March 19, 2015

Good morning, gotta love learning curves. I am a big proponent of saving seeds. Last year I was running low on a couple of my tomato varieties so I decided to hold back a few fruits of these desired plants. Before I did this my tom bed had been infected with western curling disease. This disease was introduced into this bed by leaf hoppers. Western curling disease is a virus.

Well I may be slow but eventually I do arrive. For some reason one morning I was thinking of GMO's. GMO's are created with the splicing of some DNA from one source to another organism that is not even closely related. The chance of this splicing happening naturally would be worse odds than winning one of the huge lottery prizes. It just is not going to happen!! From what I gather this gene is spliced into the host cell by the use of a virus. This virus is very evident in this “new” organism and is how it is traced as a GMO.

How does this relate to the seed saving problem?

It is evident that my seeds were infected with the western curling disease when I started to grow seedlings this year. I did not see this in my Oregon Spring or my Long Keeper seeds. These seeds were saved in 2012 and 2013 respectively. These have grown really quite nicely. The Pink Eggs and New Yorkers are a different story. These seeds were taken from an infected bed.

Even though the fruit and the plants looked to be good specimens to harvest seed from, they must have been infected and not displaying the symptoms yet. The symptoms are found in the ( love these words) apical meristem (the growing point of a plant) and the plant begins to curl and become quite convoluted. Eventually the plant dies and if it has not been rouged out can potentially infect the rest of the plantings. Potentially is mild, NO it WILL infect the rest of the bed.

One of my first thoughts when I saw the curling was that some how the seedlings had been sprayed with an herbicide. The seedlings had never been out of the house!!

I have not had Western curling disease for several years. The year that I first observed the disease was back when I was not using fabric so universally in the garden. I am not sure what made last year such a banner year for the curling disease but it was. The fabric is possibly the only defense there is against this disease. The idea is to prevent the leaf hoppers from chewing on the plant and the only way to do that is to prevent the insect from having plant contact. A beneficial insect or a spray can take out the infected insect but if that insect chews on the plant before it is nuked, the damage is done.

So the moral of the story is: not only does the selected plant to save seeds from, needs to be a typical specimen of that variety, but also there must not be any signs of obvious maladies within the bed. Because the the malady could be a virus. Virus's can affect clean down to the building blocks of the plant. What an amazing lesson to have learned!!

Yes I am seeing some more signs of spring. The spring bird chorus is in full swing, noticed some willows budding out and soon the cottonwoods. Most of my beans are up, zukes and crooknecks, are up along with some butternuts. The lettuce replacements are up, and have started to out plant chili's , eggplants and toms. Of course I have the heavy fabric by the bed in case Mom Nature has another hissy fit. We can hope that spring has arrived!!!