$5.95 a pack?? ugh!!

[kenny_j]

Originally Posted by brokenbar

AQHA & APHA Cutting Horses...I had a large breeding facility standing 7 studs and shipping and receiving semen from all over the world. Bred about 300 to 400 mares per year. I never wanted a "regular" vet practice...you get too burned out. I had enough to do in breeding season and then we had cattle that took up the rest of the year (I only worked on our cows...I lacked sufficient admiration for cattle... ) We also had our own stud and raised 15 foals from our mares per year. I really thought I would miss it more but that part of my life is over and it's time for me to do other things. The Husband really misses the cows...I do not even read or subscribe to the AVMA Equine Journal or keep current on all the new science...I find most of it appalling. My friends like to email and chat about cutting horse stuff and I just have no interest any more. There was a time that I would have slit my wrists if I could not make it to the NCHA Futurity in Fort Worth...my friends just cannot understand my lack of enthusiasm. I have "filled the void" with tomatoes

Brokenbar, it is funny how ones life can change so suddenly. For most of my adult life I was an avid outdoorsman, hunting and fishing I could not live without, the last 10 years I haven't done much of either. Just do not have the entusiasm to put in all the work that is required to do it properly. I always gardened, but not like the last several years, it has become my main focal point. I need to look up your thread about drying tomatoes and ask you some more questions there.

[dice]

People complain about growing "$5 tomatoes". Now with
the price of gas, we are looking at "$5 trout" (or a lot more;
depends on how far you have to go to find fish).

[baileyj]

Just wondering if I can also send a SASE for a few seeds...new to posting here and missed this when first posted....
It's worth a try I guess....

[brokenbar]

Originally Posted by dice

People complain about growing "$5 tomatoes". Now with the price of gas,
we are looking at "$5 trout" (or a lot more; depends on how far you have
to go to find fish).

My Husband and I always had to chuckle when hunters would say "I hunt because I need the meat"....License, food for 2 weeks, horse, horse feed (and having horse freshly shod), lantern fuel, bullets, 2 or 3 new "something-or-others" to replace torn, aging, broken & lost associated gear, fuel for the truck that will be pulling the horse trailer up the Big Horns on a 10% (+) grade just a guzzlin' the fuel on the way up and lets not forget THE BEER...and the costs of having the meat cut, wrapped and frozen.

All of this adds up to some of the most expensive meat on the planet and beats the price per pound of Kobe Beef easily.

My Husband used to hunt but he says the older he got, the less he liked to kill things. He says he enjoys watching them more these days but he does not have any problem with those who still hunt.

And I think as we grow older our priorities change and we enjoy life more. We have time to "stop and smell the tomato blossoms" that we did not have when we had a family and responsibilities and a full time job. Life is GRAND and I wish I could tack another 20 years in there somewhere...

[dice]

Hunters with beer, now that is a scary thought.

"How did you get that hole in the side of the camper?"
"Well, there was this squirrel sneaking around outside of
Ringo's tent one time, and we had seen some cat tracks
around camp. It was late, and we had had a few beers...."

[Father'sDaughter]

Originally Posted by dice

Hunters with beer, now that is a scary thought.
."

As long as the beer comes out after the hunting is done for the day and the guns are secured, it's no scarier than a group of friends sitting around a campfire and enjoying a few.

[celerystalksmidnite]

Not to be nosy, but just reading through some older threads and saw you mentioning frustration with Black Cherry. Now, who knows if they are the right variety as this is a new pack of seeds and a new variety to me, but the BC I ordered from Pinetree came up like GANGBUSTERS in jiffy peat pellets, which were then root-rinsed and separated to individual cups. (I always separate for root stimulation.) I only covered my trays with lids (well, sorta cover; sometimes I set them on askew) when they had a little moisture left and only during the day when there was plenty of sunlight, to prevent fungal disease. Now I realize starting seeds is a little like cooking and we all do it a little different, but I am curious now if maybe BC particularly (peculiarly?) likes peat pellets. The little tray of potted up seedlings is so beautiful now, I'm almost more enamored with them than I am with my blossoming plants that are already in ground.

Now on topic, I haven't grown Brandy Boy in years, not since I found it in a Walmart seed rack 7 years ago or so. I noticed Burpee had free shipping the last few days, so I went to their site and picked some up. I am not sure what the point is in dehybridizing a hybrided heirloom, but as my mother always says, "you never know." Could some 'vigor' remain? I dunno. Sudduth has been plenty vigorous for me.

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by celerystalksmidnite

Not to be nosy, but just reading through some older threads and saw you mentioning frustration with Black Cherry. Now, who knows if they are the right variety as this is a new pack of seeds and a new variety to me, but the BC I ordered from Pinetree came up like GANGBUSTERS in jiffy peat pellets, which were then root-rinsed and separated to individual cups. (I always separate for root stimulation.) I only covered my trays with lids (well, sorta cover; sometimes I set them on askew) when they had a little moisture left and only during the day when there was plenty of sunlight, to prevent fungal disease. Now I realize starting seeds is a little like cooking and we all do it a little different, but I am curious now if maybe BC particularly (peculiarly?) likes peat pellets. The little tray of potted up seedlings is so beautiful now, I'm almost more enamored with them than I am with my blossoming plants that are already in ground.

Now on topic, I haven't grown Brandy Boy in years, not since I found it in a Walmart seed rack 7 years ago or so. I noticed Burpee had free shipping the last few days, so I went to their site and picked some up. I am not sure what the point is in dehybridizing a hybrided heirloom, but as my mother always says, "you never know." Could some 'vigor' remain? I dunno. Sudduth has been plenty vigorous for me.

The frustration with Black Cherry was only the first year it was offered by TGS and that b'c for the first time they did their own seed production. and as Linda said later there were too many immature seeds that went out. Remember that it was her late husband Vince who bred this variety.

However once you got up a few plants and could save your own seeds there was never a problem again. And I'm sure that she now subcontrcks out seed production for it as she has to do with many other OP varieties. And that b;c TGS is not set up to do their own seed production at all and only did it With Black Cherry that one time/

The point about dehybridizing an F1 hybrid, I'm not sure what you mean when you say dehybridizing a hybrided heirloom, is that when it works it mean lower cost seeds as opposed to paying the higher cost for F1 seeds.

Or are you talking about the Burpee Brandy Boy or one of the other ones that Burpee did? And here I'll mention their F1 version of Red Brandywine which really made me mad. I bought seeds for it, some plants and compared both with my own Red Brandywine and saw no difference at all. They first introduced it as Red Brandywine hybrid, then changed the name and did not state that it WAS Red Bradywine.

I gave up on Burpee many years ago, yes I did.

And you did see how they took the name of one of Brad Gates varieties , I think it was something or other tye dye and brought out that one. Then there was Black Pearl which was supposed to be their Black Cherry, but of course Black Pearl is a hybrid. And nothing like the OP Black Cherry so I'm told by those who have grown both/

Certain hybridizing places accept commercial orders for something and then the company offering it gets to name the variety. But if truth be told I've only seen that happen with Burpee/

[celerystalksmidnite]

Thank you, Carolyn, that is something I did not know about Black Cherry! I wonder if there is still some old seed floating around giving people fits? I read that Black Cherry was a TGS "exclusive" on their website, which gave me the smallest nagging worry that my Black Cherry from Pinetree is something else, but reading on this forum about the good vigilance of certain heirloom growers against the renaming of varieties (thank you, again), I am continuing with the assumption that Black Cherry is Black Cherry.

On further consideration, I see that my earlier statement about Brandy Boy was based on a series of assumptions. I suppose my point about Brandy Boy is more a point of curiosity about its parentage. Which, if I'd thought it through, I probably could've searched out. I assumed, perhaps incorrectly, that Brandywine was one of the parents or at least prominent in the lineage. Based on that assumption, I further assumed a dehybridized Brandy Boy would essentially be Brandywine, if the BW characteristics were the ones being sought by the breeder/dehybridizer anyway. Not to say that it might not have interesting results, but that if the point of Brandy Boy was creating a 'clone' (not a true clone, I don't mean, sorry if that muddies the waters) of Brandywine with 'hybrid vigor,' or in other words, a hybrid for the sake of having a hybrid for the hybrid crowd, you'd essentially be breeding for Brandywine, which we already have. But I may have been dead wrong in the assumption that other growers believe Brandy Boy and Brandywine to be very, very similar plants, as I do. I am far less experienced than others, who may easily have noticed bigger differences.

Which all adds up to: my brain isn't matching the speed of my fingers these days. Thanks for your patience.

[dice]

Brandy Boy has some disease tolerances that, as far as we know,
Brandywine does not (not documented, anyway). The point of
dehybridizing it would be to get a plant very much like Brandy Boy
itself that comes true from seed (seed saved from last year's plant).

One would not really know that the disease tolerances were
in the resulting OP after several generations of selection from growouts
unless one had those diseases in one's own garden, but we have so
many members here, for example, that have verticillium, fusarium,
and/or root-knot nematodes in their gardens and fields that it would
be straightforward to find out which of those disease tolerances were
preserved in someone's Brandy Boy OP variety.

[celerystalksmidnite]

That makes a lot of sense when you put it that way. For some reason, I just couldn't wrap my head around it by myself, probably because I've been lucky enough to not have to deal with those diseases. I appreciate the explanation.