Starting vegetable seeds indoors questions

Last year I tried starting my vegetable and herbs indoors with seeds and had no success. I have done some research, but wanted to ask the forum a series of questions before attempting it again this year. The following is what I am planning on starting from seed indoors: tomato, bell pepper, carrot, lettuce, corn, pole bean, spinach and basil. I also want to try some watermelon seeds inside. Here are the questions I have:

1) Should any of these not be started inside?

2) I plan to start them indoors 4 weeks prior to the estimated last frost and when I will transplant them into my raised beds. Is that too much time, too little, or just right?

3) From what I have researched it looks like most places recommend a soil less mix. Should I add some soil or not? Any thoughts on your personal favorites for seed starting mix?

4) Should I cover them with a sheet of plastic wrap until the begin to sprout?

5) Is it okay to have them by the window receiving natural light, or should they be kept away from light?

Anything else I should consider doing that I have not mentioned here, please let me know. Thank you all for your help!

Hi Heuvy,

at 1) I wouldn't transplant the carrots - they'll do best at their final place. Anything with a tap root will be very sensitive to transplanting. Pole beans are normally very quick to germinate and to grow, so anyone around here ( German 7a) plants them exactly 5 days before our "Eisheilige" are over. That's somewhat superstitious, but works well for generations...

at 2) Four weeks could be a little short for the tomatoes, and maybe the bell pepper. With the lettuce, you might not be hysterical about last frost, as some types will not suffer. I have a few plants of read oak leaf which I started too late last year, which are looking quite healthy right now, as our after-christmas-snow has thawed away - i hope they will take off as soon as temperature rises again.

4) Plastic wrap could help with keeping everything moist, but you need to remove it at the first sight of green

5) Light is everything, especially for the tomatoes. one fact to keep in mind: the human eye adopts very easily to different lighting situations, to a point where you almost always misjudge the true light intensity - for you to feel something as "half bright", the real physical intensity has to drop by 9/10

This is just my own experience, but I would NOT do carrots, lettuce or spinach indoors.
They would all do well as direct sowings in the garden beds.
Peppers take a long time---8 to 12 weeks indoors in good light.
Tomatoes need 6 to 8 weeks head start under good light.
There are special seed starting mixes at garden centers.

Thank you both for the responses. With regards to the growing medium, especially for the peppers and tomatoes, will I need to add anything to them before I translpant them, or should the seed starting mix suffice until it's time to transplant them?

I have successfully started tomatoes and peppers indoors under lights, six weeks before the last frost. I used a soiless mix and covered with a clear lid until germination. People aren't born with green thumbs, mostly trial and error earns them the green designation. I'm still working at earning mine.

Come to think of it...my peppers did take longer to germinate. You're right CLS.

heuvy-
The seed starting mix will have almost no nutrients, so you will need to "pot them up" into real potting soil to "grow on" a bit before transplanting them, and they will likely need a bit of fertilizer too while still in the pots. Seed mixes are specifically designed to drain well so as not to drown the little guys, but keep them moist, and have almost no nutrients so as to discourage growth of bad things like fungus. The seed has enough stored nutrients to sprout and make the first "seed leaves" but not to keep on growing. Some people just plant the seeds directly into regular potting mix, and often that works too.

Thanks for all of the help so far everyone, this has been great. It sounds like it might be best to start the seeds in the potting mix so I don't have to switch them to a pot before transplanting (maybe add seed starter to the top level of the medium). If I did use seed starting mix, would it work to have the bottom layer be soil to help add nutrients or would that prevent drainage?

Also, I have a bunch of plastic plant trays I got from Lowes last year when they were done with them but I also have some of the plastic storage containers in the photo below. If I put holes in the bottom of these, would they work just as well for starting the seeds?

Hi Heuvy.

I am totally expert, experienced, and highly skilled at killing seedlings started indoors. I can share several things with you that are guaranteed to kill off tray after tray of seeds.

Of course, you could also use my experience as examples of what NOT to do, should you prefer ...


1. Over-watering rots seeds and drowns any roots that manage to emerge before the seed rots. The few seedling that emerge will probably fall over and die from damping-off before the seedling mix dries to a usable point.

That is sure to happen if you start with seedling mix that is too damp or retains lots of water, as many cheap commercial peaty mixes do. If you buy your mix, something professional is a good idea if you can afford that big bale. Pro-Mix and Sunshine are two great brands.

(BTW, the issue is not really 'too much water in the mix". It is "too little air" or "not enough largish air-filled voids and channels". Once the open spaces in the mix fill with water, air can't diffuse freely and rapidly as a gas. It has to slowly dissolve into water, and then slowly diffuse through water to reach the root hairs. If the mix had air spaces, each space would rapidly reach 100% oxygenation and oxygen would only have to diffuse slowly a few millimeters from the nearest void space to each root hair. Anything without gills drowns quickly if you hold it under water, but if you have even a narrow straw or snorkel that can reach the air, oxygen can diffuse rapidly through the gas and keep you alive.)

Many people add coarse Perlite to commercial mixes to make them drain fast enough. Coarse grit like #2 chicken grit (crushed granite) also works well, but it could be a little bigger.

I like screened pine bark best, to "open up" and "lighten" commercial mixes. in sizes from 1/10 inch to 3/16 inch or so (2 to 5 mm). In fact, small pine bark nuggets plus a little pine bark fines hardly need any commercial mix added at all. And bark nuggets cost around 1/10th as much as good commercial mixes.

Seedlings need no fertilizer until they have 1-2 pairs of true leaves. Even then, use 1/4 as much soluble fertilizer as you might think desirable for bigger plants. That might be the only way to kill seedlings that I have little experience with. You would have to ask others about the best ways to "burn" or "salt up" a tray of seedlings.

Suppose you have a nice, fast-draining mix that lets in enough air for the roots. You can probably still make them unhealthy by keeping the surface damp - just mist it often and never run a small fan on it. Keep them in a stuffy space with little air movement.

If frequent misting is too much work ... too-frequent top-watering may still kill most of your seedlings unless the top layer of mix drains dry very fast.

Bottom-watering is hard work unless you have some good setup for it. Me, I plugged up the pipes that drain my bathtub the first time I tried. Then I found that I could bottom-water right in my 1020 trays, by laying a piece of cotton flannel in the tray before adding seedling inserts or small pots. The flannel carries water uniformly to every cell, insert or plug even when I add barely enough water to the tray to dampen the flannel.

https://allthingsplants.com/ideas/view/RickCorey/646/Bottom-Watering-Seedling-Trays-with-Cotton-Flannel-Prevents-Water-Logging/

You can still kill the seedlings by over-fertilizing, never watering, or leaving them in a 1" pot until they are big enough to need a 4" pot.

I think the most effective to kill a small seed is to plant it too deep. When they say "surface", they don't mean "1/16th inch deep". When they say "needs light to germinate", they do know whereof they speak.

For example, petunias need to be surface-sowed, and they need light to germinate.
http://tomclothier.hort.net/page05.html

When I was experimenting with very coarse, open, very fast-draining seedling mixes, I sowed an entire 98-cell tray of petunias - several rows of each variety. Two or three petunia seeds per cell. Of course the tiny seeds immediately fell down to the bottoms of the channels and crevices in the seedling mix. They were not on the surface and got no light.

Out of 200-300 seeds, NONE emerged. Less than 1/4%. That's a record that's hard to beat, although I once set up three whole TRAYS of salvia, thyme, and I forget what other perennials. That was in my over-watering era, and the trays were filled with some cheap commercial peaty mix. Nothing emerged from any cell in any of the three trays - a germination rate less than 0.2% and maybe lower than 0.1%.

You can make them sickly, leggy, pale and vulnerable by not giving them bright enough light, but this is a slow and painful way to stretch out their death throes. They will become sick, stop adding leaf area, and shoot up much taller than is ideal within a week or so of not-enough-light, and may never recover. It's still not an efficient way to kill all your seedlings, but can be combined with leaving them in tiny seedling cells too long. Then, even if they survive long enough to be planted out, they have little or no chance of surviving transplant shock, wind and sun.

Creative people have put seedling trays in front of windows that get cold at night and chill the seedlings, then full sun blasts in and cooks them before they can recover from the chill! Combined with insufficient light intensity, this is a classy three-way-kill that is even easier than over-watering! But it isn't as reliable way to kill ALL your seedlings. It depends on latitude, date, southiness of the exposure, shade and room temperature.

Four foot shop lights might cost $20 and take 30 minutes to hang - who has time for that?

If you do avoid over-watering, over-fertilizing, under-illuminating, window-burning, ignoring crucial directions and not potting up or planting out soon enough, please let us know what results you get!

After three years of killing most of what I plant, I've started getting lots of survivors and wonder if that's a quirk or whether it can be reproduced ...

Survivors? shame on you, Rick !

Well, actually, if you take seeds from your own plants and use them for your next generation, they will work out better from year to year, because you're selecting for plants which are able to survive your seeding methods - lots of people are doing this kind of selective breeding without even knowing it!

Unless they are hybrids....

most tomatoes are no hybrids - and even if they are F1s, you may find that the F2 and further are far more interesting.

ok, now I'm scared! I just read Rick's post.

I hadn't (until now) even considered that I might get less than 50% success in this first year of seed starting. Now it's time for me to scramble and comew up with a fall-back strategu, if I kill ALL my seedkings, than WHAT will cover the bare ground in my gardens?? (Too bad I'm not in dry, arid desert: else I could just spray-paint some rocks!!! LOL)

Oh, Bet, it's unlikely you'll do as badly as I did the first year or two. Especially if you keep the soil like whatever it is they say: "damp but not wet", or is it "moist but not damp"?

Some say "no wetter than a well-squeezed sponge".

Of course, you can sow two seeds in each cell, and then you can laugh at a 50% die-off.

Or start an extra tray or two, expecting many losses.

Those are also clever psychological techniques! When the seeds see that we EXPECT them to die in droves, the little buggers dig in and thrive just to spite us!

I swear that I got 300% germination from some saved Alyssum seed that I expected to fail because it was "all chaff".

I was kind of dramatizing a little, but yes, I have killed many trays of seedlings over several years. One kind and experienced gardener told me that was a GOOD sign. If you never lose any plants, you aren't trying hard enough, and you should try more difficult species and a variety of techniques. That's how you learn.

But it is smart to sow only some of the seeds you have, so you can try again if they don't come up, or if you started them so early they outgrew their pots before you harden them off, or started them outside just before a surprise cold snap. You might get two starts inside and one direct sow outside before one of them does well. Then you know what works best for you.

I eventually noticed that it was good to start SOME very easy seeds. Their behavior during abuse told me more than the "just dead" ones told me.

I agree that anyone who saves their own seeds automatically selects for traits that are able to survive their methods of "caring for" the seedlings and plants. Also, micro-climate, insect pests and plant diseases.

tHANKS FOR THE ENMCOURAGEMENT, rICK (gggggrrrrrr dang caps lock!) I already planned on 2 per cell, to account for my estimated 50% die-off,

I THOUGHT I had selected all easy seeds to start with (tomatoes, marigolds, zinnias and asters) but now I'm not so sure about the asters and the zinnias.

For an emergency fall-back plan (quickly thought up after reading your post and panicking: what if I kill EVERYTHING??) I decided to use my extra marigold, aster and zinnia sees to direct sow. . . and just out-right BUY some tomato seedlings / plants!! As well as fill in bare spots left with those sp[ray-painted rocks. . and let loose my pet rock for effect! LOL

So, with a fall-back strategy already figured outr. . . those dang litt buggers will ALL grow! LOL I can see it now: I'll fill my son's toy wagon with all that surplus and go visit my neighbors, one after another, giving them away!

BetNC-I have always had good success starting my plants from seed and my set up is very basic. But I usual only start Tomatoes, peppers,eggplant and a couple other things inside, everything else is direct sown. I start 1000s of seeds a season. Zinnias are super easy, those I direct sow. Getting plants acclimated to Tx weather is more difficult then just tossing the seeds. IMO.

I usually have abt 80% success. The one really good thing abt DG is that if you are having problems you can get an answer right away. Hopefully before the problem becomes terminal. Rick is a much better gardener the he is letting on....he is also extremely fun and has the unique talent of being able to express this in writing.

Totally agree abt starting your own saved seeds. Just wanted to point out that if the plant you collected the seeds from is a hybrid the next generation may not be anything like the mother plant. In the US most of the tomatoes grown (at least around here) are hybrids. People are just catching on to O/Ps but many of them don't have the proven disease resistance. O/Ps are pretty much all I grow.

I just don't get OP (open pollinated) tomatoes. What is that supposed to signify anyway? Because of the way the tomatoe plant's sex parts (anther and stigma, folks...this is a smut free zone!!) grow - it's most likely each blossom will self-fertilize. Blossoms are rarely physically capable of being pollinated by bees etc. That's whyt is isn't a concern to plant different varieties of tomatoes next to each other.

Another thing I don't get is seed companies advertising "non-GMO seeds". That's akin to labeling beans "Vegetarian"! Genetically modified organisms, whether plant or animal, are highly regulated by several different federal government agencies. In the case of animals, the strict regulations require that ALL GMO animals be destroyed (not just carcasses disposed of any old way but incinerated and over=seen by federal inspectorts) with accompanying documentation. There are some agricultural crops / plants that have been approved for release to the general public (farmers/growers for corn, wheat, etc who must still submit records and meet ffederal guidelines.) after YEARS of growing test plots to ensure the variants wouldn't get loose in the wild and run amok....but, to date, there are NO GMO horticultural plants that are even available to the general public.

Can somebody explain these for me??

Too late for me to answer right now but you can try doing a DG search and you mite get your questions answered. There is a ton of info on here.

I wouldn't use the term "open pollinated" for tomatoes - then again, "heirloom" sounds horribly pompous. They're just carefully stabilized varieties, which takes about 7 generations in tomatoes. In tomatoes there isn't much "hybrid vigor" which would make F1s the better performers as there is in e.g. corn. So, essentially, F1 in Tomatoes are just double money for the seed companies: no costly stabilization phase with long "time to market", and an argument for people to buy new seeds every year. There's virtually no property in F1-tomatoes that can't be brought to a stabilized cultivar, so I don't see a point in using F1s here.

GMO may be highly regulated, but how could they know what to regulate for? Even though there's much gene decoding these days, genes just don't work that describable - they don't encode "bloom yellow", more like "produce this substance which happens to be a caroteinoid in a certain kind of tissue which is part of the petals". This substance could just be yellow, or may have other effects, as it may react in unpredictable ways with other substances around - maybe not in the originally designed plant, but in cross-polinated relatives. I'm a chemical engineer working in inorganic heterogenic catalysis, and even this relatively simple chemistry continues to surprise me and my colleagues after (in my case) ten years of experience. Organic chemistry is even worse with it's abundance of functional groups in indefinite combinations.
I'm fine with helping plants to overcome certain hybridization barriers through embryo rescue, tetraploidization or maybe even somatic embryogenesis - though you may hear other things in the invasives forum about the cardinal climber ;). But the further the gene sources are apart, the less predictable results are to be expected. crossing barriers like the realm by bringing fungus- and bacteria DNA to plants is bold, to say the least.

Garak it's always good to hear differing ideas, especially from someone from a different discipline albeit related. At the risk of bringing out the haters, I'm a research scientist and one of my most prolonged efforts was as a member of a team of professionals from various disciplines, developing and studying transgenic animals. I'm aware of some transgenic research with plants, but there is no GMO horticultural plant available to the general public: they remain confined to the research laboratories / greenhouses of higher education / research.

There seems to be a definition problem between a genetically modified organism (GMO) and a hybrid. It is simply a matter of genetics (DNA): the genomes of the two differ markedly. A hybrid has 50% from each parent. A GMO has something like 99.9% from its parents and .1% from us mad scientists at a laboratory! LOL (A fertilized embryo - very soon after conception - is manipulated in the laboratory to introduce a very small section of foreign DNA into the rapidly dividing cell mass. Thus far, a GMO animal does NOT breed true.)

A good example would be those glow-in-the-dark tetras in some fish stores : while the majority of their genome is tetra, a very small part is squid/jellyfish. . . the VERY small part is the foreign gene for luminescence. (They are physically sterile, by the way, so they can't reproduce even if discarded into a lake, stream.)

Plants have bits of foreign genomic material introduced via a vector, like tobacco mosaic virus. It is SO much easier to get the foreign DNA into their reproductive system, but their offspring still behave as F1 hybrids. A long period of selective breeding is required to stabilize the foreign gene into its DNA. Each small gradual step from the original research laboratory to the eventual release to the general public takes many years of growing, testing, recording, refining, growing, testing, recording, refining.........ad infinitum: A GMO (plant or animal) is not released "into the wild" until the EXACT effects are known and it's proven NOT to have detrimental effects on the environment or the food chain,

BetNC,It may be no good idea to capture this thread for discussing the big evil M-Company, but their field tests already proved that genes don't need to be in a seed catalog to run free - open field tests are enough, especially with wind-pollinated species. as I said: it's hard to know what to test for - in case of wind pollinators I'd test for allergenic potential, as small changes in "flying proteins" can have severe effects - but that's just one of the more obvious ideas....

I'm aware of the differences between hybridization and somewhat "surgical" GMO, though you can of course reduce the foreign hybrid influence by back-crossing, though not down to 0,1% of "inserted" DNA. Still I think it's more of a problem to insert a single new substance into a well balanced chemical system than mixing two balanced systems.

I'm not dogmatic, just very careful. And don't rely on any form of reproduction prevention. The tricky thing about life is that it's creative - it always finds a way.

BetNC, I think what you've described is a good "defense in depth" approach for your first year or two of starting from seed. After that, you'll know how high a germination you can expect from any plant you've started before.

And, yes, when they see that you fill your beds no matter how many seeds get fussy or how many seedlings get damping-off fungus, they will change their strategy to overwhelming you with more seedling than you need.

How they'll respond to your red wagon approach, I don't know. Perhaps they'll regard you as Johnny Appleseed or Betty Zinniaseed, and thank you for spreading them all over the neighborhood.

>> to date, there are NO GMO horticultural plants that are even available to the general public.

Yup. As far as I know, none, zero, nada, zip, zilch. Before the big GE companies will sell anyone GE seeds, they require contracts promising many things like not reselling the seeds and not saving your seeds for next years' seeds. If you don't sign a doc promising to feed your your first-born to carnivorous lawyers if you do anything Monsanto doesn't like, you aren't getting GMO seeds.

The seed vendors who make a big deal about not selling any GMO varieties are like a can of Crisco lard labelled "no artificial sweeteners", or a pack of "fat-free" cigarettes.

Maybe, 10-20 years from now, if some companies smaller than Monsanto are tempted to use the newer GE tools like CRISPR to make, I don't know, a blue Zinnia for the tiny home-gardener-seed-market, will be deterred by the fact that most vendors to hobbyists have the "no GMO pledge" in place.

But for now, they could expand it to promise that no unicorns were harmed while harvesting the seed crop.

Apparently pollen from corn (or was it wheat?) drifted from some test plot an polluted the genome of some wheat seed crops in the NW, rendering that whole year's crop unsellable in Japan or any other country that tests for and forbids GE genes in food crops.

>> But the further the gene sources are apart, the less predictable results are to be expected. crossing barriers like the realm by bringing fungus- and bacteria DNA to plants is bold, to say the least.

I agree with that. It's one reason I like "CRISPR" better than the first generation of GE tools like the Agrobacterium plasmid and "gene guns". Those really are blind shotguns that people use to slap in unrelated gene sequences, promoters and regulators. That plasmid just plugs the new genes into chromosomes any-old-where, at pure random. (That's why they need their own initiators and promoters and regulators, often taken from bacterial sources.)

CRISPR is much more precise. It can edit precise DNA sequences at known locations (as distinct from inserting whole genes randomly with a plasmid or compressed air). The edited genes remain part of the same regulatory cluster as the original genes. And you don't have to add the initiators and promoters and regulators and entire gene-mobilizing plasmid itself into thousands of square miles of crops.

One nice thing about CRISPR is that you can discover a DNA sequence you like in a wild relative of a crop. Say that gene is "sug17". Then you can edit the sug17 gene that already exists in an existing commercial cultivar - give that gene the precise DNA sequence (allele) found in a wild relative. Since they make just one change, they don't have to back-cross for generations to eliminate unwanted DNA.

It's more precise, and you can limit yourself to using only versions of genes that already exist in that species in nature.

But is the following an upside or a downside?

It's much faster and cheaper to make one precise change and test it in the field, than to fumble around for years with plasmids and random insertions.

Therefor many more companies, and poorer countries, can perform GE effectively with CRISPR. It's a power tool.

Some of those countries are going to develop strains that benefit poor and starving people, and that can thrive on more marginal land and with less water and fertilizer added. Not just strains that increase the profit margins of mega-agro-business firms and their armies of lawyers.

However, with CRISPR, even small labs can afford to genengineer species according to their own peculiar agendas, and who knows what their goals will be. (Cue creepy music for James Bond arch-villains, or for well-meaning people with more arrogance than wisdom.)

Oh, yes, I should mention this: CRISPR works as well on humans' genes as on crop plants' genes. That makes it even more interesting.

NOW I reach the part of thread where you mention that you know much more about these issues than I am ever likely to!

And you are right - it's difficult to get GE changes into the gametes of animals. With plants, you can clone a single cell in tissue culture, and then it will be reproduced along with the rest of the genome.

Rick...That info re CRISPR is new to me. Being retired, I stay in touch with my colleagues who keep me in the loop, as it were...I'll have to mention this CRISPR to them. As of a few months ago, they were still making GMO animals the original, bombardment-keep-your-fingers-crossed method: inject a modified gene into 2-4 cell embryos and test the neonates!! Foreign genes were often incorporated into the genome upside-down, backward, scrambled, truncated....and not always expressed, either...even tho th3e neonate tested positive for being a GMO animal!

While highly interesting at the beginning and the end, the gestation periods were a total crap-shoot!

I find calm in this gardening...at least I do AFTER I do something for the first time (like start seeds indoors LOL).

I can't decide if your picture is a bunch of little frogs on/in a flower...or a weird flower!!!

The little-known tree-frog zinnia hybrid is a marvel of GE ...

Just four tree frogs that found the only remaining damp spot in my garden to be a giant Zinnia bloom. I had watered fairly recently and they knew what they wanted.

But why all four on ONE bloom, and none anywhere else, ever? It reminded me of the SF/comedy movie "Earth Girls Are Easy", where four aliens crash-land on Earth ...

>> bombardment-keep-your-fingers-crossed method: inject a modified gene into 2-4 cell embryos and test the neonates!!

The "gene gun" / biolistics method? That's what they did with plants, too, until they figured out that if Agrobacterium could inject ITS genes into plants, biologists could piggy-back.

---

I first read about CRISPR in Tech Review ...

Aww, now you have to be a subscriber to read the good articles!
http://www.technologyreview.com/paywall/?paywall#nid=524451&destination=node%2F524451&back=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.technologyreview.com%2Ffeaturedstory%2F532796%2Fwho-owns-the-biggest-biotech-discovery-of-the-century%2F


http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/532796/who-owns-the-biggest-biotech-discovery-of-the-century/



I'm not sure how many of these links are still active ...


Companies selling CRISPR kits: do-it-yourself, and pretty cheap:


http://www.genecopoeia.com/about/overview/
kits & reagents for do-it-yourself GE

"Precise Genome Editing Tools"
http://www.genecopoeia.com/product/genome-editing/?gclid=CJu8y5OhorwCFYhsfgodDGMAAA


http://www.genecopoeia.com/product/crispr-cas9/

The clustered, regularly interspaced, short palindromic repeats (CRISPR)-associated protein (Cas) systems are adaptive mechanisms evolved by bacteria and archaea to repel invading viruses and plasmids. Recently, efficient genome editing by the CRISPR-Cas system has been shown in multiple organisms

Rick...checking out your links....I 'm going to join up for the Tech Review...this CRISPR sounds like the Big Thing . . . I'm so interested!

Shoot me a dmail, please......I'd like find out more about someone who shares two of my interests AND has a rich sense of humour!!

and can you direct me to more about that Monsanto debacle??

>> more about that Monsanto debacle

Wow, not sure ... it was a while ago ...

Googling "GMO pollen" brought up an interesting Wikipedia article - based on that, it sounds like the GMO genes jump faster than a Monsanto lawyer suing a victim

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetically_modified_organism_containment_and_escape

A study published in 2010 by scientists at the University of Arkansas, North Dakota State University, California State University and the US Environmental Protection Agency showed that about 83 percent of wild or weedy canola tested contained genetically modified herbicide resistance genes.[38][39][40] According to the researchers, the lack of reports in the US suggests inadequate oversight and monitoring protocols are in place in the US.[41]

That same Wikipedia article mentions the Oregon wheat contamination incident.

Monsanto said it was "mystified" and was let off without even a scolding. My first guess would be that their campaign financing and lobbying expenses paid for themselves that year.

"In 2013, glyphosate-resistant genetically modified wheat that was not yet approved for release, but which had been declared safe for consumption in the USA,[45] was discovered in a farm in Oregon, growing as a weed or "volunteer plant". The wheat had been created by Monsanto, ... The last field test in Oregon had occurred in 2001. ...
Monsanto was liable for fines of up to $1 million, if violations of the Plant Protection Act were found.[46][47] According to Monsanto it was "mystified" ...
The discovery could have threatened U.S. wheat exports, which totaled $8.1 billion in 2012; the US is the world's largest wheat exporter. ...
As a result of the discovery of the unapproved strain, Japan and South Korea halted wheat orders from the United States, leaving wheat growers in neighboring communities unable to decide what to plant next season. ...
the USDA announced: "As of today, USDA has neither found nor been informed of anything that would indicate that this incident amounts to more than a single isolated incident in a single field on a single farm. ...

When no more contaminated volunteers showed up, the trade issue blew over, and of course Monsanto skated.

The take-away lesson that I see is that

1. GE genes leak very freely out of even test fields that should be more tightly controlled than large farms. At the time of the leaks, those genes had NOT been approved for release and maybe not for human consumption. Careless much?

2. Monsanto was not held responsible for the consequences of the risks they take with other people's livelihood (or potentially, some believe, health) and the planet's genetic resources.

3. Those genes HAD TO leak from their test plot, but all they had to do was say they were "mystified" and blame unsupported "sabotage" to get off scot free.

I can easily imagine some Monsanto researcher proposing an expensive pollen-isolation scheme during field trials, then seeing it replaced with a much cheaper investment in lawyers and campaign finances.

I'm not actually very down on GE crops or GE in general - that's probably a technique necessary to feed an ever-rising world population. But I am down on sleazy, lying, manipulating businesses large enough to be effectively above the law, using their size and legal thugs to manipulate global markets and crop genetic resources for their profit while denying any risk with scams as transparent as "we're mystified" and "someone ELSE must have sabotaged poor little old us".

Here are some of the references:

Andy Coghlan (June 3, 2013). "Monsanto modified wheat mystery deepens in Oregon". New Scientist.
Alan Bjerga (May 29, 2013). "Monsanto Modified Wheat Not Approved by USDA Found in Field". Bloomberg News.
Andrew Pollack (May 29, 2013). "Modified Wheat Is Discovered in Oregon". New York Times.(subscription required)
Ian Berry (June 21, 2013). "Monsanto Says Sabotage Is Likely in Wheat Case". Wall Street Journal. Retrieved June 23, 2013.
Reuters (May 29, 2013). "Unapproved Monsanto GMO Wheat Found in Oregon". CNBC. Retrieved May 30, 2013.
Melissa Allison (June 20, 2013). "Wheat scare leaves farmers in limbo". Seattle Times.
Melissa Allison (June 1, 2013). "Japan’s wheat-import suspension worries state growers". Seattle Times. Retrieved June 5, 2013.
Staff (June 17, 2013). "GMO Wheat Found in Oregon Was Isolated Incident, Says USDA". Food Safety News.
Associated Press (August 30, 2013). "Source of GMO wheat in Oregon remains mystery".

To me, the "Mystery" is how anyone ever thought it was possible to contain genes in a wind-pollinated species carrying an almost digital survival decision like a round-up resistance. The most interesting point in your storyline is the study you mention first - obviously, the EPA has to do the work of the USDA. That's not funny for the M-company, since the EPA is used to face massive lobby work by the car industry...maybe it's time to set the CARB on track ;-)

Another factor is that, once a crop has a GE variety available, it gives a financial advantage (or short-term advantage, until resistances build up) to use that seed.

In the USA, they tend to "take over" a market and form 70%, 80% or more of acreage planted in that crop.

In effect, whatever DNA fragments happened to get pulled into the GE crop are planted in thousands of square miles. No matter how rare an "escape" mechanism is, multiplying that by billions of plants means they happen frequently. Whatever transgenic DNA sequences were included deliberately or accidentally, are multiplied billions of times and re-injected into the ecosystem every year.

I agree with you - saying "they won't leak" is so dumb it could only be a lie. especially since we have now seen how much they leak into related weeds.

It remains to be seen how much the plasmids and other transgenic DNA encourage the planned and unplanned DNA to escape into other species of plants, bacteria, insects and so on.

And whether those have consequences that are detectable, or catastrophic.

In my industry, "safety" is not achieved by saying "I guess we'll find out how big a problem it is over the next few decades and centuries". And we definitely don;t achieve safety by saying "we're mystified, so we must be innocent and spared any fines".

Honestly, sometimes I think we have the best government money can buy.

And therein lies the problem. Any corporation that is not in bed with our government has to be guided by the free market system and answer to the consumer. The consumer votes for a business/entity with their money. A government entity, or a government protected entity has unlimited funds via the government votes with our tax dollars.

+Since I'm only familiar with GE in plants, I can't figure out WHY aanybody thought it was a good idea to do a field test of wind-pollinated plants without a BOAT-LOAD of bio-security.

Surely, there'd be encirculating barren ground. . . . .a goodly amount of distance from any commercial crop (goodly meaning a county or state away!). . . and wouldn't there be devices/instruments to catch wind-borne pollen at increasing distances??

Jumping DNA.......don't we already know there's jumping plasmid DNA/RNA??? And since CRISPR is cross=species, doesn't that intuitively suggest a more vast sharing of DNA between organisms that we already knew of??

And, Rick, I think the most appropriate saying re government is "we have the government we deserve." The vocal minority get out and vote what they believe in or like or want. . . . while the silent majority don't vote. . . . so why are they surprised and unhappy????

My seed starting successes -
Use a good quality sterile Soilless mix - yes, you can use potting mix in the bottom 2/3 of the pot, but don't go too cheap indoors.
I use a south window and shop lights - I don't think you can have too much light for full sun outdoors type plants.
Once they are sprouted, get the humidity cover off and start bottom watering. I let my water sit uncovered overnight to warm to room temp and loose the extra chlorine. Check seedlings daily to see if they need water.
If you are detail oriented enough to put two seeds per pot - then make sure one is a nice plump seed and the other can be scrawny. If you use up all the fat ones first time around, you won't have any plump ones left for a second try.

>> Jumping DNA...don't we already know there's jumping plasmid DNA/RNA??? And since CRISPR is cross=species, doesn't that intuitively suggest a more vast sharing of DNA between organisms that we already knew of??

Darn it, I just lost a long post!

I guess plasmids and other transposons often move DNA to new locations within a chromosome, or maybe even a different chromosome within the same individual. I guess if they do that within germ cells, the changes are heritable.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transposable_element

I've read that the genes that code for fetal brain development (and some kinds of autism) are located in "genetic hot spots" that rapidly churn the genes and move them around (and maybe sometimes cause them to be doubled or tripled?) Whatever, I wish they would hurry up and create some real INTELLIGENCE in our species; it seems to be taking a long time.

>> suggest a more vast sharing of DNA between organisms that we already knew of??

Well, in bacteria, yes. I think the "multiple drug resistance" genes spread from one species to another fast. Of course, the RATES of crossover may be normal, but the selective effect of using antibiotics carelessly performs "instant selection" for one-in-a-trillion events. Like weeds acquiring RU resistance. All it takes is one resistant weed, and next season you have a field full. Next season, a county-full.

>> And since CRISPR is cross=species,

I don't understand. The "relatively traditional" Agrobacterium plasmid method always inserts the transgenic plasmid itself, and often or usually the "payload" DNA is also transgenic (at least the initiator and promoter sequences). So that's very cross-species. That's been used since around the late 1970s.

Does CRISPR also use transgenic DNA? I thought it didn't, since the buzz about it that it can EDIT existing DNA, and doesn't need to INSERT foreign DNA. CRISPR is only a few years old.

It's a common practical lab exercise for high school students to culture two different strains of bacteria together so they can "see" the effects of jumping plasmids: same species but different sub-species altogether.

I must have missed that part about CRISPR using EXISTING DNA. . . . this puts a little asterick next to it: if the target DNA is lacking the desired genetic sequence, that rather limits its usefulness, doesn't it?? It would be extremely useful in transforming a defective gene or base pair that causes a disease, EVENTUALLY, once the many technical, biological and sociological challenges are worked out

I suppose one could use it repeatedly to edit the existing non-coding DNA to"create" the desired sequence, but that opens up ma whole new batch of questions: is the target region REALLY non-coding, will the desired sequence be expressed - how, where and in amounts desired, what would be the effect of the desired sequence on the organism and would the organism then be labeled a GE (technically it WOULD be) . . . .

>> this puts a little asterick next to it: if the target DNA is lacking the desired genetic sequence, that rather limits its usefulness, doesn't it?? It would be extremely useful in transforming a defective gene or base pair that causes a disease, EVENTUALLY,

My understanding is that the usual purpose of CRISPR is exactly that: find a gene that you want to alter. 90-99% of that gene will be identical in both "donor" and "target". They would build their CRISPR reagent to recognize the DNA sequence in the target gene, bracketing the region they want to alter.

The reagent would recognize the target DNA sequence, and replace the target sequence with the donor sequence.

>> rather limits its usefulness,

I think large insertions of multi-gene sequences is what the Agrobacterium plasmid method is good for, if you can put up with the insertion going into purely random locations (even random chromosomes).

I don't know whether they can make large enough CRISPR reagents and do large insertions, like entire genes, by recognizing the DNA sequence BETWEEN two existing genes, (overlapping those genes somewhat), and then "edit" it by inserting a huge length of DNA into the space-between.

What I've read stresses CRISPRs ability to "edit". They did not mention whether it can also "insert".

I guess the short answer is, "I don't know".

P.S. I'm sure you know, but I'll just mention for others reading the thread ...

Genegineers now take for granted the ability to "sequence" DNA. They have entire digital libraries of DNA sequences of many species, and many varieties within each species.

If they don't already have library entries for several different versions of the gene they want to fiddle with, they can just use their sequencing machines and established techniques from (bacterial) molecular biology and discover the exact DNA sequence of that gene in their target crop, and many wild or cultivated sister varieties.

If they are like bacterial molecular biologists, they can even take the DNA sequecne and use software to generate 3-D images of the enzyme that gene would produce, and estimate its efficiency.

They used to try to improve on nature and invent "extra-efficient" enzymes ... but that went nowhere. Over billions or millions (or thousands?) of years, nature came up with better enzymes than we and our super-computers can.

Now the game is to find wild varieties, snoop out their interesting genes, and test them in the target crop. Maybe they still try to tweak the result by changing an amino acid or two, here or there, but the hubris surrounding inventing "better" genes or "synthetic life forms" didn't last long enough to produce any results.

I'm sure they are also combing through seed banks to find "a few good genes" in crop varieties that were not commercial successes.