right. I’m going to grow some dwarfs next season, and I’m growing some heirloom varieties, and I’m going to have a go at crossing some tomatoes.” And I loved biology in high school, so it was a really fun thing for me to do. And I was successful, and we started off with eight crosses, which we named after [Snow White and] the Seven Dwarfs, and we added another one called Witty, because we needed to have names for the hybrids for ease of reference. And I sort of collaborated with Craig, and we organized to start teams – one in the Northern Hemisphere, one in the Southern Hemisphere – so we could grow two seasons in a year, and the project was born!
Craig LeHoullier: Patrina opened this up really wonderfully. And I think, in parallel… my wife and I have been selling heirloom tomato seedlings for, at the time, about 15 years here in Raleigh [North Carolina], and the most frequently asked question was always, “You know, I love ‘Cherokee Purple’ and I love ‘Sungold’, but these things get 8 or 10 feet tall, and they go all over the place, and I need to garden on my deck or my patio or my driveway or I’ve got a physical issue that means I have to deal with smaller plants.” So at the same time Patrina got that spark about crossing varieties of heirlooms with dwarfs, the need was showing up for my end of being able to tell my customers, “We do have interesting, colorful, delicious, large-fruited, worthwhile varieties that will excel in a small container.” And you can use useless tomato cages, those wire cone shaped things that people put on their indeterminates and then throw up their hands after a few weeks. They’re perfect for the dwarfs. So in a way, I think, Patrina and I were meant to meet when we did and do this project when we did, because it is serving a lot of gardeners who otherwise, you know, they would struggle to grow tomatoes if they didn’t have these shorter varieties to pick from.
Rachel Hultengren: You used the word indeterminate, Craig, for some of the tomatoes. And, so, tomatoes can come in an indeterminate or a determinate variety, and maybe you could remind our listeners what those terms mean, and then how those differ from dwarf varieties?
Craig LeHoullier: Sure. Well, the main collection of tomatoes – probably 98% – are indeterminate, meaning they grow vertically, they sucker at every intersection between a main stem and the leaf junction (suckers are just additional fruiting main stems) until they’re killed by frost or disease. So conceivably a tomato that is indeterminate can reach 10, 15, 20, 25 feet in length, 3 to 6 feet or more in girth, and just be incredibly complex, out-of-control plants.
The determinate gene really showed up for the first time in the 1920’s and a lot of the modern hybrids are determinates, in which they reach a height of about 3 to 4 feet, they throw out tons of blossoms, they fruit within about a 2 to 3 week period, and then they’re pretty much done. So people think of a tomato like ‘Roma’. It’s a tomato machine for a short period of time; you make your sauce or you do your canning. But because there are so many fruit in ratio with the amount of foliage, the flavor potential of determinates tends to be inferior to that of indeterminates.
Dwarf is the third type of tomato, that just never got a lot of attention because there were so few of them around. But they combine the best traits of indeterminates, in having the ability to fruit until they’re killed by frost, with the short stature. What I like to tell my customers is, “A dwarf if a tomato that grows at half the vertical rate of an indeterminate”. So if you have a Cherokee Purple that’s 8 feet tall in your garden at the end of the season, the dwarf is going to be 4 feet tall, which means it’s easier to contain. One of the benefits is that they really don’t have to be pruned. But they do fruit gradually, and because the fruit to foliage ratio is much more in line with an indeterminate, with a dwarf you have the flavor potential there, which can equal the best of the indeterminates in the dwarf lines, something that Patrina demonstrated with one of her very first crosses, which we’ll get to – the Sneezy cross. Everything that’s popped out of that cross has been utterly delicious, and it’s not a surprise, because one of the parents – ‘Green Giant’ – is one of the best varieties we’d ever eaten.
Rachel Hultengren: Can any tomato be made into a dwarf variety?
Patrina Nuske Small: Uh, yes. The thing is here, and this is one of the fun things about this project, is that we were dealing with recessive traits as well as dominant traits. Dwarfism is a recessive trait, whereas the normal regular heirloom varieties, their dominant genes means that they grow so big and tall. So if you combine anything with a dwarf plant, you will get some recessive genes in the pool. So the first generation, which is the F1 generation, the dominant trait will show up only. You will not see any dwarfs in that generation; you’ll only see non-dwarfs. But in the second generation, they start dividing up between dwarfs and non-dwarfs, and you’ll get approximately 25% that are dwarfs, compared to 75% that are not dwarfs. And of those non-dwarfs, also, in the third generation you can still find a few dwarfs. So that was really interesting learning for the people in the project to see that come about.
Craig LeHoullier: So I think that Patrina touched on something that’s really really important. We were all pretty much amateur gardeners who, maybe some of us had science backgrounds, but I think what we had in common was we loved to garden, and we were either very or reasonably good at making observations and keeping track of things, but it was this love of the unknown. So even to this day, 13 years after we started this project, whenever we do a cross and we grow it out, we’re still learning about what’s dominant and what’s recessive. When you cross a green one and white, what happens? When you cross a white with a pink? Scientists have recorded some of these down in scientific papers, but gardeners had never really experienced and seen these first hand.
One of the challenges I’m facing, because what I’m trying to do is get a book written about this project, but how to cover genetics in a way that a layman will find fascinating. You don’t get into the weeds of genetics, yet you’re finding all of the wonders of the things that we’ve discovered doing this work over the past 13 years.
Rachel Hultengren: It sounds like it’s been quite a learning opportunity for everyone involved.
Craig LeHoullier: Yes. Wouldn’t you say, Patrina?
Patrina Nuske Small: Absolutely. And so much fun. And, in fact, the fun aspect was really the primary goal when we were sharing the opportunity to forum participants to take part. We wanted them to have fun, and we wanted them to actually be able to report on what they found, and how it tasted, and how it performed, and all of those exciting things. But we also gave them the opportunity to name any new variety that they discovered along the way. So they could name it after their pet, or their family members, or something else if they wanted to. And I chose to often use names that were associated with Australia, because I’m fairly keen that at least a small part of this project still retains its Australian background. The fun of naming something that’s really relevant to you, we felt, was a reward to people for al the hard work that they put in. And without our volunteers doing all of this work, this project would never really have gotten underway to the extent, or had the impact that it’s had, if it hadn’t been for our volunteers.
Craig LeHoullier: Yeah. One interesting anecdote about naming is – one of our volunteers was from New Zealand, and he got essentially the Holy Grail. He ended up with a potato leaf dwarf with red and yellow bicolored swirled fruit that was absolutely delicious. And he named it W-H-E-R-O-K-O-W-H-A-I, which is a Maori term pronounced ‘fer-ti-kai’, for red and gold or red and yellow. And I sell lots of seedlings, and people look at it, and they don’t know how to spell it. I seem to be able to remember how to spell it because I’ve written it down thirty zillion times. So when you turn your team loose to name a variety, you have to be ready for anything to happen.
Patrina Nuske Small: That’s for sure.
Rachel Hultengren: So I would love to talk more about the community engagement aspect of this project, which makes it really unique. But first, Craig, you mentioned that there are a lot of benefits to growing dwarf varieties; people can grow them in smaller containers, they don’t require pruning, if you have just a small amount of space, you can grow something that maybe tastes still amazing, even though it’s much smaller. But why, given all that, why aren’t there more commercially-available dwarf varieties of tomato? Or rather, why weren’t there more before you started this project?
Craig LeHoullier: So this is an interesting one, and there’s a few reasons for it. The third catalyst for the project… So Patrina named one, where we could create this collaborative project and do crosses. I named a second, where we could fulfill the gardeners’ needs. But there’s a third catalyst, and that is, I was perusing old seed catalogues, and found a 1915 catalogue from a company called Isbell, that was in the Midwest in the United States. They described a tomato called ‘New Big Dwarf’ and they said, “We crossed the largest tomato we could find, ‘Ponderosa’, with a dwarf variety (and at this time there were only three or four of these around) ‘Dwarf Champion’. And ‘New Big Dwarf’ was the first, and up until our project the only, of the large fruited dwarfs. And I think it just went into the background, as more and more tomatoes came out, and then Burpee came out with ‘Big Boy’, and we get Big This and Better That and Ultra That and Super-Duper That. Gardening is very prone to trends and fads, and that which is advertised and that which shows up in seed catalogues. So again, this divine intervention aspect – for some reason, the whole dwarf category was just sitting there waiting to be plucked by Patrina and I to fill a gap that we felt was clearly needed. And now that we’ve filled it, if you look at a company like the Victory Seed Catalogue, where they can do star ratings to lots of our releases – people seem to love these things. My local customers are converting a lot of their garden choices from indeterminates to dwarf varieties.
There was actually a set of hybrid dwarfs on the market for a few years, called the ‘Husky’ series, but they never caught on because they were just kind of ordinary, red, typical type tomatoes. It took until the Seed Savers’ Exchange did their thing and made heirlooms known and then seed companies that specialized in non-hybrids made them widely available. Again, just the right time, it wasn’t until the 1980’s/1990’s/2000’s that the possibility of even creating the types of dwarfs we’ve created came about, because of the availability now of this amazing range of diverse heirloom varieties to take advantage of. That’s kind of my view. Patrina, I’d be interested in kind of your view of this as well – why now and why do they seem to be so well received?
Patrina Nuske Small: Well, I think that the populations are really moving towards city living and high rise living sometimes, and yet at the same time, people are becoming more and more concerned about their food and where it comes from. And they don’t really want to have food that’s either genetically modified or has tons of herbicides or pesticides or fungicides, etc. So people are being encouraged more and more to grow their own, so that they can get good flavor and and pick things when they’re actually ripe instead of having super market varieties that are picked so green that they almost never ripen. And people do care about what they’re eating these days and they haven’t got space, so it seemed to just make much more sense to offer them something that they could grow in pots on balconies. So yeah, I think it’s just a timing thing and serendipity and all of that in one.
Craig LeHoullier: Yeah, and I think maybe this is a time to touch on another, what I think is a critical aspect of this project, that we were not doing this project for financial compensation. And, in fact, the end goal of this project is that once we have a great variety, we find a seed company that we deem worthwhile and give them a starter amount of seeds to actually put in packets and sell. And so another, I think, hallmark of our approach, is that this is an example of true altruism and humility and openness. That’s what I’m most proud of – what we’ve done, is that in this time, in this age, when we know how insane it is out there, we have not thought of doing any of this for any compensation whatsoever. Just the joy of gardening and the ability to give something wonderful.
Rachel Hultengren: So because there is no compensation coming back to the project, everyone, including yourselves, everyone that’s involved is a volunteer. Which, as you’ve said, this is the first all-volunteer tomato breeding project like it. And I’m curious, what has been the role of those volunteers as the project has gone forward? After Patrina did those crosses, then where did the seeds go, and what have been the roles of the other people who were involved?
Patrina Nuske Small: Right. Well, initially, after I made the initial crosses, I sent seeds to Craig to grow the hybrid generation, and then he also sent seeds back to me to grow the second generation, the F2. But he shared it amongst the team members that he had, and I shared the seeds that he sent me with my team members. And we went back and forward like this for quite a long time; however, the permissions for tomato seed, the permissions they sort of see-sawed here in Australia. Sometimes they were allowed and sometimes they weren’t, to be imported. And so that did affect the sharing process to some extent. But in 2013, the department here that controls all of that sort of thing got in touch with me, and I think they got in touch with Craig and people in the Northern Hemisphere too, that it was no longer possible to actually import tomato seeds into Australia unless you were willing to pay for the process of having them certified as being free of seven particular viroids they were concerned about here. And to do that you had to supply a huge sample of like 20,000 seeds or something for them to test. And this was not at all possible in our situation. So it more or less was at the stage, anyway, where we could just divide into two separate teams.
Craig LeHoullier: Yeah – Rachel, you asked a great question. Because everyone is a volunteer, and because you’re going to get a wide variety of personalities, and many gardeners love to jump into something and then after a few years, “Been there, done that, now I’m ready to jump into something else”. Others have incredible persistence. Some take every little bit of data that’s available and share it with you, others it’s like pulling teeth even getting seed back from them. But if you think in terms of the fact that I’ve probably had 500 volunteers pass through my, I don’t know, guidance in the US in the years of the project, maybe 100 have been really really serious about it. And this isn’t to belittle at all the efforts of the other 400. Lives change, people’s focus changes, their interest changes, their ability to follow through… and it’s like everything else in life: “many are called, few are chosen” to become really obsessed with something. But the volunteers have all been wonderful, many of them have become friends.
It would be better if we could still share, because there are things that Patrina and I are working on, I’m sure, that we would just be dying to get into the other one’s hands. We enjoy watching what the other one are doing, but it’s not quite the same as when we could send little packets of seeds back and forth to each other.
Rachel Hultengren: How many varieties have been formally released through the project?
Craig LeHoullier: 106! And there are another 25 or 30 in Bill Minke’s hands. Bill is the fellow that lives in Wisconsin, long-time seed saver who grows out the seed to give to the companies. So if we were having this chat next year at this time, we could be to 130 to 135 released varieties.
Patrina Nuske Small: And all of them are released through the Open Source Seed Initiative, which is also amazing, that our volunteers all readily agreed to us being able to pledge them. And I think that’s astounding.
Rachel Hultengren: Why was it important to you as a community to pledge them as open-source?
Patrina Nuske Small: For a long time, really, I’ve been quite concerned about the way the food movement develops as corporations take more charge of our seeds. And it became quite a concern of mine, and when I came across the Open Source Seed Initiative, I thought, “This is amazing. This is wonderfully timely.” So I got in touch and started to do a little bit of pledging here and there. But in the end, we decided after discussions with Craig and discussions with Carol Deppe, we decided that perhaps it would be great if the whole project itself and all of the new varieties that they developed would be pledged as open-source seed. So we asked our volunteers, and sure enough they all agreed, and so there it is. All of them are OSSI pledged.
Craig LeHoullier: And I think, that is fantastic, Patrina. I love the way you put that. And on my part, I discovered the love of gardening just after I was married in 1981. And my grandfather actually instilled the love of gardening in me when I was three or four years old. It just took growing up, going to school, dating, all that stuff – it went dormant for a while. But when my wife and I met 40 years ago, the first thing we said is, “We need to have a garden.” And then I get bored with the ordinary, so I discover the Seed Savers’ Exchange in 1986. And then there is genealogy, and history, and stories. And your garden wasn’t just a bunch of plants or a bunch of red or yellow tomatoes. It was the story of the man, or the woman, or the family that sent you the seeds of those tomatoes. And the fact that they were freely shared, and the fact that they could be saved and freely reshared – before I knew about OSSI, that is my gardening principle, which is why I got so involved in the Seed Saver’s. It is very important to me that anything we can create will never be taken over by a corporate interest and profited, and people excluded from it. I think that they need to be there to be grown and enjoyed and shared and used forever. And that’s just extremely important to me.
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Rachel Hultengren: We’re going to take a short break. We’ll get back to my conversation with Patrina and Craig in just a minute.
If you’re new to this podcast, consider listening to previous episodes from our first season. If you’d like to learn more about the Open Source Seed Initiative’s history and mission, check out season 1 episode 2, where I talk with Dr. Irwin Goldman and Dr. Claire Luby about intellectual property rights in crop plants.
After this episode, we’ll be taking a planned break from the podcast. If you’ve enjoyed listening, please consider filling out our listener survey at http://bit.ly/FreetheSeedsurvey. Knowing more about our listeners, what you’ve liked and what we could improve will help us as we consider creating more episodes in the future. Many thanks in advance for sharing your thoughts with us.
Now let’s get back to the conversation with Patrina and Craig. We discuss how, given the volunteer-driven nature of the project, there were limitations, but those didn’t preclude the project from experiencing success.
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Rachel Hultengren: Going back to the logistics of running a program like this – when you would share seeds with your volunteers and they would grow tomatoes out, what sort of information were they sharing back with you about their observations of those plants, and were volunteers making the selections to say which plants with which characteristics would be saved or would be selected and continued in the process of stabilization? Or were they sharing information and then the decision of selection was a more collaborative conversation?
Craig LeHoullier: There are two aspects. First, we really wanted… because we were all amateurs, we wanted to impress upon people, “Let’s say if you grow six plants. Don’t pick tomatoes off all six of those plants and mix the seeds together.” So we needed to teach them a little bit that we’re doing single plant selections right now to carry on. So if you grow six plants, and you get a yellow and a red and a green and a purple and a brown and a white tomato, what Patrina and I would like back would be six packets of seeds; one from tomatoes from each of those plants. We delegated to the participants if something was wonderful. We did ask, initially anyway, for seeds of everything they grew out, and then took into consideration what they decided about the quality of what they found, and whether it was special enough to say, “This is the one of these six plants. These other five are interesting, but this one is the one.”
Now why did we ask for the other five back? Because we often found that the best results didn’t appear in the third generation. Maybe you’d grow a plant because it had interesting color, but it didn’t taste that good. And then in the fourth or the fifth generation, bingo. You found the one that had the color and the flavor associated with it.
But how would we have done this project if we were in a perfect world? We would have had acreage, from each cross we would have grown out 200 F2’s to see, as much as possible, what the possibilities are, and then we would have grown large populations from each of these. A lot of these were single or maybe double plant selections, meaning we had to get to what we wanted fairly quickly. But a least we’re growing out to enough generations to convince ourselves that we’re getting really good stability.
Patrina Nuske Small: We had sort of acknowledged right from the beginning that it was going to be a fun project, and that there were going to be limitations, and that we really wouldn’t be able to grow out these large numbers of plants for each generation that really, theoretically, one is supposed to grow in order to find the diamond in the bunch. So, knowing that we would have limitations, we still wanted to maintain it as being a fun and surprising outcome. And whatever we found, we found, and whatever we missed, we missed. And luckily, we just managed to find some beauties. So that made it even more exciting – the fact that even though maybe somebody only grew two plants, that one of them was absolutely great.
And I sometimes would pot up some of the non-dwarf seedlings and give them to family members to grow out, just to see what they got. Even though I only really grew dwarfs, I just wanted to check what else there might be, and in fact that’s how one of my favorite tomatoes came about, which is ‘Uluru Ochre’. It was actually a non-dwarf seedling that I gave to my brother to grow, and I went to collect samples from it, and I looked at this tomato, and I thought, “This is really an odd looking tomato. It’s a really strange color.” And it was a bit overripe when I felt it, and I thought it might be going bad. And I decided to still take it for seeds. But when I was processing it for seeds, it smelled great. And I thought, “Okay, well it smells alright, perhaps I’ll have a little taste.” So I had a little taste, and it was amazing – it just blew me away! It was a complex sort of flavor with a lot of sweetness, and I thought, “This tomato’s not bad! It’s the color that’s so strange about it.” And so of course I saved seed, but then I was thinking, “Gosh, I hope I can find dwarfs in the next generation (in the third generation).” But sure enough, we did find some dwarfs. From there we got ‘Uluru Ochre’.
Craig LeHoullier: And what’s amazing about that is Patrina discovered the first ever black orange. So a ‘Cherokee Purple’ and ‘Cherokee Chocolate’ are like black reds and black browns, black pinks. But ‘Uluru Ochre’ retains green as it turns orange and we’d bring that tomato to our ‘Tomatopalooza’ tasting events, and people would look at it and go, “Oh my gosh – am I supposed to eat that tomato?” I think it’s the most beautiful tomato in the garden, and others would probably have a little bit of compunction about, you know, “Do I go near this thing?” It is so unique! That was a brilliant find, Patrina, no doubt about it.
Patrina Nuske Small: Absolutely.
Rachel Hultengren: I look forward to seeing a photo of that. We’ll make sure to post it on the show-notes so that other people can see what that black orange looks like. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a tomato like that.
Craig LeHoullier: Yeah. There’s one more point I wanted to make about data. So what we would have wished for everyone to do, and we couldn’t even fulfill this ourselves, would be plant height, plant habit, fruiting habit, apparent disease tolerance, yield per plant, days to maturity, blah blah blah. And sometimes what you’d get back from volunteers were “Here’s a picture of the tomato I grew and here’s the seeds. Oh, it was red.” Or, “Here’s a delicious tomato and here’s the seeds.” “Oh, by the way, do you remember the color?” “Oh, I kind of forgot.”
So what you had to do, and this is not a slam against anybody, because if I look back at my records over the past five years, I have got things missing that I would have sworn I would have taken down. You’re in summer time. It’s sweaty, you’re sweating all over your notebook. You’re busy, you’re trying to get things watered. You’re picking, you’re seed saving, you’re tasting, there just simply isn’t the time to collect and transfer all the data. So in our project, Patrina and I just made the best of what we got. And man, it was enough to get us to where we went to. (Laughs)
Patrina Nuske Small: Yeah, absolutely.
Rachel Hultengren: That’s a great thing to hear, because I’m sure that thinking that one needs to get all of the details of every potentially measurable trait – that might slow people down or make them more hesitant to start a breeding project. So to hear that you can be successful and come up with some really interesting and exciting new varieties even if you don’t take all of the notes that you possibly could take. Even if you just say, “You know, I really like this and I’m gonna save seed from it and put a star on the label,” and say, “Next year I’ll definitely grow it and look at it again.” Sometimes that’s all it takes.
Patrina Nuske Small: Yes. When I look at my notebooks from right at the beginning of the project, I hardly wrote down anything. I did have a notebook, but they are so disorganized, and I often just reported on the taste and color and that was it. But as I progressed through the project, and realized that there’s just so much more to observe, then each year I think my notebooks got better and better and better. And now when I look at it, I think, “Well, I didn’t even realize that I was actually developing, as I went, some good strategies here.” And I do encourage people to have a notebook every year, because you do forget. It’s easy to forget what you had on a certain year, and it’s really great when you need to look back. You’ve got it there; you’ve got the info of what you grew and how it performed.
Rachel Hultengren: It’s a really encouraging lesson, that you can get started on a breeding project, and it doesn’t have to be perfect. You can get better at it as you go. But just jumping in and getting started is a great way to learn about breeding, and… or, what’s that saying? A journey of a thousand miles starts with one step? That’s how breeding is, too.
Patrina Nuske Small: Yeah, exactly.
Craig LeHoullier: Yeah, I wanted to raise a couple of just interesting surprises we’ve found along the way because they’ve led to some of our really great varieties, some of which have these wonderful Australian names. So Patrina crossed ‘Stump of the World’, which is a wonderful large pink heirloom, with this rather ordinary red dwarf, ‘Budai Torpe’. And you figure, “Okay, you cross a pink and a red – what are we going to get for possibilities out of this? We’re gonna get pinks and reds, and maybe they’ll taste good, maybe they won’t.” So the Sleepy family was born. Boom! All of the sudden, a purple tomato popped out of it. So you’re crossing a pink and a red, and somewhere hiding in one of those varieties were the recessive genes of the black tomato. And ‘Rosella Purple’ was born. And if you were to sit people down who have purchased our dwarfs, they would probably put ‘Rosella Purple’ in the top ten, and say, “That tomato is a challenger to ‘Cherokee Purple, in terms of quality and flavor.’” I mean, didn’t that blow you away, Patrina, to find purple coming out of that cross?
Patrina Nuske Small: It did, and that was such a surprise. And another surprise was in our cross Tipsy, which was a cross between ‘Golden Dwarf Champion’, which is a yellow tomato, and ‘Elbe’, which is an orange tomato, and the first generation – the hybrid generation – turned out to be red, and that was a surprise as well!
Craig LeHoullier: And some of the absolute best flavored tomatoes of our project came out of the Tipsy cross. So ‘Golden Dwarf Champion’, as an eating tomato, it’s from the 1880’s, it’s a Burpee variety, it’s one of the original dwarfs through the US tomato history. It’s okay – you grow it, you eat it, it’s like, “Yeah, it’s an okay tomato.” But when Patrina crossed it with ‘Green Giant’ and made the Sneezy family, and then crossed it with ‘Elbe’ to make the Tipsy family, almost everything that popped out of those crosses tastes spectacular. And that is something you can’t guess, you can’t plan for, and you can’t see. It’s just amazing to me.
Rachel Hultengren: So the Sneezy and Sleep families – you gave each cross a familial name, so that every line that came out of that cross kept that label of the family so that you could trace it all the way back to the cross that you made?
Patrina Nuske Small: Yes. The inspiration really came from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and we kind of stuck to the names in a similar fashion and made up names as we went along. Because if you’re trying to refer to a cross, you don’t want to have to write down each time “(’Golden Dwarf Champion’ X ‘Elbe’) F2 or F3 or F4”, etc. You can just write down “(Tipsy)F2, F3, F4”. It just made things so much more simple.
Rachel Hultengren: So we’ve heard from Patrina about her favorite variety that’s come out of this project. Craig, do you have a favorite variety?
Craig LeHoullier: Somehow I do. So Patrina did this marvelous cross, Sneezy, where she crossed ‘Green Giant’ onto ‘Golden Dwarf Champion’ in 2006. So the Sneezy hybrid was incredible. It was an eight and a half, nine out of ten flavor-wise, these big beautiful 8-10 oz. yellow tomatoes. So I thought, “Well, this is kind of hopeful.” And then the story goes to a fellow names David L., but he was affectionately known as Grub on Tomatoville. So Grub sent me some seed from something that he called ‘Summertime Gold 3’, and it was almost white. And I grew four of them. One of the potato-leaf plants had these gorgeous, 6-8 oz., variably-shaped fruit. But they were a nice, lovely medium yellow with a little bit of a red blush on the bottom. And the flavor was just supreme – it had everything I love in a tomato. It reminded me very much of the flavor of ‘Lillian’s Yellow Heirloom’ and also of ‘Green Giant’. And, you know, my wife, my best pal – I named it ‘Dwarf Sweet Sue’. We actually had someone who wrote editorials for the Raleigh newspaper who came over to taste tomatoes once. And he said he’d never tasted a tomato other than a red one. And he got to taste a slice of ‘Sweet Sue’ that day, and he thought it was the best tomato he’d ever eaten.
And we got it out to the F10 generation, and finally it was released in 2012 by the Heritage Seed Market. So Patrina made the cross in 2006, and it hit the market in 2012 at the F10 or beyond generation. So that showed the testament of our ability to squeeze two growing seasons into one calendar year by shuttling things back and forth between Australia and the US. And we got a full development of tomato done in about 5 years.
Rachel Hultengren: Yeah, that makes a big difference, being able to have two generations in a calendar year – it speeds things up quite a lot.
Craig LeHoullier: Yeah
Rachel Hultengren: So now that the project is winding down, what do you still feel is left undone? Now that these dwarves are out there – what would you like to discover about them?
Craig LeHoullier: What we don’t know is the relative disease tolerance of these, and what we don’t know is who really loves these and where are they doing well. So I would call it the regional adaptation of them. So we’ve got 106 of these dwarfs out there – which ones are going to thrive in the Pacific Northwest, or in New England, or in Australia, or in New Zealand? We had to focus on visual beauty and flavor, and if the two coincided (and I think they do on all of our releases); we didn’t want to put out anything beautiful that was tasteless. But what we don’t know is how well these are going to fight diseases that exist in various parts of the world or the country. So to me, that’s undone work, and I don’t know how to go about collecting that data, but I think that it’s important to know about. Have you ever thought about that, Patrina, how we understand how these things are going to do now that they’re born and they’re out there?
Patrina Nuske Small: Well, yes, I’ve often thought about it, and I don’t really have a good answer to that, but I’m hoping, as you’re hoping, that perhaps someone will be interested to actually assess some of the disease resistance aspects and perhaps, where necessary, breed that into the varieties that are tasting fabulous and where we don’t really want to lose a particular variety because of its uniqueness. That’s one thing. And secondly, I really try to encourage everyone to think about breeding more of the dwarfs by other sources that they can bring into the patch. Because to me, the more breeding that we do, the more chance we have of maintaining a really broad genetic diversity for the future. But part of that is also being able to get people to grow and continue growing them, because even if someone does some crosses and does bring in extra genetic diversity, but then somehow it’s not maintained or they don’t find enough growers or it just sits in a cupboard and never gets used – that doesn’t help the genetic diversity either. Yeah, I hope people breed; I want more people to breed. Have a go – have a go at it.
Rachel Hultengren: And if people are interested in, once they’ve looked at the catalogue of all of these 106 varieties that you’ve released, if they see one that they would like to use as a parent in their own dwarf variety breeding project, because they’re pledged as open-source, that’s something that they could do. They could ask for or purchase seeds from one of the companies that offers these varieties, and use them as a parent in a cross with their favorite heirloom, and then the progeny that come out of it, whatever variety they end up with – that is, according to the pledge, also open-source. So there’s the potential for many more dwarf varieties (or even indeterminates) to come out of the varieties that you’ve released and pledged.
Patrina Nuske Small: Yes. My concern is that I hope people will take it upon themselves to actually go to the effort of contacting the Open Source Seed Initiative in order to pledge the progeny. And I worry a little bit about that, whether or not everybody will continue to do that. But they should, because they have been pledged, and so the progeny are also meant to be pledged.
Rachel Hultengren: Patrina, you said that you hope that more people get involved and continue breeding to create more genetic diversity for the future. Would you have any advice for those aspiring tomato breeders?
Patrina Nuske Small: I think the main thing I would say to them is that if they’re interested in protecting the genetic biodiversity for their children and their grandchildren, that they should have a go at breeding. And these days, with the internet especially, I think that it’s a lot easier to get the information that you might need. And it’s not really all that hard to do. I found that it wasn’t at all hard to do, but I must admit that I have a very steady hand. And I didn’t break off many stigmas when I first started; I was quite gentle, and really had a very good success rate. But even if you do have some failures, and I certainly did have some failures where I did break the stigma or the cross didn’t work – it’s no big deal. You just do more of them. And, you know, I would just encourage everybody: have a go. Just have a go.
Craig LeHoullier: Yeah. I had about a 25% success rate. So I tried 100 crosses one summer, and got 25 of them to take. And that is overwhelming in itself, because it means you get 25 families. Each one of those crosses sets you off on a research journey. So you could actually read about our dwarf project, and learn about basic tomato genetics, and if there’s a type of tomato that you don’t think is available, go for it! Take two parents that you think would create it, make the cross, get some people to help you out, grow it out, and odds are you’ll find what you’re looking for. It may be a needle in a haystack; it may be a 25% of 25% of 25% type deal, but if you grow out enough plants, you might find something wonderful. Roll up your sleeves, get out, pull your anthers off the flowers, get some pollen, and go forth and pollinate.
Patrina Nuske Small: And I could add something to that, too. If one of your parents is a dwarf and the other is not a dwarf, I recommend that you use the dwarf as a mother plant, and get the pollen from the other, non-dwarf, plant. Because the tomato that you grow on the dwarf plant, that you’re saving seeds from, that becomes your first generation. And when you grow those seeds, if there’s no dwarfs among them, you know very well that you were successful with your cross, because the first generation should not show up any dwarfs (the recessive trait); it should only show the dominant trait. And so you know that you’ve been successful, which is a bonus. It feels good.
Craig LeHoullier: Yeah. Patrina has a Dwarf Project website, I have a website. I have some videos. We can really be kind of a resource in terms of email or whatever. Tap into my knowledge; I’m always happy to share things that I’ve learned with people freely. That’s kind of what it’s all about.
Patrina Nuske Small: Yeah, likewise here. We’re very happy to help people and to answer questions.
Rachel Hultengren: Wonderful. It’s really evident that you both have a really generous spirit, both in what you’ve just said, and the way that this project has been set up.
Patrina Nuske Small: Thank you.
Rachel Hultengren: Yeah. Well, I’m inspired to get started breeding tomatoes. I’ve never done tomato breeding myself; I’ve worked in peppers and squash and a few other things, but I am already starting to think about the heirlooms that I would like to cross to some dwarf tomatoes, if you haven’t already done those. I’m hopeful that this will help inspire a lot of other people to jump into it also.
Patrina Nuske Small: That would be fantastic, honestly.
Craig LeHoullier: Yeah.
Patrina Nuske Small: Awesome. And thank you so much for this opportunity. It’s such a wonderful opportunity, and I’m hopeful that people will really, you know, sort of take it from there, and keep going, and breed. Breed lots.
Rachel Hultengren: Craig and Patrina, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. I’ve really enjoyed our conversation.
Patrina Nuske Small: Thanks, Rachel – it’s been great, and I’ve just loved the opportunity.
Craig LeHoullier: Yeah – absolute pleasure, Rachel, and nice talking to you, Patrina, and have a wonderful day everyone!
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Rachel Hultengren: I’ve been speaking today with Craig LeHoullier and Patrina Nuske Small about the collaborative, all-volunteer Dwarf Tomato Project. The Dwarf Tomato Project formally ended on December 31st, 2018, so activities are winding down, but if you’d like to grow any of the tomatoes that have come out of this project in your garden or use them parents for a breeding project of your own, you can find more information about those varieties (including where to purchase seeds) on the Dwarf Tomato Project’s website, at https://www.dwarftomatoproject.net/.
Craig also has a website, which we’ll link to in our show-notes, where you can read more about the Dwarf Tomato Project, learn more about Craig’s work, and find links to his books, Epic Tomatoes and Growing Vegetables in Straw Bales.
Be sure to check out our show-notes on the Open Source Seed Initiative’s website at http://www.osseeds.org for links and photos of ‘Uluru Ochre’ and ‘Dwarf Sweet Sue’. You can also download the full transcript of each episode there.
You can find and like the Open Source Seed Initiative on Facebook, and subscribe to Free the Seed! wherever you get your podcasts. Our theme music is by Lee Rosevere.
Thanks so much for listening! I’ve really enjoyed getting to make this podcast, and I hope that you’ve enjoyed hearing it. Until next time, I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren, and this has been Free the Seed!
Episode three of the second season of Free the Seed! the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast This podcast is for anyone interested in the plants we eat – farmers, gardeners and food curious folks who want to dig deeper into where their food comes from. It’s about how new crop varieties make it into your seed catalogues and onto your tables. In each episode, we hear the story of a variety that has been pledged as open-source from the plant breeder that developed it.
In this episode, host Rachel Hultengren spoke with Bill Whitson about ‘Rozette’, a new potato variety that Bill developed and pledged as open-source.
Be sure to check out Bill’s blog post about selecting ‘Rozette’, which includes more photos of the candidate lines that he considered during the project: https://www.cultivariable.com/potato-the-story-of-rozette/
Bill Whitson
‘Ozette’ potato tubers; ‘Ozette’ flower; minitubers from true seed of ‘Ozette’; first generation of ‘Rozette’ (Photo credit: Bill Whitson)
Episode links
– Visit the Cultivariable website to purchase true potato seeds and tubers. (Please note that Cultivariable is taking a break from selling tubers this year in order to focus on growing clonal crops from tissue culture, so ‘Rozette’ will likely be available next in 2020).
– Kenosha Potato Project http://kenoshapotato.com/
– Slow Food Ark of Taste https://www.fondazioneslowfood.com/en/slow-food-presidia/makah-ozette-potato/
– Carol Deppe’s Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties
Let us know what you think of the show!
Free the Seed! Listener Survey: http://bit.ly/FreetheSeedsurvey
Free the Seed! Transcript for S2E3: Rozette Potato
Rachel Hultengren: Welcome to episode three of the second season of Free the Seed!, the Open Source Seed Initiative podcast that tells the stories of new crop varieties and the plant breeders that develop them. I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren. Every episode we invite a plant breeder to tell us about a crop variety that they’ve pledged to be open-source.
My guest today is Bill Whitson. Bill is the owner of Cultivariable, an experimental nursery on the central coast of Washington state. He breeds a large number of minor crop species, but focuses on the Andean root and tuber crops mashua, oca, ulluco, yacon, and potato. In the past ten years, he has released 37 new varieties belonging to nine species and all varieties released since 2013 have been OSSI pledged.
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Rachel Hultengren: Hi Bill – welcome to the show!
Bill Whitson: Hi Rachel, thanks for having me!
Rachel Hultengren: Yeah, we’re really excited to get to chat today! So we’ll be talking about your potato breeding, and specifically about a variety you’ve just released, ‘Rozette’, but first maybe we could take a broad view to start, and then focus in. So let’s talk about the natural history of potatoes. Where in the world are potatoes from, and how long have they been cultivated there?
Bill Whitson: So we don’t really know how long potatoes have been cultivated, but they originated in the highlands of the central Andes, so think southern Peru and Bolivia. And they were probably first domesticated something like 10,000 years ago. And those landraces and lines of potatoes are now a distinctive group known as ‘Andean potatoes’, or Solanum tuberosum andigenum, which are varieties that are primarily adapted to grow in short-day photoperiods.
So what that means is that they don’t produce tubers until the daylength falls to 12 hours or less. And that’s because they evolved near the equator, where the day length changes very little. And this is a common feature you see in tropical plants. That’s kind of an inconvenient feature if you’re growing away from the equator, where the daylength changes a lot.
Because, for example, in North America we don’t have a 12 hour day length until fall. So about September 22nd is when we get to that point. So if you’re waiting on potatoes to produce tubers until September 22nd, there are very few climates where that’s going to work out well for you. The plants are going to be killed by frost, or they’re going to be drowned in the field by rains, so there are a lot of problems to that.
But there was a branch of potatoes that was established later – we’re not sure exactly when, probably several thousand years after they were domesticated in the Andes – in coastal Chile. And those became the [Tuberosum] group of potatoes, that over time adapted to the differing daylengths in coastal Chile and became capable of tuberizing under any length of day, so we call those day-neutral potatoes. And those, then, became the basis of the modern potato. So we don’t exactly know all the contributions, but most of what went into the European potatoes were contributions from Chilean landraces of potatoes, and then various diverse contributions that have been added through modern breeding. For example, there are about one hundred species of wild potato that are now sometimes used in modern breeding to further add genetic diversity.
So it’s a fairly complex picture, but the homeland of the potato is the central Andes, and then the homeland of really the potato of commerce in North America and Europe is Chile.
Rachel Hultengren: So the Chilean potato is the basis for the potatoes that we have here in North America at a large scale, and the potatoes that went to Europe initially. So what was the path of travel like for potatoes from the coast of South America to get to where we are now?
Bill Whitson: So, yeah. The potatoes were first carried to Europe in the 1500’s. The Spanish discovered the crop as they moved their way through the Andes, and eventually they began to ship potatoes probably from both sides of South America on their trading routes. So it’s not completely clear what exactly ended up in Europe. It’s likely that potatoes from the Andes were initially taken there, and then somewhat later potatoes from Chile. And eventually, as everyone knows, they had terrible problems with late blight in Europe, which became the Irish potato famine. And that probably wiped out a lot of the original Andean potatoes that had been carried to Europe. It gets very unclear after that point, exactly what happened. There were probably contributions from both Andean and Chilean potatoes, and at this point it’s likely that more of the potatoes that survived were potatoes from Chile.
One of the major progenitors of modern potatoes is a – or was, it no longer exists – was a potato cultivar known as ‘Rough Purple Chili’, which was taken from Chile to somewhere on the East Coast of the U.S., and that became the foundation of breeding for late blight resistant potatoes. And that particular landrace is in the background of something like 80% of modern commercial potato varieties.
Rachel Hultengren: Wow. Apart from that ‘Rough Purple Chili’, did most potato varieties stop in Europe on their journey between South and North America?’
Bill Whitson: Right, so at first, most of them went to Europe, where some amount of work and selection was done, and then were brought to the U.S. But that ‘Rough Purple Chili’ represented a break where suddenly the United States became a center of new potato development. And then varieties that developed from that were being sent to Europe to help with the problem of producing potatoes that were resistant to Late Blight. So from that point on, it was kind of a transatlantic trade in potatoes that has just continued ever since. And of course, with the advent of modern plant breeding around the time of World War II, things have really opened up a lot. From that point forward, people started making large collections of germplasm in South America and introducing genetics from wild potatoes and broadening the genetic base of the potatoes of commerce quite a bit. But the early potatoes that we had in the United States came almost completely from European lines.
Rachel Hultengren: Scientists have recently used genetic analysis to determine that there was likely another path of dissemination for potatoes in the U.S., which was up the West coast as the Spanish came. And one of these varieties is one that you’ve worked with, which is ‘Ozette’. Can you tell me the story of that variety?
Bill Whitson: Yeah, so ‘Ozette’ really represents a bit of a break from the standard story of the potato, and that wasn’t recognized until fairly recently. So ‘Ozette’ is a potato that has been maintained by the Makah people of the Olympic Peninsula [of Washington State] for about 200 years. And it’s a kind of unusual-looking potato. It’s a fingerling type, so it’s longer than it is wide, and it has deep eyes, which is a feature that you commonly find in what are commonly termed ‘primitive potatoes’. So you would see that a lot in Andean potatoes and Chilean landraces, but it was usually bred out very quickly from European potatoes for reasons I’m not completely clear on.
So it was a bit of a mystery, where this potato came from. It doesn’t look much like other potatoes we have in the United States, and it wasn’t… nobody was really aware that it was there until the late 1980’s, when the USDA National Plant Germplasm Repository did a collection there. And not long after, it was commercialized by Ronniger’s Potato Farm and became available pretty widely.
But it wasn’t until 2010 that they did some research and looked into the genetics of this potato and discovered that it pretty clearly traces its origin back directly to Chilean potatoes instead of to those lines that were introduced from Europe or were introduced to the East Coast of the U.S. So from there, they puzzled out that it probably represents a unique introduction.
The Spanish in the 1700’s had trade routes up and down the West Coast of North and South America with stops in Chile and Mexico. So the thought is that ‘Ozette’ was probably either brought directly from Chile, or originated in Chile and made a stop in Mexico on the way up the coast before it was ultimately planted in a garden at a fort (near Lake Ozette on the Olympic Peninsula) that only lasted for about a year. So you can imagine the crazy investment it took to get this potato to the Olympic Peninsula; they had to sail ships all the way up the coast from Chile, they had to establish a fort, they had to build a garden, and then they went away a year later. And the only thing that was really left a hundred years later was this potato that was kept by the Makah. So it’s a pretty cool story.
Rachel Hultengren: That seems like quite a journey for that potato to make.
Bill Whitson: Yeah, and it’s not the only one. There are a couple of other varieties that have been stewarded by tribes in the Pacific Northwest that probably came here the same way. But ‘Ozette’ is by far the most commonly available and popular of those varieties. I believe it’s been inducted into the [Slow Food] Ark of Taste, and so that gave it a lot of press, and it’s become a fairly popular variety, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.
Rachel Hultengren: So ‘Ozette’ is the starting point that you used for developing this new variety, called ‘Rozette’. Maybe you can tell us why you chose… I mean, it sounds like there were a lot of great qualities to ‘Ozette’, but what particularly stood out to you to make that one of the parent lines that you wanted to use?
Bill Whitson: Sheer ignorance, really, is my excuse for trying to breed with ‘Ozette’. It’s a great potato for this climate, but it’s a terrible potato to breed with. Potatoes have a lot of hurdles that you have to overcome to be able to breed with them, and it varies a lot from one variety to another. But ‘Ozette’ has kind of the full set of problems that we deal with in potatoes. And the worst of those is that it very rarely flowers. This is a problem we see with a lot of potatoes, most likely because they’ve been clonally propagated for long periods of time. In many cases that means that they’ve accumulated genetic load and lost the ability to reproduce sexually very effectively.
Rachel Hultengren: Can you say a little bit more about that genetic load? What does it mean for a plant or a variety to have a genetic load that would keep it from flowering?
Bill Whitson: Sure. So when we say ‘genetic load’, we’re just talking about the accumulation of mutations over time. And the problem with mutations is that they’re very rarely beneficial. Most mutations result in a loss of fitness, rather than an increase of fitness. If you reproduce a plant sexually, then it has the opportunity to recombine and go through various types of error corrections to try to eliminate those deleterious mutations. But if you propagate a crop clonally, then you just accumulate them over time. And if they’re bad enough, you may get to the point where the plant simply can’t survive anymore.
But assuming that there’s someone there to keep selecting tubers that grow well for them, then you may only lose features that aren’t of importance to you. So if you’re a farmer and you’re trying to select a potato that continues to grow well for you, you keep choosing to replant the tubers of plants that have yielded well for you. But you might not care whether or not that plant flowers or makes berries or sets seeds well anymore. And so if you extend that over hundreds or potentially even thousands of years, you may lose the ability for the plant to reproduce itself through seed, and it may then require a farmer to be there to keep replanting it from tubers. So that is one of the key problems with potatoes.
Some of them flower very well, but many of them, particularly those that have been highly selected, have lost that ability to some degree. And ‘Ozette’ is probably one of the worst. It flowers here on average every three years, and I might only see a flower or two when that happens. So you have to be paying attention if you want to breed with it, and you have to catch those flowers and make sure you get them pollinated if you’re to have any hope of getting seed.
Rachel Hultengren: So you didn’t know, before you chose it as a variety you wanted to breed with, that it flowered so poorly?
Bill Whitson: Right. You never really know… There’s relatively few people doing potato breeding, and most of them are working with improved lines that are well-established, that are well-documented, a lot of papers have been written about them, and their characteristics are widely known. But with some of these lesser-known varieties, you’re really on your own. And so not many people had done any, or had attempted any breeding with ‘Ozette’. As far as I’m aware, no one else has actually accomplished breeding with ‘Ozette’ before now – it’s just so difficult to work with.
So you have to grow the plant to discover whether or not breeding is going to be possible with it. And ‘Ozette’ had enough problems that it turned out to be a terrible choice. But I liked it well enough that I kept growing it, and every few years I would get flowers and I would pollinate them. And finally, a few years ago, in 2016, we got a flush of flowers, and I pollinated them with pollen from different varieties, and managed to get three of those flowers to form berries. And ultimately got 170 seeds from those berries. Each of those was an opportunity to see progeny from ‘Ozette’ for the first time.
Rachel Hultengren: I expect that few people probably know what potato flowers look like – could you describe them for our listeners?
Bill Whitson: Yeah, potato flowers can be really beautiful. I often think that there’s potential for also breeding potatoes as an ornamental. The flowers can come in all the colors that potato tubers can come in; so you have white flowers, you have blue flowers, you have red flowers, and all the variations on those. So you have anything from pink to dark blood red, and kind of light powdery blues to very very dark purples. There are nectar guides on the corollas of the flowers that can be a different color or a darker shade than the petals, so you often get a darker star shape within the corolla of the flower. And yeah, I probably can’t really do them justice.
But particularly, varieties that flower well, the short-day varieties that I deal with from the Andes, produce very very big plants that produce a lot of flowers. And so they can be surprisingly beautiful ornamental plants. If not for the fact that they would eventually accumulate diseases that you would introduce to your food crop, they’d be a much more appealing kind of ornamental, because they’re grown from tubers you could plant them in a flower bed and have them come back year after year.
Rachel Hultengren: Yeah, that would be interesting to have them as a cut flower, like a dahlia or something, but growing them has the potential of them then acting as a reservoir for viral diseases for anybody who’s actually growing potatoes.
Bill Whitson: Right.
Rachel Hultengren: And the flowers look sort of like tomato flowers?
Bill Whitson: They are, but they’re larger than tomato flowers. I’d say anything from probably 2 to 2.5 inches in diameter, something like that. On a large potato plant, you could have two to three hundred flowers that open over a period of a month or so.
Rachel Hultengren: What were you looking to change about ‘Ozette’, and what were you hoping to keep the same in its progeny?
Bill Whitson: Yeah, it’s hard to have any expectations before you’ve seen some progeny from a potato, because potatoes are so genetically diverse. A lot of the crop plants that we work with are heavily inbred, so they’re homozygous for most of the traits that we care about – there’s not a lot of genetic diversity in there. So you can look at the parents and have a pretty good idea, if you make a cross, what kind of traits you’re likely to see.
Rachel Hultengren: What does it mean for a plant to be homozygous?
Bill Whitson: So for many crops… Many crops are diploid, which means they have two complementary sets of chromosomes.
Rachel Hultengren: Like humans?
Bill Whitson: Like humans. And if you’re homozygous, then each of the two alleles that you have for any given gene are the same. So there’s no chance, for example, if a homozygous plant pollinates itself, that you will get a different result, because no matter how you recombine two alleles that are the same, they’re still the same.
If you take two plants that are homozygous, but have different versions of that gene, then you get a very predictable mixing of the two. That’s how you, for example, get an F1 hybrid; you take two highly inbred plants and cross them, and you know you’re going to get a uniform result from that cross, because those two alleles are going to be intermixed evenly. So with an inbred plant you can get reasonably predictable results.
But potatoes have never been inbred; biologically, they’re an outbreeding species, so they have all kinds of obstacles to self-pollination, and as a result they are highly genetically diverse. And there’s an additional layer of complexity, in that most potatoes are polyploids. They’re specifically tetraploids, which means that instead of having two sets of chromosomes like a diploid, they have four sets of chromosomes. So you have twice the possible genetic complexity in there. And none of that has ever been inbred to achieve stabilization.
So the first time you grow a potato from true seeds, you really have very little idea of what to expect. So I didn’t know what I was going to get from ‘Ozette’. And beyond the unknown of what kind of genetic diversity was in ‘Ozette alone’, it was pollinated with just incredibly diverse pollen. So really anything could have come out of these seeds. But my hope was that I would get something similar in flavor and form to ‘Ozette’, but with some color, which is why I pollinated with pollen from red and blue varieties.
Rachel Hultengren: So when you grew out all of the seeds that you were able to get – those 170 something – what did those seedlings look like?
Bill Whitson: About half of them were white to light yellow potatoes that were either round or oval with shallow eyes, and I would expect that is largely a contribution from more modern potatoes among the pollinators that I used. We also got a lot of potatoes that were… probably the next largest group were white to yellow potatoes that had blue patches around their eyes. What I didn’t see a lot of, unfortunately, was the shape of ‘Ozette’ that I wanted. So there were a few fingerlings among the batch, and there were a few that picked up the kind of color that I was hoping to see.
But really there was only one that stood out in the batch for being a potential keeper. And that was one that more-or-less kept the shape of ‘Ozette’, and kept its deep eyes, and also came out with red skin and a little bit of red flesh. So that was very close to what I was hoping for. But the problem was that in that first generation, the tubers were mostly very small. So I had hopes, but I wasn’t terribly optimistic. Sometimes in the first generation you grow a potato from seed, you only get small tubers, and then they perform much better when you replant those tubers and grow them again. But I usually have pretty good results in the seedling year. When I grow here, the seedling year tends to look very similar to what I’ll get when I grow from tubers. So I was afraid that I was going to get a variety that was close, that looked good, but that only produced marble-sized tubers for the most part. So I replanted that the next year, and was happily surprised that the tubers came out of the ground actually a little bit larger on average than ‘Ozette’, so we’re talking about the larger ones being in the range of about 5-7 inches long, and the yields were good and the taste was great! So I got really lucky; the odds of getting a keeper in the first generation out of a cross are not that great. Usually it takes me on the order of going through four to five hundred seedlings to find one that I think is worth keeping, and with ‘Ozette’ I had less than two hundred seeds, so I beat the odds there, and I got lucky in one generation of selection, which is great.
Rachel Hultengren: In one of your emails, you compared it to pulling a winning lottery ticket on the first try –
Bill Whitson: Right.
Rachel Hultengren: – which seems like a great metaphor.
Bill Whitson: Yeah, you can do that with clonally propagated plants. You know, it’s not necessarily the expectation that you would have, but with plants that are seed-propagated, where they’re inbred, you typically have to go through the period of stabilization, and that may take up to seven years before you get that plant to the point where, when you grow it from seed, you get uniform results. So the wonder of cloning is that if you have a tuber, you can make more tubers, and those will all produce the same phenotype over time. So there’s no stabilization required, there’s just the period of bulking up your seed tubers to the point where you can plant the amount that you want.
Rachel Hultengren: So you said that it tastes really good – I was wondering: how do you taste the candidate lines that you’re looking at when you’re breeding a new variety?
Bill Whitson: Well the first thing I do is kind of a rough pass, looking for anything that has traits that I don’t think will be acceptable. So I tend to just throw out round white potatoes without even a taste test, because I’m just not very interested in them. I tend to throw out any potatoes that have just unacceptable form or yield. But past that point, I’m usually left with about half the crop, and I taste all of those. Every potato goes in the microwave and I taste a bite or two to get a sense for it. At certain times of the year I may not even need to eat any other meals that day (laughs) because I’m just taste-testing potatoes all day. But it was fairly straightforward with ‘Rozette’, because I didn’t have that many progeny from that plant. I probably taste tested about 60 of them.
Rachel Hultengren: That still seems like quite a lot – that’s a lot of potatoes.
Bill Whitson: I don’t necessarily eat the whole tuber, though. In many cases, it only takes a bite to determine that I’m not interested in growing that one anymore. And maybe 5% or less of the crop will either have a flavor that I immediately recognize as good, or at least good enough that I want to give it a bigger try.
Rachel Hultengren: Putting potatoes in the microwave and taking a bite – that sounds like it is similar to the way that maybe the average consumer would eat a potato. But there are so many different ways to eat a potato – do you do any more advanced testing to see if a line would do well as a potato chip or a French fry, for example?
Bill Whitson: I generally don’t do any of that. I will cook a potato in more ways once I’ve decided that it’s worth keeping around, but the microwave taste-test serves as a pretty good proxy, in general. I’m able to tell, more or less, what the texture of the potato is like and what the flavor of the potato is like, and generally I don’t have any surprises when I go on to prepare the potato in other ways. But I never consider things like chipping or fry color or any of those… Those are all characteristics that are very important to commercial commodity potato growers, but they don’t really hold much interest for me.
I’m probably never going to breed a variety that is going to be grown as a commodity crop, so I don’t even consider those kinds of traits.
Rachel Hultengren: Who is your target market for a new variety? Who do you keep in mind when you’re making selections?
Bill Whitson: Well, first me. Really I’m ultimately breeding potatoes that I like, and if other people like them too, that’s great. I don’t really have a set of criteria in mind for other people. So the people, in general, who are most interested in what I breed are home growers and small market gardeners. And that’s because the varieties that I select tend to be varieties that are going to require hand harvesting. I tend to select smaller potatoes; I tend to select potatoes that don’t senesce uniformly, and so they’re not ideal for harvesting with a tractor. So the people that grow what I produce are generally going to be working by hand or they’re going to have smaller two-wheeled tractors, things like that. And that’s a pretty big limitation.
The average tuber size that I select is about 3 inches; that’s about half the size that they typically shoot for in commodity potatoes. And that makes a big difference in mechanical harvesting. A lot of the potato equipment that’s available for tractors is going to pass through a lot of the tubers at a 3 inch tuber size and just make a mess instead of picking them all up and packing them up neatly for the farmer. So I’m really targeting small scale production.
Rachel Hultengren: How would you describe the overarching goal of your potato breeding program?
Bill Whitson: It’s pretty much the same as my goal with all the crops I work with, which is to introduce new flavors, forms, and colors that are not common in the existing commercial crop. And so with potatoes, that’s pretty easy. Potatoes are vastly more diverse in South America than they are in North America. In the Andes alone, they have about 5,000 landraces (or cultivars depending on how you look at it). And those range incredibly widely. They tend to be a bit smaller than the potatoes that we’ve selected for growing in North America and Europe, but they have a wide variety of skin and flesh colors in different combinations, they have all kinds of different forms and shapes. They can have very very deep eyes. There are all kinds of different forms, and the colors are nothing like what you’ll find in commercial potatoes. So they’ll very often have, for example, a mix of vivid yellow and red or blue flesh in the same variety. Many of the skin patterns involve two different colors, so you could have a variety, for example, that’s deep blue with bright yellow eyes, or deep red with yellow eyes. Red and white or blue and white – there are just a lot of combinations.
So my goal is to introduce, as much as possible, that kind of diversity in a package that people can grow at the very least in the Pacific Northwest. As I mentioned earlier, one of the problems with Andean potatoes is that they don’t form tubers until later in the year – they have a short-day photoperiod. And so that rules out their cultivation in most of North America, but in the maritime Pacific Northwest, we have mild falls, it’s possible to grow those varieties. And one of the things I’m able to do through breeding is to select potatoes those that have those kinds of really interesting appearances and fantastic flavors of the Andean potatoes but that also form tubers at least a little bit earlier in the year. So it’s a slow process, but I’m selecting for varieties that will set tubers at 13 or 14 hours instead of 12. That can get you as much as a month earlier, and make it really much more practical to grow these kinds of varieties, again at least here in the Pacific Northwest.
Rachel Hultengren: Yeah, a month makes a huge difference, in terms of, at least here in the Pacific Northwest, how much rain you’re getting and the chance of frost. So if you can move that tuber harvest up into the early fall, that would make a big difference.
Bill Whitson: Yeah, absolutely. And I know that difference very well (laughs), because we get something between 110 and 120 inches of rain here, but most of that comes between October and May. So (laughs) if I can get a variety that I can harvest in September, that’s a huge difference for me. Because otherwise I’m standing out in the field while we get 2 or 3 inches of rain a day, harvesting potatoes. So I’m highly motivated to find varieties that I can harvest while the weather is still at least a little bit dryer.
Rachel Hultengren: Yeah, that sounds like it would be a tough harvest day, or several, depending on how many potatoes you have in the field.
Bill Whitson: Right.
Rachel Hultengren: I’m curious when you got into potato breeding. When did this start for you?
Bill Whitson: I guess around 2007. I started breeding plants around 2005, mostly on a lark. I read a copy of Carol Deppe’s Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, and I thought, “Well that would be a good hobby.” And yeah, I don’t have a farming background or gardening or anything, really. I had never really grown any vegetables before I decided I would take a crack at breeding them.
Rachel Hultengren: That was quite an inspiring book.
Bill Whitson: Yeah, I guess I was looking for something at the time, and it sounded interesting. So I thought the thing to do would be to pick a crop that really nobody works on, because at least then you’d have a chance of discovering something new and interesting. So I put my early efforts into working with the Jerusalem artichoke, which is a crop that, although it has seen some breeding work, it has been mostly toward using it for biofuels. There hasn’t really been much work done on it in terms of making it a better edible.
But the Jerusalem artichoke is a terrible plant to breed with (laughs), and a really terrible choice for a new vegetable breeder, because it turns out to be horribly complicated.
Rachel Hultengren: So you shifted your focus to potato – is potato that much easier of a crop for a new vegetable breeder?
Bill Whitson: Right, so one led me to the other. The thing about the potato was that there was just a mountain of research on the potato. You know, lots of people breed potatoes, and there were hundreds of papers about breeding potatoes for every paper that existed on the Jerusalem artichoke. So it really became the plant that taught me plant breeding. For several years, I just read four or five different papers every day to try to get a handle on potato breeding. So now I tend to think of all plants kind of like potatoes because it was what I started with. I guess you could say it’s my root metaphor for plant breeding.
Rachel Hultengren: You’ve written that “failure is a good teacher” on one of your blogs posts that I read, in reference to starting out in potato breeding. What were some of the lessons you learned early on?
Bill Whitson: Oh, well I mean, maybe the most valuable lesson is that it’s almost impossible to compete with commercial potato breeders in the commodity potato field. And honestly, I wasn’t that interested in it anyway. But it doesn’t take much potato breeding to realize how… what kind of numbers you have to deal with to select the next great ‘Russet Burbank’-style potatoes. Those guys will plant a hundred thousand seedlings, and from those hundred thousand seedlings maybe introduce one new variety. If you want to make the next ‘Russet Burbank’, and you want a variety that has good disease resistance, excellent yield, uniform coverage in the field, perfect chipping ability, the right fry color that they want, you’re probably not going to achieve that on a small scale. The numbers involved are just crazy.
So if you grow a thousand Russet potatoes, you might think, “Well, odds are I’m gonna find a good one in there” and you will. You’ll find a good one. But it won’t be the equal of a commercial commodity potato on even half of the criteria that they consider important. It’s just such a crazy numbers game. Again, you would have to win the lottery, but you’re gonna have to buy a lot of tickets to compete in that world.
Rachel Hultengren: So you’ve pledged this variety and 36 other new varieties to the Open Source Seed Initiative, and I wanted to talk a little bit about intellectual property as it relates to potatoes. What sort of intellectual property can be applied in potatoes?
Bill Whitson: Well, you can… I mean, there are really only two methods that are common. The most common by far is to get Plant Variety Protection in the U.S. or what in other countries is called “Plant Breeder’s Rights”; that’s a monopoly enforced by the government for 20 years, where you can prevent any other parties from propagating the variety, but it is fair game to use for breeding. You can also potentially seek patents. Patents are a thornier matter with plants. You can potentially get a utility patent for certain kinds of traits. There’s some debate about whether or not that’s in the spirit of the patent code, but people have certainly done it. It’s more common for people to seek patents when they’re doing genetic engineering than when they’re doing conventional breeding, but it is definitely possible to get patents for conventional breeding. And patents also, I think, last for 20 years. But they give you a lock on propagation but also breeding. So the main distinction between the two is that with Plant Variety Protection people can at least use the variety for breeding.
Rachel Hultengren: Well, so to be clear – there are Utility Patents, which only since the 1980’s have people been able to apply to plants, and then there are Plant Patents, which came about back in the 1930’s for asexually propagated species. But even though potatoes are an asexually propagated species, potatoes and other tuber-producing food crops were excluded from that legislation.
Bill Whitson: Yeah, it’s weird isn’t it? So you can get PVP or you can get a utility patent, but for some reason you can’t get a plant patent for a tuber. (Laughs) It’s weird.
Rachel Hultengren: Yeah, the intellectual property landscape is not particularly straightforward in most cases. Is there a story that encapsulates for you the need for the Open Source Seed Initiative?
Bill Whitson: Well, my previous career was in the software development world. So I’ve been involved in patents for various software features. And in the time that I worked in software development, I went from a general feeling that patents were probably a good thing that increased innovation – which is kind of the standard party line – to being a lot more skeptical about them. And those were through encounters with patent law through software. So one example would be just the small amount of work that it actually takes to get a patent that can really ruin someone else’s company. And that doesn’t feel like it enhances innovation to me. So that made me pretty skeptical about intellectual property. I mean, I’m not completely opposed to it. I don’t necessarily have a better idea, in some cases. I’m not even necessarily opposed to using things like Plant Variety Protection. I think it’s overall a fairly balanced system that I don’t object to. But I think it’s good to have a greater diversity of options. So the OSSI really provides people a kind of option that didn’t exist before. And I think open-source has been really good for the software industry in a lot of ways. So I don’t know where open-source seeds are going, but I think it’s good to have that option, and I’m happy to encourage it as much as possible.
Rachel Hultengren: That’s a unique perspective, to come from the tech industry where you have experience both in patents and in open source for code, and then apply that thinking in plants.
Bill Whitson: Yeah. I don’t have the experience, though, in the plant breeding field to see what all the effects of intellectual property have been in plant breeding. I mean I see some of that from kind of a more distant perspective. I think that’s where OSSI is a really good idea, because although it’s not likely that there’re going to be a bunch of big companies or university breeders that are going to want to use my germplasm as a starting point, it at least gets some varieties out there that can act as a monkey-wrench and slow that system down and maybe make people think about it a little more. I think one of the great things about the OSSI is you get a packet of seeds that has the pledge on it, and so now, maybe you’ve never thought before about the intersection of intellectual property and plant breeding. And you’ve just got that little snippet that makes you, maybe for the first time, think about that and take a position on it.
Rachel Hultengren: Going back to ‘Rozette’ – I assume that you named it that because it came from ‘Ozette’ and has rose colored skin.
Bill Whitson: Pretty much!
Rachel Hultengren: I was wondering – did you consider any other names for it?
Bill Whitson: I hate naming varieties. (Laughs) It’s my least favorite part of the process.
Rachel Hultengren: Why’s that?
Bill Whitson: I don’t know. I don’t find it easy. I spend far too much time thinking about it; I never really get to anything that I find particularly satisfying. So normally I just name varieties using a pattern. So for the past few years it’s been place names in the Pacific Northwest, particularly the Olympic Peninsula. So I have a book of old place names for western Washington, and I just open it to a random page and pick something, for the most part.
But for ‘Rozette’, it just seemed kind of obvious. It’s somewhat descriptive, it’s a little bit cute, but I only picked the name because it was easy. Normally that’s the part that I just – yeah, I really don’t like.
Rachel Hultengren: Have you ever considered partnering with a small child, and just giving them that role entirely for your company? Being like, “Your only job is to give me interesting plant names”?
Bill Whitson: Well, I have a couple of nieces that are just about to that age, where they’ll probably be good at that. So I think that’s a good idea. I would be happy to outsource that to elementary school kids at any time.
Rachel Hultengren: You could probably pay them with ice cream.
Bill Whitson: Absolutely. (Laughs)
Rachel Hultengren: Would you have any advice for somebody who’s interested in getting into plant breeding, possibly into potato breeding?
Bill Whitson: So for plant breeding in general, I would say, “Just do it.” Don’t overthink it. Buy some varieties, grow them in close proximity to one another, let the insects cross them up, save the seed, plant it out and see if you get anything new and interesting. People tend to think that it’s harder than it is. I mean, there are certainly elements to it that are hard, and where you’ll benefit from doing your research and learning more. But as Joseph Lofthouse likes to point out, plant breeding for most of human history was done by illiterate farmers. So you don’t need to spend a whole lot of time reading and researching to get started. You just need to start growing and breeding plants.
As for potatoes – if you want to breed potatoes, find someone who you can get true potato seeds from. Because starting from potato tubers, particularly of existing commercial varieties, is just hard, and it’s unnecessarily hard. I went through that phase of trying to grow from all the commercial potatoes that are available, and so many of them are just poor flowerers, have male sterility, and other problems that it’s really hard to get off the ground in many places.
So I can sell you potato seeds – it’s a large part of what I sell. You can get them through something like the Kenosha Potato Project, or you can find someone else you know who’s growing potatoes. You can potentially get them from the USDA. There are lots of sources. It’s just going to be a lot easier and your progress is going to be a lot faster if you start from seed.
Rachel Hultengren: Is there anything else you would like to tell us about the story of breeding ‘Rozette’?
Bill Whitson: If you’re interested in breeding potatoes and you haven’t done it before, that could be an encouraging story for you. Because although it took a while to get to the point where I could actually get a berry from that variety and get seed, from that point it really only took one generation of selection. I grew out something like 150 seedlings and whittled that down to one variety that offered something new and unique. The space required to do that is probably only about two to three hundred square feet. So it’s something that someone could easily do in their backyard.
You’re not necessarily going to discover the next big commodity potato, but it’s pretty easy to discover a new variety that you’ll certainly be very happy with and want to grow for yourself and your family for many years.
Rachel Hultengren: Well, Bill, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been a real pleasure to get to hear the story of ‘Rozette’, and about your potato breeding.
Bill Whitson: Absolutely – thanks so much!
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Rachel Hultengren: We’ve been speaking today with Bill Whitson of Cultivariable about his potato variety ‘Rozette’. If you’d like to grow ‘Rozette’, tubers should be available from the Cultivariable website in 2020.
To see some stunning photos of potato flowers and ‘Rozette’ itself, check out our show-notes on the Open Source Seed Initiative’s website at osseeds.org. Bill has also written a blog post about the process of selecting ‘Rozette’, which we’ll link to in our show-notes. If you’d like to find true potato seed for your own potato breeding project, you’ll also find links in the show-notes to the various sources that Bill mentioned during our conversation.
Let us know what you thought of this episode by tweeting @OSSeeds. You can find us and like the Open Source Seed Initiative on Facebook. If you’d like, you can give us a review on iTunes, which will help other potential listeners find us there, or you can just tell a friend! Our theme music is by Lee Rosevere.
Thanks for listening! Until next time, I’m your host, Rachel Hultengren and this has been Free the Seed!