Description
About the development of Common Wealth Pickler and South Wind Slicer (by Edmund Frost):
I’ve been working on these cucumbers at Twin Oaks Seed Farm / Common Wealth Seed Growers since 2014, when we did a large cucumber trial focused on downy mildew resistance. I decided to move forward with a cross between Shandong Si Gua 1210 (from China), and a cucumber from Luzon Province in the Philippines (USDA PI 426170). I made a selection from this population in 2016 under heavy downy mildew and bacterial wilt pressure, and managed to cross that plant to an American pickling cucumber called ‘Homemade Pickles.’ Selection from the three-way cross started in late 2017 (it is possible to grow two generations of cucumbers to seed here in a growing season).
The resulting population had a lot of diversity, and is the foundation for both South Wind Slicer and Common Wealth Pickler. We’ve done intensive breeding trials each year since then, selecting for downy mildew resistance, bacterial wilt tolerance, flavor, sweetness, crispness, shape, and productivity. We are continuing to refine both varieties, and to cross it with other material to create additional varieties. We received grants from Organic Farming Research Foundation in 2018 and 2019 for the cucumber research and breeding work. The 2014 trial happened with SARE funding. Read more about all this on our research page: Commonwealthseeds.com/research.
Thanks and Acknowledgement to:
-Peasant and Indigenous farmers and communities in China, the Philippines and many other places whose brilliant work over so many generations created the parent cucumber varieties used in this project. The breeding work here is one small part of this whole story.
-Kathy Reitsma and others at North Central Regional Plant Introduction Station in Ames, Iowa. (They maintain the cucumber collection for the USDA germplasm bank.)
-Adam Call and Todd Wehner from NC State for their work in “Studies on Resistance to Downy Mildew in Cucumber” (2010). Results of this study largely informed the choices in our 2014 downy mildew trial where we identified what parents to use in this project.
-Michael Mazourek, organic plant breeder from Cornell, for support, guidance, and encouragement throughout this project.
-Micaela Colley and Jared Zystro from Organic Seed Alliance.
-Bill Holdsworth for making the initial cross in the winter of 2015.
-Organic Farming Research Foundation (OFRF) and Southern Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SSARE).
-Jay Bost, Katie Ziemann, and Gabe Sachter-Smith for doing seed increases and re-combinations in Hawaii over the winters of 2019, 2020 and 2021.
