The University of Saskatchewan has also been working on haskap berries. Wikipedia says those have been cultivated in Russia since the 1950s.
That’s awesome. It’s like a plant that manufactures lime popping bobas.
I concur. I believe the OP is making a distinction between wild plants that are grown deliberately and those that have been genetically modified (through breeding or artificial means) to be more easily grown with the goal of a cash crop.
Did you not follow Shakester’s wiki link? It has a timeline - including cited stuff like:
1888
The first commercial orchard of macadamias was planted at Rous Mill, 12 km from Lismore, New South Wales, by Charles Staff.
What makes for a domesticated pecan? I mean, there are ‘native’ pecans (meaning wild indigenous ones here in Texas), and commercial cultivars, and they’re pretty easy to tell apart (the native ones are a lot smaller and harder shelled). But they all taste about the same, and the trees aren’t easily told apart without actual nuts falling from them.
But what makes the others domesticated? There’s some sort of threshold where something beyond just garden-variety selective breeding takes place to make a crop “domesticated”, right?
Samphire is an interesting example. It has been collected wild for centuries, but cultivation is a new thing. I haven’t been able to pin down a date, but I found an interesting paper from 2016 (spoilered here because it’s PDF-ish paper, you can kust scroll down to read the paper) which states:
It goes on to talk about commercial scale production in Israel by 2013 (a publication date).
So for a domestication date: ongoing?
Samphire wiki:
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Speaking of Sasketchewan, are Saskatoon berries, AKA serviceberries, cultivated for food anywhere? I’ve seen them cultivated, but only as ornamentals: I’ve never seen the berries for sale anywhere.
You can buy wild blueberries in stores. At least dried ones. And even dried, they taste better than the farmed ones.
They don’t have to be genetically different than the wild ones, although they usually are. Domestication is really a matter of being about to grow lots of the crop consistently. In the case of blueberries, it was soil conditions but other plants may have other issues.
No I didn’t. I found some other sites about the domestication of macadamias. They didn’t mention domestication in Australia, just Hawaii.
In the case of pecans, they have to be grafted. If you plant the seeds from a tree that’s producing nuts that are good, you won’t get more trees just like it.
The first person to successfully graft pecans was a Black person named Antoine. This was in Louisiana in the 1840s, so he was a slave and we don’t know much about him. However, pecans did not become a widely grown crop until the 1880s.
I don’t know if is domesticated, as in selectively bred to be substantially different from the wild variety, but wild rice is an interesting (and tasty) example. It has been harvested by Native Americans for centuries, but commercial cultivation began in the 1950’s, according to Wikipedia. Of course the wild variety has undoubtedly changed considerably from its progenitors before humans began harvesting it.
I don’t know if the berries are sold commercially, but there are several cultivars on the market that are advertised for the quality of their fruit.
Is that actually domestication though? I thought with plants, it had more to do with breeding them for keeping traits that were well adapted for agriculture, but not necessarily so great in the wild. Stuff like seed heads not shattering easily, larger kernels, and so on versus the wild variety.
Just grafting branches from the right pecan trees onto other ones doesn’t seem to really fall in that category like the others do- it’s just mechanically propagating the wood from wild trees that happen to have characteristics you like.
Are you saying you don’t think the 1888 plantings cited happened because other sites (which you haven’t cited, so I can’t tell if they’re all citing the Hawaiian Macadamia Propaganda Dept…) don’t mention them? Otherwise, what’s your point?
Domestication (for plants) can be merely the deliberate planting and care:
Domestication is a sustained multigenerational, mutualistic relationship in which one organism assumes a significant degree of influence over the reproduction and care of another organism in order to secure a more predictable supply of a resource of interest, and through which the partner organism gains advantage over individuals that remain outside this relationship, thereby benefitting and often increasing the fitness of both the domesticator and the target domesticate.
The breeding for traits is a common aspect, but it’s not necessary. Domestication starts as soon as the seed/shoots of any particular individual plant are singled out for replanting, and the resultant plantings cared for while growing. What’s important is the mutualistic relationship between the plant and planter. I definitely think that qualifies in the case of grafted pecans.
You asked if I’d read his cite. My answer was no, because I’d read other pages which I thought covered the entire history of macadamia domestication. Obviously I was wrong about that.
Cornell’s been talking them up as a good new crop for small farms in the Northeast USA.
That link says they’re grown commercially on 3,200 acres in Canada. (Not all in one lump; that’s on 900 different farms.)
The berries are very tasty. But i really like blueberries. And they look like blueberries. And if I’m expecting blueberries i am disappointed. But on their own, they are a very nice crop. I often pick and eat them when i come across them.
I planted one, but my yard has a lot of ceder apple rust (which they are susceptible to, being related to apples) and even ignoring that birds eat the berries, they don’t take work where i live.
Something that is difficult to grow commercially are mushrooms: some species have a mutuallistic relationship whit something else, usually a tree that has to grow for ages before the mushrooms start to bud, and can be extremely fussy about a lot of conditions. Research is going on right now and more and more species are being developed commercially on a regular basis. Paul Stamets has written the most complete book about it.
Of course, mushrooms are not plants. They are funghi. But humans are trying to cultivate them, so I thought they fit in here.