Your welcome we got a few nice watermelons from those old frozen seeds.Although I had a stoke which put a stop to garening for awhile .But it dose work. We only planted a few seeds so what we planted worked.
I have been curled up in the fetal position ever since the last election but am slowly turning back to normal.
If you hybridized your own varieties, you have done more than I have. I am too lazy to dehisce the blossoms and all. I know how to do it, but I would rather just select from OP varieties for stuff that grows in my microclimate. Our peppers and tomatoes are mostly grown in greenhouses, so we get little cross-pollination. Squashes and pumpkins require work, too, unless you only plant one variety of each of the 4 species of squashes, or just one variety period.
I didn't hybridize, I tried to unhybridized and get a variety based on one of the originals that would reproduce consistently and better than the original. I never accomplished it. I always came up with freaky-looking results. My main goal with tomatoes was to get one that was a great producer of a medium-sized tomato in minimal time. One that would produce by the third week in June. Some years I could get them planted by the end of April but most years it was the middle of May before no frost. I finally went to making burlap covers to go over old copper-clad telephone wire stringers held up by steel fence post as a breathable frost guard.
I have de-hybridized peppers, but never achieved results as good as the hybrid, and there are already so many good OP varieties out there that finding the right one is the best way to go for us amateurs. Are you familiar with Carol Deppe's work?
I was at my friend's greenhouse today and another guy I know came in with a bucket of yellow tomatoes. I forget what variety they are, but they are no longer available in any form. I imagine that some new variety came along that gave better crop yields and these got displaced (just as Bermuda onions were, except their seeds are still available.) Agriculture is a fickle mistress... His family has been growing these tomatoes for generations and saving the seeds. Something happened with the stash of seeds his mother had saved and he lost the crop for a while, then at some point he came across a stash of seeds his grandmother had set aside, so he's been back in business...and he continues to save the seeds.
So this germination inhibitor is to keep the mature seed from germinating inside the tomato? And does the alcohol from fermentation remove it where just a soak in water wouldn't? I feel like I'm asking dumb questions.
It is not alcohol that removes the inhibitor. It is the actions of the fungus and bacteria that do so. Tomato seeds just dried and saved will still usually germinate eventually, but germination is quicker and the rate is higher if you ferment them first. All commercially available tomato seeds are fermented before drying. Not a dumb question at all.
That's very interesting. I make chocolate covered almonds, and I learned that the first thing lots of folks do with their edible nuts & seeds is to soak them so as to dissolve the enzyme inhibitors. Then they re-dehydrate them. As you know, those enzyme inhibitors keep a dried seed's food source intact, waiting for wet enough conditions to dissolve and make the food available to the sprout. But eating those enzyme inhibitors can also inhibit our digestive enzymes, thus making nuts & seeds "difficult to digest." So the above process is used to get rid of the enzyme inhibitors before eating the seeds/nuts. I have noticed that it makes the almonds way less mealy. I never gave thought to the mechanism with those seeds that naturally exist in a wet environment. Sounds like a mirror-image process.
Thanks for that last. My feelings have been hurt enough this week, LOL. Long story. I may talk about it later. I had the cops called on me. That's a teaser. I'd never thought about it but of course there must be some way to keep the seed from sprouting too early. The whole process seems so complex. It reminds me of the Christian apologists who look for things in nature that don't seem like they could have evolved.
I think all seeds have inhibition mechanisms that allow the seed to wait for the most ideal conditions, but those naturally in a wet environment seem to be the strongest for obvious reasons.