American Gardening 11: 274-275 (1890)

THE ORIGINATION OF VARIETIES
ASTONISHING RESULTS, BEATING NATURE WITH LIGHTNING SPEED!
R. T. CHOKE

MUCH is said about the getting-up of new varieties of fruits, vegetables, flowers and plants, and it is a grand thing. There is great satisfaction and profit in living in this wonderful age when so many grand new good things are all the time being advertised in the catalogues. The gardeners of these days do not realize how great their advantages are in the originating of superb new things. Before the time of handsome catalogues and grand impartial periodicals, it was a difficult matter to get up anything really new and good.

I hope, Mr. Editor, that you will pardon any reference to my own work, but some of the younger generation may not know about the difficulties which an ambitious gardener twenty years ago had to overcome. Those whose recollections run back into the fifties may recall some of the grand new novelties which I sent out in a modest way. As soon as I had become acclimated to this American soil, I was sure there was money in it, if it could only be gotten out. So I set out to breed up new vegetables, and I was successful, for I knew that I should be from the start.

My first attempt was with potatoes, for I was fully convinced that the potato is an important food product. I planted a half acre of the old Davis' Seedling, and by carefully marking the earliest plants, I had collected enough seed by fall to make a grand new variety, and I sent this out the next spring as Choke's New Early Dawn Morning Star. It was a grand success, for I recollect that the fifty bushels which I had to sell netted me over $15 per bushel. The seed was bought by so many persons, that I knew it would be unprofitable to grow it another year, so I set to work to breed up a new variety the next year. To do this and be sure that I should get a superb good thing, I selected eight bushels of the biggest Davis' Seedlings I could find, and planted them upon my best soil. In the fall I again selected out all the biggest potatoes, and I had a magnificent new variety, which I named Choke's Grand Arc de Triomph. This was a bigger success than the first; but as potatoes are bulky things to ship and handle, I decided to try my hand at seeds, for I had by this time got a good deal of notoriety as an originator.

I began in the spring of 1856 with lettuce, cabbage and squashes. I had no idea of getting a new variety of lettuce when I set out. But I noticed, when sowing my Brown Silesian that spring, that some seeds were a little darker colored than others. I had forgotten about this until my lettuce began to bear, when I noticed that a few plants had greener leaves than the others and the leaves were curly. So I knew that the dark-colored seeds had produced these plants. In the fall I sorted out all the dark seeds from the lettuce patch, which was an easy matter, for they were nearly all dark colored. This new variety I called Choke's Superlative Green and Brown Curl-Fringed Extra Early Summer lettuce. It sold well, and I think that it was superior to many of the best varieties of the present day.

In cabbages I built upon the Early York; by selecting the shortest plants and those with fewest leaves, I was enabled, in two years, to send out Choke's Superb Incomparable Dwarf. And by hybridizing this with the Bergen Drumhead, which was then just coming into favor, I secured a strain of intermediate season, one which was admirably adapted to any kind of soil or treatment. In fact, they would grow under total neglect. These were the hardiest cabbages I ever saw. Some may still remember these as Choke's Inexhaustible Sure-pop Hardy.

The squashes are exceedingly amenable to treatment, as the farina, or impregnating fluid, is scattered by insects and wind, and one can get any number of hybrids, etc., between all kinds of melons and pumpkins and squashes and cucumbers. I sent out no less than a dozen grand new novelties in less than three years.

During all this time of scientific experimenting, I lived in a small town where printing facilities were not good. Early in the sixties I moved into Philadelphia, and there I found wonderful facilities for carrying on my scientific work. Many gardeners had been stimulated by my successes, and I was enabled to buy any year, for a hundred or two dollars, a number of new and valuable varieties. My best hit was the enlargement of my single price-list into a catalogue, and I soon added a colored plate. I have always thought that the colored plate is the most valuable aid we have in the scientific gettingup of sorts. A number of the varieties which I introduced in those early days are changed into other kinds. I would particularly mention in this connection Choke's New Golden Butter Cream turnip, Choke's Large Colossal Excelsior turnip-beet, and Choke's Wonderful Twenty-Eight-Day cucumber.

My only object in writing this and in drawing some observations from my own experiments, is to urge on the grand work of progress in the rising generation.