Focused Chaos, an Experimental Cactus Orgy Model of San Pedro Seed Production

• Focused Chaos, An Experimental Model of Refined Diversity

While this is about cactus, I’ll probably talk about Apples quite a bit. That is because I’m very familiar with growing them both as clones and from seed. My work and research on apples is also somewhat the inspiration for how I want to approach seed growing and selection of trichocereus cacti.

The apple in America carries some important lessons. A limited number of varieties of apples were introduced from the old world, but within a fairly short span of time, those exploded into thousands of named, recorded varieties. Apple seedlings tend to be significantly different from their parents, so it isn’t surprising that all those thousands of new varieties came from seeds. But only an extremely small number were actually from intentional breeding. Intentional breeding would entail us taking the pollen of one chosen apple and putting it onto the flowers of another chosen apple, thereby creating seeds of which we have chosen both parents. Very little of that was done in America, or the rest of the world, until about the turn of the 20th century. Most of those thousands of varieties were actually from seed planted to grow rootstock for grafting onto, or were just random seedlings that sprouted up in orchards, hedgerows and such. That is more what we call selection than breeding. You are walking in the woods and find a good apple, take cuttings, graft it, your neighbors like it and they graft it, then you exhibit it at the fair and it ends up being named after you Jones’ Supreme Pride or some such.

From this chaos of seed planting, wildlings and selection, came these thousands of varieties. And many of them are very good and classic apples. But they are not all amazing. Some are great, some are good, some pretty much suck. Much progress has now been made by intentional breeding of apples.

But, there are some advantages to open pollination. More importantly, the idea of open (random) pollination within a select population is very intriguing. As apples were bred more and more, not too much attention was paid to the fact that the gene pool used for breeding became very narrow. Just a few varieties were used for breeding most new apples. Genetic diversity is generally a good thing. It keeps populations strong and adaptable. But the reason we end up with genetic bottlenecks in breeding, is because we want to chase certain traits.

My idea is to use open pollination to maintain a higher diversity and a greater number of random crosses, but still within a population that generally trends toward what we want in cactus offspring. Such a population of cactus could be likened to a breeding stable, except the cacti in these populations would interbreed randomly. So it’s more like a stable with no stalls, or a cactus orgy, resulting in total inter-breeding chaos. Remenber though, that they won’t just be any cactus. The varieties in the group will be selected for certain characteristics, with the goal of improvement along lines of desired forms and attributes. These attributes could be any number of characteristics that we might typically want in the cactus offspring. For instance, one breeding population could be a group of robust Bridgesii and the other of small spined to spineless, preferably fat, Pachanoi and scopulicola or similar formed cacti. If the population has many different varieties, and 20 of them happen to be blooming one night, there will likely be pollination between them all. Is that good? Well, that depends but for my experiment yes!

I also like make controlled crosses between specific plants. I’m excited to cross pollinate using my seedling King Tubby when it grows up. I want to cross it with Some even fatter and even smaller spined variety. But that means that every one of the seeds from that fruit will have the same parents, crossed in the same direction. While these will still throw a lot of variability, they will not throw nearly the variety as when a flower may have been pollinated by 20 different parents. Lets say you get seed from me of King Tubby x Excaliborg. You may grow out 50 seeds, but they only have two parents. Not only that, but those parents are only crossed in one direction, with King Tubby as the seed parent. Lets now say that you get open pollinated seed from me and there were 15 cactus varieties blooming at once and I collected seed from all of them and mixed them together. Each cactus variety could potentially be pollinated by any of 14 others in a best case scenario. To do the math, that is 196 different potential crosses in one batch of seed! Now that is some diversity. Some will be the same cross in two different directions, i.e. King Tubby x Dokuro Chan and Dokuro Chan x King Tubby, but still, damn that’s a lot of variety. But why would this diversity be important?

King Tubby, Scopulicola #9 x Juul’s Giant, my favorite looking cactus so far out of all the seedlings I’ve grown to size.

Remember that there is no junk in these select populations, so each seed has reasonable potential to be something really good. If you plant 50 seeds of only one cross, they have limited potential for diverse expression. But if you plant 50 seeds of this population of open pollinated varieties, only a few are going to be the exact same cross. And we not only get very diverse seed with high potential, but it would also be very cheap, because moths and other bugs do the work of pollinating. Not only do I just have to collect the seed, but there could be tens of thousands of seeds in a season, so I would not even have to clean it that carefully to get a ton. When doing intentional cross pollinations, There are only so many you can make in a season.

The reason we make specific crosses is to chase specific traits. That approach is super useful. If I want a red fleshed apple with high sugar, I’m not going to grow seed of apple parents that don’t have those traits. I’m going to cross very sweet apples with red fleshed apples. But the truth is that we can’t completely guess what kind of plants will turn out when any specific cross is made, until we make the crosses and grow the seeds out. While we can aim for a certain outcome, the synergy between the genes of different varieties is not actually very predictable. So allowing a large population of varieties to cross willy nilly, creates huge genetic diversity that may express unexpected positive traits in any random cross. For instance, the smallest spines on a cactus I have from a batch of seedlings in 2020, were from the parent in the mix with the largest spines, Bridgesii SS02. This is not explicable, but I’ll take it! So, while there is a time for controlled crosses, a more chaotic open cross pollination creates crosses that we might not ever make and could not guess the results of. Some of those results will be very good. Each cactus also has unexpressed characteristics lurking in its genes. And remember, although they are crossing randomly, they are not random varieties. The whole population is purposefully selected toward a certain set of characteristics or a phenotype.

This unnamed, but very cool blunt bomber of a seedling probably has the smallest spines out of about 2500 that year. But it has in it’s parentage the very large spined SS02. We can try to guess or research possible outcomes when making crosses between just two cacti, but they may not cooperate in producing what we desire. We don’t really know what lurks in the genes of trichocereus that might express. There are many good crosses that no one will ever make, because they would never predict the unexpected outcome. In that way, a little chaos and a lot of diversity can be a good thing.

BITE ME!, named for all the sheeple that said I couldn’t grow good apples from seed 🤣🤣🤣 This is not only the very first apple I fruited, but it’s also open pollinated, so I only know one parent. Sure, it’s a surrounded by an apple orchard with mostly good to decent apples, but the genetics it’s exposed to are not focused in any way. The point is, a little chaos can yield unexpected good results, but undoubtedly more so if we focus it in a bit. A focused, but sizeable gene pool, allowed to pollinate chaotically, is a little of both worlds, a lack of control, within a controlled population.

As more varieties from the original native populations of Wachumas make their way North, and good new seedlings are selected, a select population can be added to, old varieties can be removed, and the group gradually refined toward desired ends. If I send you seedlings or seeds and you grow them and find something exceptional that fits the type I’m breeding for, it can be added back into the gene pool to gradually refine toward the phenotype, or to add in a new characteristic. It’s a gene pool party, with a very select, rotating, invite only guest list.

This idea stems from an idea I’ve had for a while now to make seed-bank fruit trees that are grafted to many different varieties, with some common traits that are desired. For instance, very late ripening apples. If the tree is isolated, then the only apples to cross on that tree would be the ones grafted onto it, creating a crazy mix of genetics in the seeds of any single apple. Different seeds in the fruit could be pollinated by different parents, but focused toward very late hanging, high quality fruit. Apples are not easy to isolate in order to prevent pollination from random sources, because they are very common almost everywhere. But San Pedros are not that common and can easily be grown as an isolated population for this experiment.

This is the original Frankentree. It currently has a little over 100 apple varieties grafted onto it and I’ve seen it produce 100 different varieties of fruit in a single season. It is quite easy to build a tree like this and it could be populated with select varieties toward a specific apple type or season etc. The problem is isolating it from other trees and random cross pollination by bees. Hard to do with the common apple, but easy to do with wachuma.

Think of what this approach means. Without hand pollination, or any other interference, we could have a focused, but diverse pool of genetics producing gigantic quantities of affordable seed toward a certain phenotype, almost like moving toward a land race of cacti of a certain type, a focused genetic medley. Having inexpensive, but quality seed, more good seedlings could be propagated at lower cost, and sown and grown with less care. More seedlings means more to select the very best specimens from.

This approach is currently just a mental construct. It will take years to accumulate the varieties I need, test them and grow them to flowering. It is also boldly experimental in nature and only a good deal of time will tell what the results of such an approach might be. My vision is to see these cactus populations exist as community seed bank resources. I plan to do the same with loquats, apples, peaches and other fruits and nuts, so that trees grown from these seeds will have a much higher probability of producing interesting high quality fruit, with a maximum amount of variability, all that without the inevitable genetic bottlenecking and time/energy/money costs of less accessible controlled breeding. I’m excited about this general concept and feel pretty sure it’s an awesome idea with a future.

If you have suggestions or genetic material to trade that I might use, these are the characteristics I’m looking for, aside from the most obvious desirable characteristics that most trichocereus growers want:

T. Bridgesii: Large, fat, robust varieties. Tendency to go thornless. Exceptionally blue in color. Growth vigor.

T. Pachanoi, Scopulicola and similar formed cacti: Fat. Small thorns to thornless. Growth vigor.

I would also like to eventually start selecting populations for cold hardiness, and am interested in that trait as well when it can be tested for. Eventually, I would like to see seedlings planted in mass quantities outdoors in marginal climates, like the pacific Northwest, to see what survives. That is how the wealthy apple was developed, by freezing and killing thousands of seedlings until something survived. In order to do that, we need cheap, genetically diverse seed, just what I’m planning to produce. There is also a practice in Russia of growing a plant as far north as you can, fruiting it, then planting the seeds, to gain cold hardiness. This idea probably works by what is now called epigenetics, or malleable genetics. Genetic pathways that are dormant in the plant “wake up” and are passed to the next generation as a matter of survival. That could be the topic of another post.

This idea rocks. Isolated seed-bank populations, producing huge amounts of inexpensive seed, from a focused, but diverse gene pool, selected toward a general type. If you have interesting varieties for this project, hit me up and let’s trade!