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jal_ut
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Carrot Seed

I harvested my carrot seed. It is formed in a head called an umbel. The individual seeds have little spines on them and look like burrs. Once they are threshed some and the chaff removed they begin to look like carrot seeds.

[img]https://donce.lofthouse.com/jamaica/carrot_seed.jpg[/img]

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rainbowgardener
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I've never harvested carrot seed, never left carrots to go to seed. But I have harvested dill, fennel, and parsley seeds and they are all pretty similar.

DoubleDogFarm
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Both the domesticated and wild carrot are Daucus carota. We have Queen Ann's Lace all over the island.

Has anyone taken a wild carrot and tried their own breeding? Can one eventually creat a palatable carrot. Selective breeding.

Eric

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jal_ut
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Maybe Eric, but it hardly seems worth the effort unless just for the sake of the experiment. I don't think I will live long enough to do it.

Carrots are usually biennial, however I have one of this years carrots blooming in my garden right now. It looks like it would be too late to make seed this year.

I keep some of the best large roots over winter in the pit for planting and seed next year. Could one improve the strain for his own garden by doing this?

I have been doing that for years with the Charleston Gray water melons, (save the seed from the earliest and best) but can't say for sure if it has improved the strain for my garden. Every season is different and what works this year may not work next year.

DoubleDogFarm
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:shock:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2908163/

I'm pretty sure saving your own seed is at least acclimatizing them.

Eric

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gixxerific
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jal_ut wrote: I keep some of the best large roots over winter in the pit for planting and seed next year. Could one improve the strain for his own garden by doing this?
It is very possilbe by doing this. Some may call it selective breeding, climatazation, a Landrace whatever. Theoretically you would choose the best tasting, earliest, color, biggest, prettiest, least stinky etc. Of course this takes time with subseqeunt generations to keep producing a crop with the genes you are looking for.

Weather and other factors that is a whole 'nother story.

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jal_ut
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It is very possilbe by doing this. Some may call it selective breeding, climatazation, a Landrace whatever.
The thing is if you keep saving the biggest and best and only a few each year because you only need a few, you may soon lose the genetic diversity of the strain. They may become so inbred they will lose vigor. I don't know.

It is certainly selective. I won't call it selective breeding unless the gardener actually gets involved in the hand pollination of the plants, where the cross is strictly controlled.

Landrace? Now that is a word that hardly belongs in the garden nomenclature. Wikipedia has about the only definition of the term that I could find. "A landrace is a local variety of a domesticated animal or plant species which has developed largely by natural processes, by adaptation to the natural and cultural environment in which it lives."

So, if you consider "developed largely by natural processes" that pretty much eliminates anything that a gardener has selected from the classification of a "landrace". Right? So why do gardeners keep referring to landraces? I don't get it.

I think you may improve a strain for your garden and improve climatization but you will do it at the expense of genetic diversity unless you save seed from a large number of plants each year. On the down side, who needs that much seed? Those in the business of selling seed maybe, but not me.

It would take some space to grow 50 individuals per variety and save the seed and especially for 20 or so cultivars. It is also a lot of work. It may require this though if you want to keep up the genetic diversity of the strain.

I have been saving seed from a variety of watermelon for quite a number of years now. It was a good performer the first time I grew it and still is. I can't say if there has been any improvement. I do save seed from quite a number of plants each season and mix them all together and just grab a handful to plant next year.

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soil
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I let carrots bloom for seed too. people say it will cross with queen annes lace which it can. Here they bloom in completely different times of year so it's not a problem.

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applestar
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Yeah. I think I ended up with Queen Anne's Lace crossed ones -- the leaves were fuzzy and the roots were white and woody. There was a black spot in the middle of the flower heads. I let some of them bloom for the beneficial insects then pulled them for the compost pile -- so they were not total waste.

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jal_ut
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Queen Anne's Lace is missing from the landscape here. I don't think I have a problem with that.

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jal_ut
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Report on the germination test. In 4 days I had 80% germination. I am happy.



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