Post G22-019: Parthenocarpic Catch-22.

 

The question.

Recall Post G22-013, where I proposed to bypass last year’s troubles with cucumber beetles and squash vine borer by growing parthenocarpic varieties of both plants.  A parthenocarpic plant is one that produces fruit without fertilization, that is, without pollination.   No bees needed, which means I can grow them inside an insect-proof enclosure, excluding the bees along with the pests.

The resulting fruits are sterile and lack fully-developed seeds.

I have to admit, as I ordered up a few packs of seeds for various parthenocarpic cucumbers and squash, I did have this nagging little question:  How do they produce viable seeds from parthenocarpic plants?  Isn’t “seedless cucumber seeds” an oxymoron?

I stifled that question and ordered the seeds anyway.  The seeds I bought were offered by a presumably reputable seed merchant.  And I know that greenhouse-based farms produce plenty of produce from parthenocarpic varieties.  Didn’t seem like much of a risk.

That said, buying seeds for seedless cucumbers does seem like a bit of a Catch-22.  Or maybe a chicken and egg problem.  Perhaps my local nursery stocks the seedless cucumber seeds right next to the dehydrated water.

At the time of purchase, I noted a seemingly unusual percentage of purchasers’ comments complaining of low or no germination rate.  But you see comments like that on the sites of any seed vendor.  I chalked up the squawking to the relatively high cost per seed.  These parthenocarpic varieties seem to sell for anywhere between 25 cents and 50 cents per seed A poor germination rate is not much different from mulching your plants with ground-up dollar bills.

And now, of the 20 seeds planted (five different varieties, three cucumber, two squash), in peat pellets, exactly four seeds appear to have sprouted.  These are from two cucumber varieties.  All the rest of my new whiz-bang parthenocarpic seeds appear to be duds.

But is that normal?  And is it true that they failed to sprout, or is there some other explanation?  Because if that’s really the germination rate, I paid somewhere around $1.75 per viable seed.    For cucumbers and squash.  Which feels more akin to mulching your plants with $20 bills.

So that gets back to the main question of this post:  How, exactly, do seed vendors produce seeds for parthenocarpic varieties?  (Or, more simply, where do seedless cucumber seeds come from?) And is there usually a low germination rate for parthenocarpic varieties?


The answers.

As it turns out, there are several ways in which you can get viable seeds for “seedless” parthenocarpic plants.   But as far as I can tell, the most common parthenocarpic varieties are F1 (first-generation) hybrids.  So, by and large, you don’t get seedless cucumber seeds from seedless cucumbers.  You manufacture them by crossing two seeded varieties that generate the parthenocarpic (seedless) first-generation hybrid offspring.

Of the five varieties I planted, four of the five ( Diva Cucumber, Sweet Success Cucumber, Easy Pick Gold II squash, and Golden Glory squash) are either explicitly marketed as F1 hybrids, or simply as hybrids.

For those, there’s no fundamental reason they would have any lower germination rate than any other F1 hybrid.  These same varieties are planted by commercial farmers growing produce in greenhouses and poly tunnels.  Presumably, they wouldn’t put up with extremely low germination rates.

The sole exception to the F1 rule is Little Leaf cucumber.  As it turns out, that is an open-pollinated variety, not a hybrid.  But that’s also a gynoecious variety — that is, it produces all (or nearly all) female flowers.  Thus, you can get a Little Leaf cucumber with seeds, in the rare event that a male flower is produced that fertilizes one of the many female flowers.

So the upshot is that of the five seedless varieties I’ve chosen, four are F1 (first-generation) hybrids, so the seeds for them are actually produced by crossing two non-parthenocarpic varieties.   I don’t think they’ll produce seeds under any circumstances.  And the last one is seedless, but only because the plants are rarely fertilized owing to its gynoecious nature.  It’ll produce either seeded or seedless cucumbers, depending.

Now that I know how this works, I’ve done what I should have done from the start, and dissected the peat pellets that I planted these in.  Mystery solved: There are no seeds inside.  Plausibly, some birds came by and pecked the seeds out while I had these sitting outside.  So all I need to do is replant, and be a bit more careful, and I should be able to proceed according to plan.

I’ll report back on the actual (bird-free) germination rate in a couple of weeks.

Post #1519: Inflation and Occam’s Razor

 

The American penchant for ignoring the rest of the world never ceases to amaze me.  And so, after reading my N-hundreth story about U.S. inflation rate — with nary a whisper about the rest of the world — I felt motivated to blog about the elephant in this particular room.

Much of the reporting on U.S. inflation is fundamentally idiotic.  It’s noise generated for political advantage, with no content.  It’s all about exploiting an opportunity for finger-pointing.  It lacks substance because all of that reporting assumes there’s some unique U.S. cause to our unique U.S. inflation.

I was going to invest maybe a whole ten minutes in looking up the current inflation rate in selected countries.  But this is the age of the internet.  Maybe somebody put all that information in one convenient place.

So that, if for some peculiar reason, you, as an American, actually wanted to know what the inflation rate was in countries other than the U.S.A., you wouldn’t even have to search for it.  Just look it up on the Financial Times website.

This takes the drama out of doing this one country at a time, but it gets right down to the bottom line.  Here are graphs of the inflation rate in the U.S., North America, Europe, Asia (other than China), and the world as a whole.  (I exclude China because they don’t have a credible domestic inflation measure.)  These are all taken from the Financial Times website.

Notice anything?

Now it’s time for Occam’s Razor.  On the one hand, maybe each of these countries has some unique, specific factors boosting their individual rates of inflation.  Simultaneously.

Or, just maybe, something has happened world-wide, to cause prices to rise.  But it’s so tough to imagine what could possibly account for an increase in inflation in almost the entire industrialized world.  It’s not as if these countries had anything in common over the past couple of years.

In any event, this is why I’ve had my fill of U.S. reporting on inflation.  It’s just so damned dumb.  The endless blather about why it’s due to this, that, or the other uniquely American factor.  The constant drumbeat of whom to blame for it.  But mostly, the absolute unwillingness to take five minutes, look around, and note that this is  not an American issue, it’s a global phenomenon.

 

Post G22-018, Sprawl method for tomatoes.

 

End-of-season edit:  When all is said and done, I won’t be doing the sprawl method again with full-sized tomatoes.  Maybe I planted these too closely, but I ended up with a tangled mass of vines, weighted down by the fruit.  A lot of tomatoes ended up rotting.  Either you can’t see them, or you can’t get to them, or they end up on the ground.  It’s a lot less effort to grow them, compared to staking them up, but you don’t get much in the end. 

Everything else here:  Cold-tolerant tomatoes, and electric fence as deer deterrent, gets two thumbs up.  I now plan on growing cold-tolerant (short-season) tomatoes every year.

I’m now in Phase III of my four-part tomato strategy for 2022.  I outlined that in  my first garden post of 2022 (G22-001).  It’s time for an update.  I’m posting it because otherwise I’ll never be able to recall how things went this season. Continue reading Post G22-018, Sprawl method for tomatoes.

Post #1516, COVID-19 trend, now 31/100K/day, rising 23%/week

 

At this point, I could probably just copy a post from any random day in the past month or so, and I doubt anyone would notice.  New cases continue to grow roughly 25 percent per week.  Today’s case count of 31/100K/day is there just a matter of arithmetic, plus or minus some random variation. Continue reading Post #1516, COVID-19 trend, now 31/100K/day, rising 23%/week

Post #1513: William and Mary, last COVID-19 update for the semester

 

The uptick in new COVID-19 cases at William and Mary that started a few weeks back appears to be ending.   But, because students have been/continue to leave the campus at the end of the semester, that’s not crystal clear.  But the current week continues the downward trend seen last week.

Source:  Calculated from William and Mary COVID-19 dashboard, accessed 5-16-2022.

You can see that the infection rate for the comparable (age 18-24) Virginia population rose last week, in line with the overall increase in the official count of new infections in Virginia.

For sure, this is the last usable reading for the semester. Everyone but the Seniors has gone home at this point.

In truth, this is likely to be my last update ever.  My daughter graduates this year, and I no longer have a reason to track after that.  Let’s hope that by that time fall semester rolls around, the new case rates are so low that nobody need to bother to track it.