Creating the vegetables of the future

What happens when pollen from a zucchini rubs shoulders with pumpkin blossoms? Many scenarios are possible and can lead to the creation of amazing varieties of plants. Controlling the outcome of this type of crossing is the goal of rare hybridizers, these garden magicians who juggle with fate to add new plants to the plant heritage.

Isabelle Morin
The Press

play with nature

Black tomatoes with pink hearts, corn with three heads and rainbow cabbages… So many plants that come into being thanks to the manipulations of seed breeders, also called hybridizers.

“I’ve always been curious to explore the possibilities. When I see things that have accidentally or intentionally crossed paths, I inevitably get excited. This is how seed breeder Daniel Brisebois, from the TourneSol farm, explains his passion for plant hybridization, an activity that we do not practice in Quebec for a living, but rather out of curiosity.

The culmination

Unlike seed companies, whose objective is to avoid crossbreeding to guarantee that the variety sold will indeed be the one promised, hybridizers start from a crossbreeding which may be the result of chance or of their manipulations, and which becomes the point of start of a new line of players.

To perfect a new variety, they invest resources, years of work, sometimes even a lifetime.

Daniel Brisebois dreamed of a black radish with red flesh. Since 2007, he has been working on this project which is three quarters of the way through to be stabilized. Eventually, its seeds will generate a harvest composed of 100% black radishes with red flesh. They will then go from hybrids – seeds that give random results once planted – to open-pollinated seeds, a status that will guarantee offspring identical to the mother plant.

In the meantime, his radishes are refined from generation to generation thanks to a meticulous selection during which the candidates who display a maximum of the desired characteristics are reproduced between them until they give without fail the desired result.

From seed to chef’s kitchen

The man who has been nicknamed “the chef’s gardener” creates vegetables like no other. Five new varieties of vegetables come from the hybridization work of Michel Lachaume. For 30 years, the breeder has also introduced several old varieties that he wishes to introduce to Quebecers, in particular a root parsley “as no one has ever seen it in Quebec”, where it often remains weak and sick.

“There, I go through the chefs, but my real objective would be for ordinary people to have access to it and eat the best vegetables,” he specifies. His cherry tomatoes have made their way to grocery stores. However, it is his orange-fleshed Louis Albert potato – the one that makes chefs so happy – that is his greatest pride.

He hopes to have the opportunity to share it on a larger scale one day.

“To mix two pollens to put them together, it is not very difficult. The bulk of the job is to make the right selections. I keep the best specimens based on criteria of taste first and always, then resistance to disease and environmental pressures. Appearance comes next. Nature generally does very pretty things on its own. »

Enrich the heritage

Daniel Brisebois’ red-fleshed black radish from the TourneSol farm is an example of spectacular hybridization. But the exercise of selection has other functions, such as that of isolating the best peppers to make the next generations tastier or more resistant, explains the seed-breeder. “If people like it, it gradually takes over in the community. The variety adapts to where it is. And that’s how you create a terroir. »

Breeding allows new varieties of fruits and vegetables to emerge, where others die. “Gene banks are emptying of their content. It existed before, cauliflowers that resisted – 25 ° C and even under the snow. Unfortunately, it is a heritage that has disappeared forever,” laments seed producer and breeder Michel Lachaume. Was this cauliflower harder to grow or transport? We ignore it. One thing is certain, preservation goes through conservation, and the small seed companies are today the guardians of this heritage.

Play roulette

The major seed companies market a majority of hybrid or so-called F1 (first generation) varieties. However, a hybrid variety will produce seeds whose result will be uncertain once re-sown. To get the tasty tomatoes that charmed us last summer, you’ll have to go back to the source and buy the same seeds… Unless you want to have fun playing roulette, for better or worse.

This is exactly the card that Teprine Baldo, from Le Noyau farm, chose to play.

Alongside its activities, the market gardener and seed company sells its first-generation hybrid seeds under the name Zombie Seedz. The collection includes seeds that would normally be discarded due to uncertain yield. Presented in surprise bags illustrated by different artists, these seeds do not come with any guarantee on the result, except to have fun with flowers and vegetable plants resulting from more or less strange crosses, warns the seed company, here in counter- use.

“It’s a way of bringing a little art into my work, of opening up my offer and of distinguishing myself on the seed market, because selling seeds is hard!” she says. It is still a long process to want to stabilize a hybrid variety. I’ve done a few experiments with orange cherry tomatoes which yielded results without much flavor. I told myself that I would not waste my time sowing them, staking them, watering them… For the moment, I observe. »

The quest for the perfect plant

Hybridization is a matter of zeal, believes Teprine Badlo. A labor of love…

Before the seeds definitely bear the desired characteristics, it will have taken years of work – usually between 5 and 12 years. Time, money, energy. A solid passion.

Three years ago, Nicolas Peskir gave up a job in construction to devote himself to a hobby started a few years earlier in his yard, which quickly became too small for his ambitions as an amateur coach. The Domaine Quinchien farm where he now works in market gardening allows him to use a plot of land where he does his experiments.

Some are geek of computing. Nicolas Peskir is geek of hybridization. “I like the idea of ​​participating in the creation of a diversity of plants that people will be able to appreciate”, indicates the autodidact who hybridized a corn now giving more than three ears per plant. He also generated a new potato and tomatoes. One of them, “Brandywine Sunset”, is now stabilized. The ultimate goal of this enthusiast is to develop a variety of haskaps whose sugar content will be high enough to make wine.

For those who are tempted to see what nature can produce as curiosities, it is useful to know that certain plants pollinate each other more effectively than others. Tomatoes, peas, beans and lettuce, whose flowers are small, have few opportunities to interbreed naturally in the garden. Potatoes ? Nicolas Peskir pollinates them by hand with an electric toothbrush. Squash, whose large flowers act as pollen catchers, will reproduce easily with other specimens in the vegetable garden, or even in the neighborhood… Who knows? This kind of accident could well be the starting point of a personal quest to obtain the more than perfect vegetable!