club root resistant swede

[ken smith]

My plot is heavily infested with clubroot and each year I get a good crop of swedes by growing one called Marian. I sow them in a seed tray and them prick out into small pots before planting out on well limed ground using a bulb planter. Do not let them get too big before planting out.

[bluemoon]

Hi Alison
I do not think that these terms are mutually exclusive.
F1 crops have been genitically manipulated though not necessarily in the manner that is apparently disliked by so many people.

Regards
Terry

GM crops have been made by the insertion of an alien gene into the genome of a plant. Genes make proteins, if you take a gene from another species, let's say a jellyfish, and put it into a cabbage then there's a good chance that the cabbage will react to the proteins formed from that alien gene in order to protect itself, possibly producing poisons, carcinogens and the like. We actually have no real way of knowing, short of eating the things for a generation or two and seeing if there are adverse effects. Incredible as it sounds this is the type of manipulation we're talking about when we talk of GM crops.

The creation of an F1 hybrid is just the crossing of one plant with another under controlled conditions. Basically plant breeding which we've been doing for 5000 years. Even so it's what happens in nature. Sorry, but I can't think of any natural way that a part of the jellyfish genome could end up in that of the cabbage, so no it's far from being the same thing. There could come a time, in fact for all I know it's possibly already here, when one GM crop could be crossed with another GM crop to produce an F1hybrid/GM crop, but the two terms still mean completely different things.

[Snadger]

My plot is heavily infested with clubroot and each year I get a good crop of swedes by growing one called Marian. I sow them in a seed tray and them prick out into small pots before planting out on well limed ground using a bulb planter. Do not let them get too big before planting out.

You seem to have my plot and my way of tackling it ken!