The way to Clone A Cabbage In your Organic Vegetable Garden
Why grow cabbages, and also other brassica, from seed - if you can clone them! You basically dig up a cabbage root and split the stem lengthways in 4, ensuring there is some root on every piece. Dip the pieces inside a rooting compound and retailer them in slightly damp sand indoors more than winter. In spring, plant out the cuttings. It yields an identical clone in the cabbage.
You shouldnt do it for too many years, nevertheless, or you might face problems of inbreeding depression. Thats the outcome of growing on some species as well typically from their own saved seed, with out refreshing the geneplasm eg. by mixing it with seed grown elsewhere. The plant grows more and more feeble. But, for serious gardeners like you and me, cloning is extremely useful.
Why? Root division by this method is really a lot simpler than attempting to collect the seeds once they are produced in year two (brassica are biennials). Its also invaluable when you have a rare or heirloom variety of cabbage and need to develop it on perpetually. If you attempt undertaking this from seed you need to go to wonderful labour to avoid cross-pollination which will destroy the purity from the strain. Brassica will cross-pollinate with connected varieties up to a mile away, even with wild turnip (rape).
Clone the plant as an alternative. Dont let it go to seed. And you have no issues.
Try it with any brassica
You can try this cloning process with virtually any brassica - broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, collards or kale. It does not function with kohl rabi or lettuce, however. But then, couple of people grow kohl-rabbi anyway and lettuces aren't brassica.
Its odd that no modern textbook author seems to have heard of cloning a cabbage. The concept has been around to get a quite lengthy time. Robert Thompson devoted a large section to this strategy in the Gardeners Assistant, 1871.
A leaf stem was cut from the brassica. They didnt have rooting compound in those days, of course. Instead, the stem base was rolled in newly slaked lime, dry wood ashes or powdered charcoal then sunk into the side of a clay pot filled with damp sand. The pot was covered and kept moist. If you had been lucky, roots formed and also you had a brand new plant, prepared to set out once again.
No gardening author has written about that idea since Thompson, so far as I can establish. Yet the buddy who alerted me to this reference said, his grandfather had grown cabbages that way all his life. It was typical expertise inside the Victorian era.
Did they clone cabbages in the Renaissance?
If cloning a cabbage is so effortless, it may explain how new varieties of brassica like Brussels sprouts and Savoys had been created and stabilised in the 16 th and 17 th centuries. We just dont understand how they did it. No records have come down to us.
Nevertheless it appears implausible that, as soon as a farmer saw an fascinating new mutation appear by opportunity, he would isolate it from other cabbages within a field a single mile distant. Alternatively, he would grow it alongside his other cabbages. The seed of the mutated selection would then cross with that of other cabbages as well as the unique new strain will be lost. Yet, indisputably, we've Brussel sprouts. How come?
Suppose as an alternative that the farmer took a stem cutting from that prototype Brussel sprout and he grew it on, year soon after year, without letting it set seed? In other words, he cloned it? It was nicely within the technologies in the time. So, had been the very first Brussel sprouts and also other novel cabbage varieties developed by cloning?
Today, we know that other types of plant - tomatoes, cucurbits and peppers also can be propagated from stem cuttings ie. by cloning. Why do textbook authors rarely mention this? Perhaps they havent study the best gardening books!
Why grow cabbages, and also other brassica, from seed - if you can clone them! You basically dig up a cabbage root and split the stem lengthways in 4, ensuring there is some root on every piece. Dip the pieces inside a rooting compound and retailer them in slightly damp sand indoors more than winter. In spring, plant out the cuttings. It yields an identical clone in the cabbage.
You shouldnt do it for too many years, nevertheless, or you might face problems of inbreeding depression. Thats the outcome of growing on some species as well typically from their own saved seed, with out refreshing the geneplasm eg. by mixing it with seed grown elsewhere. The plant grows more and more feeble. But, for serious gardeners like you and me, cloning is extremely useful.
Why? Root division by this method is really a lot simpler than attempting to collect the seeds once they are produced in year two (brassica are biennials). Its also invaluable when you have a rare or heirloom variety of cabbage and need to develop it on perpetually. If you attempt undertaking this from seed you need to go to wonderful labour to avoid cross-pollination which will destroy the purity from the strain. Brassica will cross-pollinate with connected varieties up to a mile away, even with wild turnip (rape).
Clone the plant as an alternative. Dont let it go to seed. And you have no issues.
Try it with any brassica
You can try this cloning process with virtually any brassica - broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, collards or kale. It does not function with kohl rabi or lettuce, however. But then, couple of people grow kohl-rabbi anyway and lettuces aren't brassica.
Its odd that no modern textbook author seems to have heard of cloning a cabbage. The concept has been around to get a quite lengthy time. Robert Thompson devoted a large section to this strategy in the Gardeners Assistant, 1871.
A leaf stem was cut from the brassica. They didnt have rooting compound in those days, of course. Instead, the stem base was rolled in newly slaked lime, dry wood ashes or powdered charcoal then sunk into the side of a clay pot filled with damp sand. The pot was covered and kept moist. If you had been lucky, roots formed and also you had a brand new plant, prepared to set out once again.
No gardening author has written about that idea since Thompson, so far as I can establish. Yet the buddy who alerted me to this reference said, his grandfather had grown cabbages that way all his life. It was typical expertise inside the Victorian era.
Did they clone cabbages in the Renaissance?
If cloning a cabbage is so effortless, it may explain how new varieties of brassica like Brussels sprouts and Savoys had been created and stabilised in the 16 th and 17 th centuries. We just dont understand how they did it. No records have come down to us.
Nevertheless it appears implausible that, as soon as a farmer saw an fascinating new mutation appear by opportunity, he would isolate it from other cabbages within a field a single mile distant. Alternatively, he would grow it alongside his other cabbages. The seed of the mutated selection would then cross with that of other cabbages as well as the unique new strain will be lost. Yet, indisputably, we've Brussel sprouts. How come?
Suppose as an alternative that the farmer took a stem cutting from that prototype Brussel sprout and he grew it on, year soon after year, without letting it set seed? In other words, he cloned it? It was nicely within the technologies in the time. So, had been the very first Brussel sprouts and also other novel cabbage varieties developed by cloning?
Today, we know that other types of plant - tomatoes, cucurbits and peppers also can be propagated from stem cuttings ie. by cloning. Why do textbook authors rarely mention this? Perhaps they havent study the best gardening books!
0 comments:
Post a Comment