Last week, Emily and I took the week off to go on a vacation.
And what better place for a vacation than to visit another seed company?
So we drove down to Naples, New York to visit Petra and Matthew at Fruition Seeds.
This is the first of 3 posts about our visit.
The Fields
Matthew walked me through one of their isolation fields. We looked at a lot of trials and some seed crops.
Next, let’s go into the greenhouse …
The greenhouse is used for some seed production but there is also a lot of breeding work going on in here. Some projects have clear intentions – a sugar snap pea and pepper project were in this crowd. And then others were just to see what might happen! (That is my favourite kind of project.)
Hybrid Squash Fields
We looked at two hybrid cucurbit fields.
The first field was quite big with alternating two rows of squash for female flowers and one row of squash for male flowers.
The team regularly removes all the male flowers from the female rows to make sure all the pollen comes from the male rows. They leave the female flowers on the male rows intact. This means they could also get a lot of uncrossed seed from the male rows!
Here’s a pollination cage where they are working on another hybrid cucurbit.
In this case they need to go in and hand pollinate.
Dahlias!
Fruition grows a bunch of Dahlias. Some come from their own breeding program. Others are already released varieties.
I loved this colour scheme.
Onwards to the warehouse
Next post we’ll go into the Fruition warehouse to see some of what is going on in there!