How to Clone A Cabbage Inside your Organic Vegetable Garden
Why develop cabbages, and other brassica, from seed - whenever you can clone them! You just dig up a cabbage root and split the stem lengthways in four, ensuring there's some root on every piece. Dip the pieces within a rooting compound and store them in slightly damp sand indoors over winter. In spring, plant out the cuttings. It yields an identical clone from the cabbage.
You shouldnt do it for as well many years, nevertheless, or you could possibly face difficulties of inbreeding depression. Thats the result of developing on some species as well often from their very own saved seed, without having refreshing the geneplasm eg. by mixing it with seed grown elsewhere. The plant grows more and more feeble. But, for serious gardeners like you and me, cloning is very valuable.
Why? Root division by this approach is a lot simpler than looking to gather the seeds once they are produced in year two (brassica are biennials). Its also invaluable if you have a uncommon or heirloom selection of cabbage and wish to develop it on perpetually. Should you try undertaking this from seed you have to visit fantastic labour to prevent cross-pollination which will destroy the purity on the strain. Brassica will cross-pollinate with connected varieties as much as a mile away, even with wild turnip (rape).
Clone the plant instead. Dont let it visit seed. And also you have no difficulties.
Attempt it with any brassica
You can attempt this cloning process with virtually any brassica - broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, collards or kale. It doesn't work with kohl rabi or lettuce, even so. But then, couple of individuals grow kohl-rabbi anyway and lettuces are not brassica.
Its odd that no modern textbook author seems to have heard of cloning a cabbage. The idea has been about to get a really extended time. Robert Thompson devoted a sizable section to this technique within the Gardeners Assistant, 1871.
A leaf stem was reduce in the brassica. They didnt have rooting compound in these days, naturally. Alternatively, the stem base was rolled in newly slaked lime, dry wood ashes or powdered charcoal then sunk in to the side of a clay pot filled with damp sand. The pot was covered and kept moist. In the event you were fortunate, roots formed and you had a new plant, prepared to set out again.
No gardening author has written about that notion given that Thompson, so far as I can establish. But the friend who alerted me to this reference mentioned, his grandfather had grown cabbages that way all his life. It was widespread understanding in the Victorian era.
Did they clone cabbages inside the Renaissance?
If cloning a cabbage is so simple, it may well explain how new varieties of brassica like Brussels sprouts and Savoys have been created and stabilised in the 16 th and 17 th centuries. We just dont know how they did it. No records have come down to us.
Nevertheless it seems implausible that, as soon as a farmer saw an fascinating new mutation appear by possibility, he would isolate it from other cabbages inside a field a single mile distant. Instead, he would grow it alongside his other cabbages. The seed on the mutated range would then cross with that of other cabbages as well as the distinctive new strain will be lost. But, indisputably, we've got Brussel sprouts. How come?
Suppose rather that the farmer took a stem cutting from that prototype Brussel sprout and he grew it on, year soon after year, with out letting it set seed? In other words, he cloned it? It was effectively within the technology of the time. So, were the first Brussel sprouts as well as other novel cabbage varieties created by cloning?
These days, we understand that other varieties of plant - tomatoes, cucurbits and peppers can also be propagated from stem cuttings ie. by cloning. Why do textbook authors rarely mention this? Maybe they havent study the best gardening books!
Why develop cabbages, and other brassica, from seed - whenever you can clone them! You just dig up a cabbage root and split the stem lengthways in four, ensuring there's some root on every piece. Dip the pieces within a rooting compound and store them in slightly damp sand indoors over winter. In spring, plant out the cuttings. It yields an identical clone from the cabbage.
You shouldnt do it for as well many years, nevertheless, or you could possibly face difficulties of inbreeding depression. Thats the result of developing on some species as well often from their very own saved seed, without having refreshing the geneplasm eg. by mixing it with seed grown elsewhere. The plant grows more and more feeble. But, for serious gardeners like you and me, cloning is very valuable.
Why? Root division by this approach is a lot simpler than looking to gather the seeds once they are produced in year two (brassica are biennials). Its also invaluable if you have a uncommon or heirloom selection of cabbage and wish to develop it on perpetually. Should you try undertaking this from seed you have to visit fantastic labour to prevent cross-pollination which will destroy the purity on the strain. Brassica will cross-pollinate with connected varieties as much as a mile away, even with wild turnip (rape).
Clone the plant instead. Dont let it visit seed. And also you have no difficulties.
Attempt it with any brassica
You can attempt this cloning process with virtually any brassica - broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, collards or kale. It doesn't work with kohl rabi or lettuce, even so. But then, couple of individuals grow kohl-rabbi anyway and lettuces are not brassica.
Its odd that no modern textbook author seems to have heard of cloning a cabbage. The idea has been about to get a really extended time. Robert Thompson devoted a sizable section to this technique within the Gardeners Assistant, 1871.
A leaf stem was reduce in the brassica. They didnt have rooting compound in these days, naturally. Alternatively, the stem base was rolled in newly slaked lime, dry wood ashes or powdered charcoal then sunk in to the side of a clay pot filled with damp sand. The pot was covered and kept moist. In the event you were fortunate, roots formed and you had a new plant, prepared to set out again.
No gardening author has written about that notion given that Thompson, so far as I can establish. But the friend who alerted me to this reference mentioned, his grandfather had grown cabbages that way all his life. It was widespread understanding in the Victorian era.
Did they clone cabbages inside the Renaissance?
If cloning a cabbage is so simple, it may well explain how new varieties of brassica like Brussels sprouts and Savoys have been created and stabilised in the 16 th and 17 th centuries. We just dont know how they did it. No records have come down to us.
Nevertheless it seems implausible that, as soon as a farmer saw an fascinating new mutation appear by possibility, he would isolate it from other cabbages inside a field a single mile distant. Instead, he would grow it alongside his other cabbages. The seed on the mutated range would then cross with that of other cabbages as well as the distinctive new strain will be lost. But, indisputably, we've got Brussel sprouts. How come?
Suppose rather that the farmer took a stem cutting from that prototype Brussel sprout and he grew it on, year soon after year, with out letting it set seed? In other words, he cloned it? It was effectively within the technology of the time. So, were the first Brussel sprouts as well as other novel cabbage varieties created by cloning?
These days, we understand that other varieties of plant - tomatoes, cucurbits and peppers can also be propagated from stem cuttings ie. by cloning. Why do textbook authors rarely mention this? Maybe they havent study the best gardening books!
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