Plant Breeding at Johnny's

Like most farmers and gardeners, you probably appreciate the results of good plant breeding. You also aren't alone if you find it mystifying. To help de-mystify it, allow me to tell short stories about how we bred six of our 41 "Bred by Johnny's" varieties.

I think that a sufficient glossary will be mostly built into the stories. But, I should say this: the basis for plant breeding, called "traditional plant breeding" in these days of biotechnology, is simply the manipulation of mating. As a breeder, you get an idea, and you manipulate mating in an attempt to get there.

Genetic engineering is something totally different — it's the mechanical transfer of a piece of DNA from a donor plant, or other kind of living thing, to another plant, with the goal of moving a trait from the donor. Mating is bypassed.

If you have questions, one of us involved in plant breeding at Johnny's will try to help.

Now here are the six stories. And after them, I'll briefly explain why we do this work.

'Butterbeans' soybean

Tom Vigue did the work on this here, at Johnny's, in the late 1970's. We had a nice green vegetable soybean variety called 'Giant Green.' One summer Tom noticed a plant that was unique, in being a bit earlier to mature, with a more compact plant form and concentrated pod set. He saved the seeds from that one plant; that's called "Single Plant Selection" (SPS), and it's as simple as it sounds. Since soybeans do not readily cross-pollinate, the SPS seeds were inbred; in other words, the plant's ovaries were self-pollinated, fertilized with the plant's own pollen.

It turns out that this SPS was stable, that its progeny (offspring) were uniform (for observable characteristics). So, there you go, a new variety. The only thing left to do was build up the seed supply.

Sounds easy, doesn't it? But remember this: Tom had to be in the field at the right time, he had to be attentive, and he had to recognize improved traits when he saw them.

'Carmen' pepper

My wife, Janika Eckert, was managing the pepper breeding at Johnny's. But it had been my program, and I was staying involved. One early summer day in 2001, I was walking through the sweet pepper nursery with Janika, and I got an idea.

In 1973, the first year of Johnny's, I had visited Fred Herbst, a seedsman in Brewster, NY, and Fred gave me seeds of an Italian bull's horn pepper. It was early and tasted great, but the plant sprawled. Janika had plants in the nursery. She also had plants of another bull's horn line that we had selected from a hybrid from Italy, that had a tall, strong plant form, nice fruits, and good taste, but later maturity. Janika made hand-crosses between the two, and in 2002 we grew the F1 hybrid — "F1" standing for "first filial," or first generation after the cross. It was wonderful. During 2002 she also made several more of the same hand-crosses, so we would have seeds to sample to others.

We entered it in the 2003 All-America Selections (AAS) trials, the only independent North American trials for newly-bred vegetables and flowers. Enough trial judges scored it highly that AAS chose it as an AAS Winner. Happy day when we heard that.

To get it on the market, we grew a lot of plants of the parents in 2003, to build up seed supply. From those seeds, we produced a commercial quantity of hybrid seeds in 2004.

Janika named it 'Carmen.' Nice name. It was announced in 2005 as a 2006 AAS Winner.

'Baby Bear' pumpkin

In 1981, I crossed 'Streaker' with 'New England Pie.' 'Streaker' was a naked (hulless) seeded pumpkin bred by Dessert Seed Company, in California. 'New England Pie' was an old, heirloom variety of small pie pumpkin. The goal was a pie pumpkin with naked seeds.

In 1982, I grew the F1 hybrid and began eight generations of self-pollinating (known by breeders as "selfing") and selection.

Selection means keeping the favorites, which, in practice, means keeping only a small portion of the population. In other words, you have to throw out most of your work each year. It's not easy to do that, but it's essential, lest you have so many projects that it becomes unmanageable, not to mention expensive. The science of genetics, and Mendelian Genetics to be specific, shows us that all of the plants in an F2 generation (second generation after the cross) will be different from one another, a quality known as heterozygosity, but that each generation of inbreeding will increase the uniformity (homozygosity) by 50 percent. Do the math, and your plants are less than one percent variable, thus, over 99 percent uniform, in the F8 generation, after 7 generations of inbreeding.

There is some vigor lost in all crops by this kind of inbreeding, but in pumpkins it isn't so bad sometimes, and the plants of JPN 659 (our pedigree number before we named it) retained good vigor.

It was in 1987 or 1988, and we had an elementary school class visiting the farm in September. When the kids walked by the pumpkin breeding nursery, I saw a couple of them drawn to that JPN 659.

It was a Winner in the All-America Selections trials in 1990, being the first vegetable AAS Winner in three years. We built up the seed supply and introduced Baby Bear in the Johnny's 1993 catalog. We also supplied seeds to other seed companies for their catalogs and packet racks.

This successful breeding work hinged on: 1) choosing the parents for the initial cross; and 2) making the single plant selections in each subsequent generation. With a crop that takes up as much space in the field as pumpkins, a breeder never has as many plants in segregating populations as s/he would like, so you're just getting the tip of the iceberg. That makes my finding that one exceptional plant that became 'Baby Bear' rather remarkable. Translate: good fortune. To balance that good fortune, there are plenty of promising parental combinations that amount to nothing.

'Racer' pumpkin

We used to sell a popcorn variety developed and grown for Johnny's by Marvin Rhodes, an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania. We called it 'Rhodes Yellow Pop.'

One harvest season, probably around 1985, Marvin sent me a sandwich bag of pumpkin seeds as a gift. He said that his children saved them each year for replanting. The variety was a medium-large jack-o'-lantern with a nice rib, color, and handle. So, beginning in 1986, I began self-pollinating and selecting it in the nursery each year, in an attempt to further refine the good traits.

University of New Hampshire professor J. Brent Loy and I cooperated on squash and pumpkin breeding. Around 1993, I sent Brent seeds of my best selection of the Rhodes pumpkin, and he crossed it with one of his small-fruited, semi-bush pumpkin lines. Bingo. A beautiful, extra-early-maturing, medium-size Hallowe'en pumpkin.

We finally had a commercial production of seeds in 1997. We named it 'Racer' and introduced it in the 1998 Johnny's catalog. 'Racer' remains one of our most popular pumpkins.

Sometime after Marvin sent me the pumpkin seeds, he wrote to me that he was moving his family, along with some other families, to begin a new life farming in Kentucky, and that he wouldn't be able to continue supplying us with popcorn seeds, at least until they had gotten re-established. That was the last I heard from him. If you know anything of Marvin or his family, please let me know.

'Racer Plus PMR' pumpkin

'PMR' stands for Powdery Mildew Resis