Seeds And Their People - EP. 26: Saving Spiny Nightshades, Breeding Cannabis, Adapting Tropical Crops, and much more with Northeastern Connecticut Botanist Bryan Connolly

Episode Date: January 12, 2024

Dr. Bryan Connolly is a botanist, horticulturalist, and professor of Biology at Eastern Connecticut University in Willimantic, CT, my (Owen's) hometown. His research interests include rare plants of New England, the nightshade family, the rose family, and cannabis. Before Eastern, Professor Connolly was a faculty member at Framingham State University in Massachusetts and also worked for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, University of Mississippi’s Medicinal Plant Garden, New England Wild Flower Society, and the Connecticut Department of Environmental Protection. He is also involved in his family farm: Cobblestone Farm CSA in Mansfield Center, CT. Bryan appreciates his family's tolerance of his growing unusual plants, especially his wife Diane Dorfer, and he is sorry about the Erubia spines all over the yard a few years back. He thanks his son William for helping to take care of the spiny Erubia as well!  In this interview we hear about Bryan's 33 year journey with seed saving, seed production, and plant breeding; his work with giving a boost and sometimes reintroducing native plants from New England to Puerto Rico; his work with students around growing cannabis for medicinal uses; and his trials and initial breeding work with some crops we shared with him, including pigeon peas, field peas, and roselle.    SEED AND PLANT STORIES TOLD IN THIS EPISODE: Chenopodium formosanum (Taiwan) Grass Jelly (Taiwan, Indonesia) Erubia (Puerto Rico) Corpse Flower (Indonesia) Easter in August Cherry Tomato Minnesota 13 Field Pea Bo (Black-Eyed Pea Leaves) Mississippi Purple Hull Pea Northern Adapted Pigeon Peas Solanum chacoense (South America) Cannabis (specifically the beverage, Bhang from India) Chin Baung (Burmese Roselle Leaf)   MORE INFO FROM THIS EPISODE: Bryan's ECSU professor bio Bryan's instagram: Northeastern Connecticut Botany Breeding Organic Vegatables, NOFA publication, by Rowen White and Bryan Connolly Organic Seed Production and Saving, NOFA publication, by Bryan Connolly Stewarding Indigenous Seeds and Planting by the Moon with Stephen Silverbear McComber, Seed Savers Exchange Ploidy (number of chromosomes in a cell) Ploidy, genetic diversity and speciation of the genus Aronia ABOUT: Seeds And Their People is a radio show where we feature seed stories told by the people who truly love them. Hosted by Owen Taylor of Truelove Seeds and Chris Bolden-Newsome of Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden. trueloveseeds.com/blogs/satpradio   FIND OWEN HERE: Truelove Seeds Facebook  |  Instagram  |  Twitter   FIND CHRIS HERE: Sankofa Community Farm at Bartram’s Garden

I don't know. I kind of joke that I'm the Hagrid of the plant world. I'm like, ooh, it's got spines. Ooh, it's poisonous, you know? And I'm just like, oh, it's just doing its thing. Isn't that cool, though? Welcome to Seeds and Farmer and Farmer at True Love Seeds. Welcome to Seeds and Their People. I'm Owen Taylor, Seedkeeper and Farmer at True Love Seeds. We're a seed company offering culturally important seeds, owned by farmers committed to cultural preservation, food sovereignty, and sustainable agriculture. This podcast is supported by True Love Seeds and by our listeners, like you, for as little as $1 a month.

Thank you so much to our newest members, Debbie, Andrea, and Liz. Find us at patreon.com slash true love seeds. This episode is for the science nerds like me. While we were back in my hometown of Romantic Willamantic, in Northeast, Connecticut for Christmas, I snuck away to visit Brian Connolly at the farmer's market and then in his greenhouse at Eastern Connecticut State University, where this interview takes place. Here's his bio from Eastern. Dr. Connolly is a botanist and horticulturalist. His research interests include rare plants of New England, the Nightshade family, the Rose

family, and cannabis. Before Eastern, Brian Connolly was a faculty member at Framingham State University in Massachusetts, and also worked for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife. As you will hear in the interview, we've known each other for a couple of decades, but this past year, we took our seed nerdery to a new level after he invited me to come speak to his students. I sent him seeds for gondulets or pigeon peas for part of his trial of northern adapted varieties. Sent him Chimbong, sour leaf, a type of Roselle from Burma, to attempt. saving the seeds of this very long-season variety in his greenhouse, as he's worked to adapt and breed other long-season crops, and also shared some of our various field peas or cow peas

for his trials and breeding work. We will visit all of those plants and many more, including wild plants, such as a spiny nightshade that has disappeared from the wild in Puerto Rico. This is a departure from our other episodes in that we don't focus much on his own cultural crops, though he does talk a bit about Taiwanese crops he's hoping to explore more. I'm excited about this direction, however, because it gets into some of the science that is involved in seed keeping sometimes, including discussions of intentionally hybridizing different varieties, stabilizing so-called off-types, crossing plants with different numbers of chromosomes, and relatedly how seedless watermelons work. Selecting for disease resistance, returning endangered

plants to the wild, and so on. Also, you may notice Chris is not introducing this episode with me. He's doing great. He's downstairs riding out the end of his winter relaxation period and savoring the last few days before he heads back to his farm. He'll be back on the podcast soon. I am here with our cat, and he's, here he is. Yeah, that's him pawing the microphone. Okay, here we go. Transporting you to the ECSU Biologist. department with Brian Connolly. So I'm here with Brian Connolly. So I'm here with Brian Connolly, longtime friend from my hometown area.

Can you tell us where we are right now? We're in the Eastern Connecticut State University Biology Greenhouse. And why are we here? We're here to talk about plants. Why are you here, usually? Oh, well, I maintain the research collection here, and I work with students in the greenhouse, and so I maintain plant material for the botany classes here on campus, and then I do all sorts of different types of research, and I have some rare plants in here that I can serve.

Do you remember how we first met? Well, I mean, we first met, I guess, when you were the chicken man of New York, right? I was trying to be. Yeah. And, but, I mean, I've known your mother since I was a staff member at the Willamantic Food Co-op. That was probably two, yeah, year 2000 or before. So, yeah, and then the first time, like, we really interacted at any length was chicken butchering. And so we were butchering chickens, and I was showing Owen how to, you know, cut throats and pluck and gut.

And, yep, that was the day. Yeah, I was trying to become the chicken intern or the chicken man of New York City. And I had zero experience besides gathering eggs. And so my mom was like, I know somebody. And so I thought I would just come and, like, you point out some things. But you're like, okay, we're butchering today. Come on down. and it was really intense for me and actually didn't eat chicken for about a year after that.

Oh, no. Oh, no. I didn't know that. Oh, jeesh. Anyway, I really appreciate it, and it's an experience that stuck with me probably it will for the rest of my life. Yeah, yeah, it is. It's very intense. I don't do it that much anymore, but I was doing it up until probably four years ago. Well, I'm glad to have the experience because I do eat chicken, and you know, you might as well know what goes into it, you know. Someone's doing that. Yeah, yeah. And it is interesting, and you get to.

to definitely get like a view into bird anatomy and chicken anatomy. And I remember you being impressed by the colors. Like when we had the gizzards and the intestines and the hearts all in a bucket, you're like, oh, they're actually kind of pretty. They're still vibrant. Like the gizzards are almost like iridescent.

And yeah, yeah. The gut bucket. And I remember you were going to bring it out to the woods or something for the. Oh, yeah, yeah, the coyotes definitely, and the skunks and the fissures all kind of benefited from our chicken operation. And it turns out I benefited from the chicken operation also. I became the chicken intern of Just Food and Heifer International and then ended up staying on at Just Food for six and a half, seven years after that. First is the livestock coordinator building chicken coops, writing a city chicken guide, a book, and then doing a bunch of other stuff with community guards.

gardens and urban farms in New York. So thanks for that foot in the door, Brian. And now moving on to other topics away from guts and towards plants. I would love to get a sense of your journey because I actually first was aware of you besides meeting you with Ron the Chickens. I had your seed saving book that you wrote with Rowan White, who's one of my favorite seat savers out there. And I know you even had done some work with Stephen McCumber, one of her elders and someone who I admire very much. So maybe just to give folks a sense of where you've been and how you got into this work. Yeah. Well, I guess I've been seed saving for about 33 years in one way or another. I started as a teenager. And actually, I had a gourd that I had just taken from like an ornamental gourd

mix when I was a teenager and I grew it. And I saw it had a female flower. I knew it wasn't going to set fruit because it was a lone female flower. And so I was like house sitting at somebody's house and they had a pumpkin patch. And I remember taking the pollen from a male and using a Q-tip, which you don't need to use a Q-tip. And transferring it. And so that was like my first cross ever. I was like, you know, 16 or maybe I was 17. But I had read about seed saving actually in my ecology textbook in high school.

They had a little blurb in it about seed savers. exchange. And for many, many years, I was a member, like 15 years, and I'd offer up to 100 different things, mostly tomatoes. But, yeah, so, I mean, I started growing gardens and things with my parents or just on my own in Vermont, you know, probably five, six, seven, eight years old, just regular gardening, and then started seed-saving teenage years. Then I went to the University of Vermont and worked in the Slade Garden. We had this environmental garden and the common ground student farm. And I was like ordering things from native seed search and sandtail preservation back in the late 90s. And I actually had some early exchanges with Tom Stearns for high mowing. I think piece

fine that he offers in his catalog might have come from me in like 1995. But yeah, he's just done amazing things. But yeah, and then I was a double major in anthropology and botany. And part of the anthropology curriculum, I was in the anthropology club. And we'd go up to Kanawake, which is, you know, a Haudenoshone reservation on south of Montreal. And we went to this longhouse. And I had already some familiarity with seat saving. And I see these corn braids on the wall. And I say, holy crap, these are like traditional, you know, Mohawk or I would have said Iroquois back then, but, you know, Hoden Shoney seeds. And Steve gave me two years because I was interested in, I asked if I could pay him something. And he said, a quarter. And so I gave him a

quarter for two years of what's, I think, being called Six Nations Blue right now. And I have some of that. And then I can't remember just maybe through NOFA, I met Rowan. And when she was a student at Hampshire, and she was doing the seed saving at the Hampshire farm there. Yeah, and I wrote the Seed Saving Handbook for the Nofa a while ago. That was 2004 or something. And then Rowan was doing this project. And she was in the middle of having kids. And so I just kind of did an assist at the end to help get the book into the world.

I did grow commercially for Beaker Creek for a while and for I think even Southern Exposure Seed Exchange might have offered some of them. You know, I grew in FedCo. And so, you know, I don't know if you know Rob Miller, Full Moon Farm and Ham. and he let me use his land. And I actually grew some really big growouts of winter luxury pie. And I think that was a big push to get it back into the commercial world. It was almost commercially extinct. And then I think me growing, I don't know, I grew like 50 pounds of pumpkin seed one year

or something insane like that. North Georgia candy roaster I grew a whole bunch of and got that kind of into the world, too. And so I think these varieties may never have kind of gotten the commercial bulk unless I did that back in the day. But I was hired to do it and, you know, I had a contract and I sold. Yeah. And then my other part of my life, which is kind of more my traditional, professional part, is that I've been a botanist and I was the Massachusetts state botanist for six years working with endangerment. plants. There is an endangered seed bank through the native plant trust in Framingham Mass, which I've collected some for them, but not very much. They have this whole extensive seed bank.

But I've also grown native plants for zoo, New England, and they've gone out for restoration projects. So New England Blazing Star. And then this year I did purple milkweed, an esclepius perperascence for the Massachusetts Division of Fisheries and Wildlife, their Natural Heritage Program. They've done some esclepius Implexicali, I think it's called Blunt Lobed milkweed, and for Camp Edwards, which is a military base on Cape Cod. So, yeah, so I've grown several different rare plants that are native to New England as well. I've kind of, I don't know if I'd call it seed saving, but head-starting maybe. Yeah. I don't know. We're chatting about one thing that I haven't really embraced is, you know, my Taiwanese heritage and growing plants

from Taiwan. I've been pretty much a New England kid, but my dad was in the military during the Vietnam era, and my mom worked on base, and my sister was born in Taiwan, and I was born in Massachusetts, But it'd be really cool to kind of unite some of, you know, my Taiwanese heritage with all the seed stuff I do. They've sort of been in very different places in my mind for most of my life. Yeah, how will you approach that? Well, I guess I have to find some Taiwanese varieties. I guess there's a quino podium that's grown in Taiwan, like, like a quinoa kind of thing.

And then there's, you know, the sword lettuce we mentioned and was a ping-tonged long eggplant. So maybe I'll try growing some of those. And if true love ever wants to offer them, you know, I could try to supply you guys. And that would be a lot of fun. So, yeah. That would be an honor. We would love that.

And you know, that's our focus. So I love that you're thinking about your kind of ancestral seeds. I know after all these decades of this work, it's cool. It's cool to hear that you're thinking of doing that. Besides that kind of online research, are there any other ways you might kind of look into? Are there people you could talk to about these potential seeds? Yeah, I mean, first I'll try my mom. Her brother still live in Taiwan.

But yeah, I don't know. There's not too many, there's a few Taiwanese people around. But yeah, I guess I could start seeing if anybody knows of anything. One thing I would love to grow is the grass jelly plant. We would come down from Vermont to Boston and buy these cans. And I haven't figured out which plant it is exactly. There seems to be a couple things that are called grass jelly plant. But that was such a funny little treat.

I mean, it's good stuff, but it's not the Western palate. It's a little weird. So you cut it up in cubes from the can, and you put it on sugar and ice, and then you eat it. And I'd love to figure out. what exactly the grass jelly plant is and try to grow it. Yes, actually a few episodes ago, I interviewed some Indonesian friends in Philly

who are growing it. Okay. So I will ask them if I can bring you some and maybe there's multiple kinds, but I'll see at least if you can try theirs. Okay. I did get something that called the grass jelly plant at Lodji's greenhouse. It's actually in that greenhouse there, but I looked it up and I don't think it's

quite the right plant. It said it was used to like thicken soups. So I have to figure out if, and yeah, I guess it has a lot of pectin in it, and then it will make a jelly. Let's thicken the soup of this episode with a little walk around the greenhouse, which, by the way, is quite noisy with creaking vents. I've been near your greenhouse before, and there's so much to see here. I'd love to see your favorite things.

Okay. Well, they don't look great right now, but I have two different nightshades. Well, this one is Erubia. So this is an endemic from the island of Puerto Rico. It's a federally endangered species. It may be extinct in the wild, and I've been working with people on Puerto Rico and in the United States to increase it, and hopefully I'll be able to reintroduce it to the wild. Kind of, from a human standpoint, it's just kind of this gnarly, spiny thing.

It doesn't really have any cultural uses, but. I don't know. I kind of joke that I'm the Hagrid of the plant world. I'm like, ooh, it's got spines. Ooh, it's poisonous, you know? And I'm just like, oh, it's just doing its thing. Isn't that cool, though? So this is very rare, and I hope to bring it back out into the wild

with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. And my Spanish accent's horrible, but par la naturaliza, PLN, is another group I work with down there. and George Lacosio at Mount Wachisit Community College and many others. It's a very big team effort. Spiny is definitely the most prominent attribute. It's covered with spines. It's maybe a five-foot-tall plant, and every inch of it, every centimeter of it has a spine.

And then at the top, it's clearly a solanum, right? The flowers look so familiar like another salanum I've seen before, and I can't quite place it. Well, probably the closest that you've seen is potato even. Right. And it's kind of like the skinny version of potato. Or if you were to take those white petals and make them yellow, it'd look pretty much like a tomato. And it's got these long, like skinny leaves that also have spines on them. Yeah.

And what's interesting is they have them off of the midrib on both sides. And that's kind of a weird, unusual trait that you don't see. but yeah say the name one more time it's erubia or selenum and sopholium it's also known as selenum drymophyllum is an old old scientific name for it part in the background noise of my my vents moving around I think it was cleared because of the spines because the area was used for pasture and so yeah it's probably never never a terribly common plant but it's just a few places in the kind higher elevation of Puerto Rico. The first thing was I had two clones.

I had requested seed from a fair child tropical botanical garden in Miami. And my two clones that I had left, they wouldn't cross-pollinate with each other. So eventually I found somebody with a clone at University of Utah, Lynn Bowes. And Dr. Bowes sent me some cuttings. And then from there, I was able to reproduce it for about, I don't know, five or ten years. I couldn't get it to make seed. So once I had seed, I've been able to grow seedlings. Also, this doesn't have rhizomes or any way to spread vegetatively.

So if it doesn't reproduce by seed, it's just stuck. And so you just have these individual shrubs. And, you know, like the birds or animals couldn't spread the seeds. So if you reintroduce these clones into the wild that didn't reproduce, they would just kind of be this dead end. So it could still be out there, but there are two populations that have been collected from on Puerto Rico. And they're both no longer seem to be alive in the wild. They're both in being grown in gardens and botanic gardens.

So getting it back into the wild, what is that going to take, given that even though you love the spikes, most people don't want the spikes? It will go back on conservation land. And there are other salinums that are spiny down there. too. It says in lots of things with spines and dense vegetation. So it'll blend right in with a lot of things in Puerto Rico. And then it'll go on, you know, land trust land that's been set aside for conservation. So they know what they're in for. Another plant project is the amorphalus titanium. So this is the corpse flower. And so this is the largest inflorescence in the world, unbranched, That's the, but so it's from Indonesia, and then it takes seven years to flower, and then it will flower every three years, but it has this horrendous smell.

It feels like your eyes are burning when you come in here for about three hours. It's like moderately endangered, and I've actually sent the leaves to be registered in kind of like a stud book, so they know whose plants are related to whose. So they're self-incompatible. So when they flower, people like airship pollen from different botanical gardens and things to each other. And so they can propagate it from seed. But these guys have never set seed. And they've been here for, I think Dr. Koenig had them here in the late 90s. That's another weird connection.

He was my advisor on a high school science fair project. So it's cool to be in his greenhouses again. Yeah, yeah. That's a really funny small world story. So the small world story in a nutshell is that when I was a sophomore in high school, this is 1997, Wyndham High School, my friend Kristen Johnson and I worked with our biology teacher, Miss Antonella Bona, and also a Yukon professor to conduct and submit a study of Siberian hamsters and their circadian rhythms, meaning their daily cycles of sleep and activity. And it measured that by the time spent running on hamster wheels under different lighting conditions, simulating different day lengths. And we submitted it to the Connecticut State Science Fair, and we won in our division, which was the team's division in biology.

So the next year we did it again, but that year we worked with Dr. Ross Koening, who we just mentioned, who was at the ECSU Greenhouse Biology Department. And later, coincidentally, also my mom's neighbor, it's a small town. And we did the same study about circadian rhythms under different lighting conditions, but the subjects were bean plants, phasiolis vulgaris. And this was in the eastern greenhouse. And we used very lightweight wires that acted as a gauge and connected to a computer that was monitoring their movement.

You know, beans, they raise and lower their leaves depending on sunlight. And so we won again. And if I'm remembering correctly, their innate day lengths for both the hamsters and the beans were definitely more than 24 hours, maybe closer to 25 hours. And I think our conclusion or our hypothesis was that they kind of got in sync or in tune with the sunlight. light the actual day length and would go to 24 hours, but had the capacity to have a longer day length. Okay, but that's 27 years ago or so, and I haven't looked at the study since then, so I'm just kind of having a fuzzy memory about it. Okay, back to Brian and his tomato projects. We're doing several different tomato hybridization projects with the students, and

we'll go over here. I've got some seedlings that I started. I don't know, this is a green zebra, Matt's Wild hybrid. I've got a garden peach brandywine hybrid here. This is a three-way hybrid between sun gold, a current tomato, and pink fuzzy boar. This is Garden Peach by Cherokee purple. I really like hand-pollinating stuff. So if you want any two tomatoes cross, I love doing it. I love the emasculate, you know, pulling off the anthers and tapping the pollen out. And I'm my student, Natasha, Durand, who's from San Juan, Puerto Rico, loves to do that, too. Oh, cool. I'll put some thought into that. You also have a farm with your family, with a CSA, and I'm curious if any of your tomato hybridization projects have made it onto the farm in a real way.

Yes, there's one. We call it limelight. And I don't even remember where it's a green tiger cross, I think. I'm trying to remember what I did. But we grow that. And then I think that's about the only one. Occasionally we'll grow what I call brandy rose, which is from Rose to Burn and brandy wine that I stabilize. But to be honest, Eva Purple Ball out produces it. and is a little earlier. So Evo Purple Ball, we kind of stick with. How did you know limelight would make it to kind of a commercial scale for you? Really, it was selected by my daughter, and so she liked the flavor of them. They split a little, so it's a little not perfect, but it's got kind of this very balanced taste, and it's kind of like a grape tomato, but bigger. It's like a little crunchy, and so she really liked them.

And so we've kind of really kept them going for Cordelia, but for me, too, I like them a lot. But then, so we have some at the end of our kind of like cherry tomato row every year, and then they sometimes end up in the boxes that go to market and things like that. What other futures have your tomato hybrids found? Commonwealth Seeds in Virginia. I guess they're introducing something called Easter eggs in August. That originated from a Matt's Wilde Garden Peach Cross. And I guess they're keeping kind of a couple different colors.

And so with the kind of fuzz that makes like this neat like pastel kind of muted color. So I think that will be in their catalog this year. And then not too many have made it very far. I would love to, I don't know, someday have like, I don't know, maybe my own seed company called like Connolly's Creative Crosses or something and where I just release gene pools because I joke that I have plant breeder, ADHD or something. Maybe I do. I don't know. It's very possible that I never seem to bring them out to stability. I'll make a cross, grow the F1, maybe the F2 and get some cool things out of it.

And then it just sits in an envelope for a decade. And so I would love to just kind of release these gene pools into the world so people can develop their own things. But I just sort of get bogged down once you start to get, you know, 10 different lines in the F3. And I'm trying to teach and raise kids and work on my wife's farm and do research. And I just kind of end up not finishing the selection. So I'd love to get more of it out.

into the world and I think people would have fun with it that's I think people would have fun with that it sounds like you're doing many types of selection uh from flavor to size to earliness to productivity to does it split or not what are some of the other ways that you kind of traits that you look for um well they're they're not here right now but um well Matt's wild a little bit is blight resistance, especially late blight. What was it, 2009 or what was that year? I can't remember. 2009 or 2011, it was like the tomato apocalypse with the late blight in the northeast. And so I'm still a little, like, scarred from that. So Matt's Wilde is supposed to have some late blight resistance, but I also have crosses with Iron Lady and Defiant and a few other known

late blight resistant tomatoes that I've kind of crossed with green zebra and some other things and again I've never really gotten them that far out but beyond the F2 or something part of that's because I don't want to test them because I don't want to have any late flight anywhere near our farm and so I guess you could look for a genetic marker and I haven't really found like a cooperator to do that but but I could like make all these lines and send it to somewhere where light blade is a continual problem and then get the seeds back or something yeah i heard that i forget who at one of the seed conferences that i'd been to where they were talking about breeding for disease resistance that there were places where they

encouraged disease like in breeding farms so that they could select from the ones that were least affected yeah yeah frank morton that is probably who i heard it from yeah he has is what half acre of hell, I think he calls it, where he grows all his lettuces and brings in every lettuce disease he can find or something and then just, you know, and then he just lets the survivors, you know, take over and they make the seed and they are the ones he selects for. He's got some very nice lettuces, yeah. Yeah, he's on one of our early episodes actually talking about his lettuces. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Frank has some really interesting stuff going. And, and he, some of his lines are polymorphic too and you can you can select some stuff out of it and and uh

we've had some uh interesting off types pop out and we've kind of continued them a little bit on our farm too so an off type so generally a variety fits like a description kind of like um i call it like a morphometric in in agronomic space you know so you kind of have these limits like um you know it will be whatever a red leaf lettuce. That's like a romaine type. It's about 65 days to maturity, something like that. And so if you get like a speckled green leaf type out of your red leaf type, that's an off type. And so, and then, you know, some people are like, oh, you know, I didn't want that and it can be a bad thing. Or you can say, oh, hey, that's kind of cool. And you can make it into your own variety and so you can pull that out and select for it usually it will segregate

meaning it will throw ancestral types or or new combinations out that weren't exactly the first plant that you that you identified so usually you have to what's called stabilize it or make it true to type so the seeds are the same from generation and generation and it's important for some people. Some people don't care, and you can maintain a polymorphic line. Yep. Nice. How long do you think it might take to stabilize an off-type tomato or lettuce? The dogma is six generations. And if you have a greenhouse, that could be as short as two years per a shorter season type of thing. Let's take a quick break here to hear from some friends with another podcast you might like. Hey, everyone. If you're enjoying this show, you may

also like the No-Till Market Garden podcast with co-host Mimi Castile, Natalie Landsbury, and yours truly, Alex Ball. We interview growers, researchers, and others in sustainable ag community about everything from soil first farming practices to foreign business management in the wild world of soil biology and health. So head over to your favorite podcast platform today and subscribe to the No-Till Growers Network. Okay, back to the episode where we start checking out some of the crops that we've connected around in the last year, including field peas, cow peas or black eyepies. So I have your bow. This is the edible leaf cow pea. From Kenya. From Kenya. So I have Minnesota 13, which is like done. And so that matured first.

It was only like 64 days to mature seed. Not very productive, but oh my goodness, fast. And just really cute, the little Holstein or Yin and Yang kind of pattern. This I got from giving ground seed in Montana. This is centipi. It's supposed to be an Edwin Meeter variety from New Hampshire. And Meeter was like this crazy plant breeder from University of New Hampshire. And one of his lines was actually a parent line to Minnesota 13. And then I've got the Mississippi Purple Hull also from you. And it hasn't even flowered yet. And this is 80 days or something since I planted it. and so 64 days already mature seed 80 days and not even flowered so huge difference in maturation time i mean minnesota and mississippi they're yeah they're quite far apart yeah it makes sense and then

one of these is new hampshire cream number two which is another meter line um fast lady lady from carol deppy and so those were um a little bit after i i can't I wrote the days down. And then this one is extra early cow pee. This is a USDA accession I got. And then one at the end is Peking black. It's a black cow pee supposedly from China. So you can see we run the gamut from very early to very late.

Bow is in the middle here. And so, yeah. I always feel like, well, I've just been growing that one for a couple years. but it does mature relatively early compared to other ones that we grow. Yeah, yeah, it seems early compared to some of the deep, you know, southeast United States types. But, yeah, but the Minnesota, and I ordered Minnesota 150,

the sister line to Minnesota 13 from a Seed Saber. So I want to check that out. It's instead of white and black, it's like white and like tanish or reddish. And so, but it has that, that, I guess I call it a calico. And so I'm curious to see if that's just as early as 13. So now what? I did some hybridization, but it wasn't successful. I'll have to learn how to hand pollinate cow peas.

With every plant you do plant breeding with, it's always a little bit of a learning curve. But it's not a bad system, but I have to get it just right and make sure the cross pollinations don't abort. That's what happened. They just didn't set. What I'd love to do is usually the darker-seated types of higher antioxidants. I'm guessing it has a stronger kind of flavor, though. I've never really had a black cow pee, so I guess I'll find out in a couple weeks.

But I'd love to make a short-season dark-colored cowpea because I thought that would be good for antioxidants and, you know, for human health. And so, yeah, and I don't know of any super early pure black cow pee. The one we have is from Louisiana. So I don't know if it's following these trends with where they're grown. I don't know if that would help with earliness or hurt, probably hurt. Yeah, yeah. But the thing is there seems to be basically an inverse relationship with production, too. The earlier it is, I think it's a lot less productive.

They're very small plants. You can see they're kind of bush and Mississippi Purple Hill is trying to stretch out here. What's cool to see is that it seems like the bow from Kenya is the leafiest. It is. It's very leafy. Yep. And it's got the healthiest looking leaves. So that's cool. It's like the healthiest plant in here of the black eyed peas, of the cow peas. And it all kind of makes sense looking at them like this, you know, seeing the earliness of the northern varieties, the lateness of the southern, the leafiness of the leaf one. Yeah, it's cool when you line up things for trials and you get to compare them besides.

by side. Yeah, it's really informative. Cool. Let's check out the pigeon peas, the gondulets. This is Georgia number one. And so what's interesting is it has these red banners. And so that's different. So this is a pigeon pea or gondulees. And so this was bred by an Indian professor from University of Georgia. Dr. Sharad Patak, I think. Okay, cool. I'll have to put it. his name in my memory. So let's see. Would you like me to shut these down? It adds a little ambiance. A little bit of, yeah, yeah, the wailing of the vents. Yeah, so, and this just barely matured for me. I had surgery the summer and I didn't plant them until June 12th. And so, but they did flower here in Connecticut. But so Georgia, I have the order, if you're interested. So right now,

These are all plants that flowered outside, and I brought into the Eastern Connecticut State University Greenhouse. So this was a little later than Georgia 2. And so Georgia 2 had pure yellow flowers. And this was just about the same time as True Love's Northern Adapted, which I have over. I think this is the Northern Adopted.

Northern Adapted is a bit big. like like one like Georgia one but it was earlier like Georgia two so so that was kind of cool that's a good combo better than smaller and later yeah yeah yeah yeah but I did get different types and I'll have to collect the seed but this one is from echo I don't remember the full name of it but it's like a tropical like in Florida and they there seems like they're very humanitarian based they had a bunch of other short day pigeon peas and so this this one this one actually flowered as well um in connecticut well i've been i've been wanting to connect with echo for a while because they

have so many interesting plant projects going including maringa so if you're listening echo yeah yeah super nutritious maringa um so this this this made it and then um isabel this this is a new release, I think, from the University of Puerto Rico. And it was a little polymorphic. This was the early, I only planted two of each. I really did it in my old cannabis pots. And so I grow hemp. I have a commercial hemp license. And for my classes. And I just threw the seeds in there. And so this was a USDA accession, but this was a recent release from Puerto Rico. It's interesting. It's got also reddish banners. I actually didn't know that word before. Yes, or standard. So banner, wings, and keel. Those are the parts of the legume flower.

So you'll either call it a banner or a standard. Yeah. And it's got the striped pods like the others. Yes, yeah. All of these have been striped. And the seeds are all kind of that tan. Oh, I do have one other. It won't make it outside in Connecticut, but Stephanie from a local baking company, Pandiosa. She's from Puerto Rico. And she brought me seeds from her grandmother's land, great-grandmother's land in Puerto Rico. And they're black-seated. And so I have a few plants here. I can show you the black seeds in the headhouse as well. Yes, I got plaque-seeded gondulis from Edis Brown, who was on a previous episode, from Puerto Rico also. And they were beautiful plants. They just never flowered or made fruit outside here in Philadelphia. But that's cool. You have a greenhouse to try it out.

Yeah, yeah. And I could cross-pollinate these with your northern adapted and see if we can get another, you know, a dark-seated northern adapted pigeon pea. That'd be cool. And I want to get you this other one, too. Okay. Well, first, our northern adapted Pige and Pige and Pige is a mix of Georgia 1 and Georgia 2 from Dr. Pottock. And so when I first received it from East New York Farms in Brooklyn, who had gotten it from Cornell Cooperative Extension or Cornell University in Ithaca, they gave them to me separate and also mixed. And I think somehow I ended up growing them mixed.

But maybe that was for the best if they're bigger and, you know, earlier than the later one and bigger than the smaller one and bigger than the small. all the earlier one yeah yep this is a this is it yeah northern yep we've been offering it for years and people are just so happy to have it here you know especially Puerto Rican Dominican Indian parts of Africa other parts of the Caribbean anywhere tropical people this is such an important part of the diet so it's so cool that you're trialing so many of them and maybe we'll get closer to finding the ones people want and the one I want to give you I found last year I'll just say quickly on here that I found out of Puerto Rican grocery store in Philly. It was a plant. I took a picture of the phone number of where they got it. When I called them after success, they sent me to

the nursery in Jersey who grew it. And he told me on the phone he'd been growing at 50 years. He worked alongside Puerto Rican day laborers and has been growing it ever since. And that one is, I think, also pretty big and bushy. And the pods are big and just green. So I'm excited to have a couple options for people in this coming year. They'll probably be in the catalog within the next few weeks. Nice. I just want to say it's a very ornamental plant as well. I didn't realize how pretty the flowers were. And then the carpenter bees and bumblebees love them. So they're really kind of a pollinator plant as well. And I didn't realize that when I started. Oh, this, I forgot about this. This is Selenum Chacoensi. And so this is actually a South American wild potato relative,

but it showed up in Tennessee. And someone tagged me on I Naturalist. I don't know if you use I naturalist at all, but it's this app and you can ID all the wild plants, animals, insects. And so I'm an addict. I have a problem with I naturalist. But I identify selenums. And someone tagged me on this. And I said, I don't know what this is. And then I actually had genetic testing done. It points to Chaco Enzi pretty much. It seems like that's what it is. But it's only the second or third location in North America where it's escaped.

And usually it escapes right near breeding programs because people use it for disease resistance and things like that. So this is something that I want to write up and say, hey, I found this. I didn't actually find it. I had the identifier send me plants from Tennessee, and I rooted them here, and I've had them here for two or three years. Yeah, they're like fine leafed potatoes with a little purple stem. And they have these really long rhizomes, and they have these tiny little tubers

or maybe about the size of a dime or a nickel, and so they kind of run all over the place that, yeah. And so they'll cross with a potato and create a more disease-resistant offspring. Yeah, I think it's a long road. They're very bitter, they're very small, they have the long rhizomes. I believe this is a diploid and potatoes are tetraploid, and so often triploid plants are mostly sterile, but sometimes you get a seed. So I don't think it's super easy.

I think you have to do, you know, several generations of hybridization. And so, yeah. I was hoping this would come up because I know you've done work with, is this called ploidy? Ploidy, yeah. Can you tell us just for people who've never thought about. about this before, what we're talking about? Well, it's basically multiple sets of chromosomes. So basically in plants, you get a complete replication

or duplication within the same cell. So normally you have two sets of chromosomes, but plants can have four sets, six sets, anything that's even is fertile. So like strawberries are octoploid. Wheat is hexaploid. Wheat is an ancient hybrid of three different species. And so often the more gene copies you have, the more resilient you are, the larger you are.

And so a lot of our domesticated plants are polypoid. So potatoes, wheat, strawberries. When you make a cross between two different even numbers and you get an odd number, you often get a sterile plant and that's where seedless watermelons come in. And so that's a cross between a diploid and a tetraploid watermelon line. And so they're triploid, but you need a pollinator. So often if you get like seedless watermelon seed packets, you have two different seed types in there, which will grow a triploid and usually a diploid.

So the diploid needs to pollinate the triploid to actually set fruit. But the triploids often have a little bit of fertility. And so then you can move that back into either the. a tetrapoid or the diploid, so that you can get traits moved, but it's not easy. And I worked on it with my chokeberries, so my erronea. I don't know. It's an obscure berry crop, but that's what I did for my doctorate. Here we head over to see the Roselle plants called Chinbong, meaning sour leaf, in the Karen language, from Burma.

hear much more about this plant in episode 7 with Philly-based Karen farmers Nadeau, Tidawin, and Serku, originally from the Karen state in Burma. They use this variety primarily for its sour leaf and also make jelly from its calyx. Many people around the world grow rosal primarily for their calyx, to make a red drink, often called sorrel, bisup, or Agua de Hamaica, or a tea that I grew up calling Red Singer. So here's the seeds. Wow.

Yeah. Does that fit with your knowledge of it? But I've never seen a calyx, this color. I haven't, I don't know what's happening because I haven't seen it in this stage where they're like kind of modeled. Yeah. Red and white. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know. So, you know, I think we're getting close to mature seed. I didn't cross-pollinate it. It looked like it was set up to self, had a very narrow throat to the, you know, typical malvesi flower with the monodelphus stamens which uh you know is this the the the stamens are all in this tube and the you know so uh or the filaments are all in the tube and then the anthers are yeah it's it's cool cool set up i only grew three plants but i think there should be you know probably

i don't know 50 to 100 seeds per capsule or something so you know there's one two three four five six seven eight nine ten all three or four fifteen times i don't know 15 So it should be, you know, 750 seeds there. And we got three plants. So hopefully, I don't know if it'll be good for offering, but this will be, you know, keep the line going at least. Yeah, that's what's cool about this, like, budding relationship that we started this last year is just like, how can a university program support this kind of community seed project that we're working on?

And, yeah, this is a great example of just making sure. we have regenerated seeds because this is a particularly hard one. We actually haven't grown. We asked some friends in Florida to grow it for us, and they hardly got seeds before their frost. Oh, wow. And so we're still trying to figure out with this very long-season Roselle plant

and how to make it available here so people don't have to kind of sneak seeds from overseas and have a healthy, adapted, you know, population that we we kind of got to see grow and come to seed here yeah yeah and I guess the next stage is you did send me some Florida Roselle and to try and grow them together and make hybrids but yeah but this I think we planted this in when you gave your talk in March last year I don't I don't I think I planted it soon after so now it's December and the seeds aren't ready yet so so this is nine ten months

of growing and still not there yet. One year we got it successfully from that farm in Florida, so I'm not sure. We just have to find the timing right. Or breed, but the issue is they had been eating the leaves off of what they could find, which was either from Africa or the Caribbean, and that was okay. But this is the leaf they want. It's different somehow.

It's like not as tough. It's the sourness they like. Chimbong means sour leaf. So how to hybridize and select for the exact leaf type they want while also making it. So we can grow it here earlier. Yeah, or maybe in Florida, they probably don't use high tunnels, but you could maybe have it as a high tunnel crop for seed or something. Yeah, yeah.

Very interesting. But yeah, and I don't know if I rooted this, if it would be still like with like apples when you graft them. They're already in like the flowering stage. They don't have to go through a juvenile stage. So maybe if I rooted cuttings after these seeds are mature, maybe it will go instantly back into flower too. Yeah, they actually grew some as cuttings rooted in the soil

at the farm where the Koren folks from Burma are in Philly, and they successfully got some seeds from it. So that is an approach to try out more. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Very cool. So what do you call this room? room? I call this the head house or the prep area. Yeah, yeah. And it smells very fragrant in here. What's happening in here? Well, so I have my CBD cannabis hanging. I have about 20 plants. It's actually a hybrid

I created of an autoflower and a regular CBD hemp type. And my students jokingly call it OG, Dr. C. and so the OG for ocean grown is like a there's a lot of types that are called something OG yeah and so I was doing a nutrient comparison the ones with the flags got a got a different nutrient mix than the ones without I haven't really analyzed the data but but then I have a whole light cart full of clones and this will go to my cannabis class which I'll teach in the spring we have a cannabis cultivation model minor here. So can you break down what you said the cross was auto? Yeah, an auto flower. So I use auto tsunami and then there's this variety. It's just called wife and the two different cultivars. And so auto flower is day length and sensitive. And then most cannabis is like a lot of other tropical plants. You need the short days for it to flower. And so I made a hybrid between those two and it's like intermediate in its day-length sensitivity. And how long has this program been here?

And I guess people will be like, are they breeding weed? Like how do you define what's happening here? Yeah, yeah. Well, so mostly it's a growing class. Yeah, so we've had the program. I think this is the third year. I had to get a state hemp license. I can't grow THC because it's federally illegal.

These have a trace amount. I'm allowed 0.3%, which is nothing. when you go to like a dispensary they're selling people want over 20% you know and so so we're talking less than 1% my stuff has been like 10% CBD or so which I guess you can get it up to 20 yeah so we go through the process of growing the plant from seed or clone we talk about lights we talk about media fertilizer pest control nutrient deficiencies when to harvest You know, and then I talk about basic plant function, you know, root absorption, photosynthesis, and different wavelengths of light. And then we also do talk about the history of the plant where it came from, what are traditional uses, things like that.

Other uses than flower, you know, fiber, seed, you know, concrete, hempcrete, and things like that. Can I ask you to do a nutshell version of where it came from in traditional uses? And then I would love to hear about how this might be used. Like, what kind of medicinal use does this strain have? Its origin appears to be the Tibetan plateau. And so this plant, you know, has been in Asian cultures forever. And they, you know, I don't, what is it called? Bang, I think, is one of the, I don't.

I don't know a whole lot about their traditional uses, but they would make, you know, they would make, like, in India, I think there's like a shake almost, like a drink. And then, yeah, definitely. But where it gets into, like, Western culture is the Scythians brought it. Seems to be associated with funeral rights in Western China. Then it shows up on the edge of the Greek world with the Scythians. and they would take the flower and put it on hot rocks and basically make a tent. It was part of like a funeral right.

You know, you were supposed to do this when somebody died. And that was like, you know, some of the earliest Western contact with it. And then, you know, fiber has been used, you know, forever for rope, essentially, you know, probably like the Mayflower, all the rigging and stuff was probably all hemp. And I guess the Constitution is not on hemp. That I guess is a myth. But any sort of naval traditional fleets, they all had hemp rigging. You know, probably even the Norse, the Vikings probably had some hemp rigging.

Yeah, and then, you know, and the seeds are also eaten and, you know, used for oil and things like that. Actually, one commercial grower did grow some of these this year. a Sweetheel or DG AgTech in Ashford grew some of my stuff. And they liked it. It's borderline. The THC is like almost too high. It's like just under the limit. But it resisted pests pretty well, which better than some of their other lines.

But the CBD wasn't as high as some of their other things. So yeah, it's a cross of two different CBD varieties. There's also a lot of terpenes. what gives you you can smell it and if you if you were to like rub that a little bit you'd get a big whiff of the terpenes which are a lot of people really like and they have their own medicinal qualities besides the CBD and you know the CBD is you know for for calming but does seem to have anti-addictive properties and and anti-inflammatory and you know just calming yeah uses Cool. Well, thanks so much for talking to me, talking to us, talking to the listeners, and for like decades now of nerdy seed relationships.

Yeah. Well, thank you for being a fellow seed nerd. It's an honor to be interviewed. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you so much to Brian Connolly for sharing his stories and work with us. And thank you for listening and sharing this episode of Seeds and Their People with your loved ones. If you liked this episode, please share it. And please let us know somehow. Perhaps we'll with a review in your podcast app or a message. Thank you also for helping our seedkeeping and storytelling work by ordering seeds, t-shirts, and more, from our website,

tru-loafseeds.com. And again, if you'd like to support our podcast for $1 or more a month, please join our Patreon at patreon.com slash true love seeds. And remember, keeping seeds is an act of true love for our ancestors and our collective future. It feels weird not having Chris for that part. Let's see if we can get him on here, just for that one. And remember, keeping seeds is an act of true love for our ancestors and our collective future.

Take care. Thank you.