Have you ever noticed that , unlike the fluent - textured surfaces of seeds such as spinach plant , radish , cucumber , and squash , the germ of beets ( and their cousins , Swiss chard ) are grating and scrunch up , almost like someone just jammed a crowd of seeds together ?
That ’s because Beta vulgaris and chard seedsarea lot of seeds jammed into one seed .
Beet and chard germ are multigerm cum . ( agile flora lesson : The germ is the generative part of a seed — the fertilized egg — that grows into a new works . )
Multigerm seed come about when flowers develop in clusters , fused together by the petals ( such as the bloom on a beet plant ) , which then produce multigerm cum chunk .
When the seed balls develop , they may have two to five seedling sprout all at once .
To encourage better growth and produce hefty beet roots , beet seedling have to be thinned once they get to a few in in height . It is n’t an overly intimidating task for the mediocre home gardener , specially sincethinnings can be used in a salad .
But for a commercial-grade farmer , thinning dustup upon dustup of beetroot seedlings clumped together is not only time - consuming , it ’s a vast disbursement in childbed .
It was such a significant problem that in the early 1930s , scientist in the former Soviet Union go down to work on developing a type of beet seeded player that would only bring on one seedling — a monogerm germ .
Renowned sugar beet breeder and geneticist Viacheslav F. Savitsky and his co-worker , M.G. Bordonos , discovered a mutation in kale beet plants that caused monogermity in plant life that hadlate - season boltingability .
They then examined some 22 million ( ! ) refined sugar beet plants to find 100 plants possessing both multigerm and monogerm seed ball .
The scientists were able to discover plant with a high percentage of monogerm ejaculate balls , as well as the genes that were responsible for the mutation . But regrettably , their oeuvre was interrupted by the Second World War .
Savitsky finally escaped the Soviet Union and immigrated to the United States in 1947 , where he was employed by the USDA and afterwards send at the Sugar Beet Laboratory in Salt Lake City , Utah . There , he keep his work in turn up possible source of monogermity for domesticated sugar beet agriculturist and the American sugar industry .
In 1948 , his intensive research conduct to the find of 5 sugar beet plants put up monogerm seeds among 300,000 other plants in a 4 - Akka seminal fluid output field north of Salem , Oregon .
Two of those plant ( doom as SLC 101 and SLC 107 ) were straight monogerms , and only one stop up being used extensively . The selected offspring of SLC 101 were spread to found breeders in the United States and Europe , and within a few years , monogerm varieties of sugar Beta vulgaris were all that were grown in train rural area .
That one plant , SLC 101 , dish up as the sole source of all monogerm beet varieties available today , both for sugar beets and board beets .
While most beets bring about multigerm seeds , there are a few mixture that bring on only monogerm seeds , such as the F1 hybrid Moneta and the open - pollinated Alvro Mono ( both of which are mesa beets ) .
If you moan at the very thought of cutting , or lean to have a weighed down bridge player when sowing ( I care to call this fat finger syndrome , as it happens quite often in my case ! ) , monogerm come could be a full alternative for your garden .
As for me , I ’m partial to heirlooms likeChioggiaandCylindraand consider thinnings to be an other harvest time of my harvest !
