Eden Keeper
 
Services
 
Products
 
De-Beautification Awards
 
Featured Topics
    Plants
         Native
         Edible
         Wildflowers
         Biblical
         Weeds
         Bartram
         Plant Famlies
    Places
    Practices
     Quips
 
Sitemap
 
Photos
 
Links
 
About
 
Contact

     Rye, Secale cereale L., is a cereal grain that is most familiar in Alabama as rye bread including pumpernickel, rye whiskey, and as a cover crop, but it is not the same as rye grass, Lolium L., which includes tares and tall fescue.  This rye is not the rye/rie of the Bible, which was actually spelt, which is a type of wheat, Triticum spelta L.  Rye was considered a peasant food and it is susceptible to the ergot fungus (Claviceps purpurea) especially in cool moist years.  Ingestion of grain infected with this fungus causes ergotism, which is also known a s St. Anthony's fire becuase one side effect being burning pain in the extremities that could become gangrenous due to the reduced circulation, additionally the fungus contains D-lysergic acid amide (LSD), which produces altered behavior due to the hallucinogen thus the blame was often put on suspected witches.  Ironically it was once used by midwives to speed labor an reduce postpartum bleeding until both safer alternatives and the danger of this practice were discovered.

     Due to the confusion in the Bible of rie (spelling at time translation of KJV) and spelt as well as having more available space consideration this is the best place to discuss triticale, ×Triticosecale rimpaui Wittm., which was developed as fertile hybrid crop in the late 1960s from a sterile hybrid of hexaploid bread wheat, T. aestivum L., and diploid rye that has been known for over a hundred years.  This was done with a deliberate duplication in the number of chromosomes making it an octaploid while a similar cross using tetraploid durum wheat, T. durum Desf., results in a hexaploid.  The triticale hybrid combines the hardiness of rye with the productivity of wheat besides having larger grains.  At about the time triticale was developed it was mentioned indirectly in the Star Trek episode,“Trouble with Tribbles” as quadrotriticale, due to some artistic license taken by the writer and producer, where it is the only crop hardy enough to grow on Sherman’s Planet.  The quaddro prefix may be an indirect reference to the haploidity of the hybrid genome while this prefix on such a hypothetical cultivar could supposedly be more analogous to some of the mutations that led to the large ears of corn/maize, Zea mays L., or similarly to six row barley, Hordeum vulgare L.

     The deliberate multiplication in the number of chromosomes is a genetic engineering technique that results in such crops being termed franken-foods by the same elitist types that consider Norman Borlaug to be evil while they would deny starving people the means to grow enough food for themselves.  Ironically a similar natural occurrence of a doubled genome in a sterile hybrid resulted in wild emmer wheat, T. dicoccoides Koern.  Coincidentally there is a Biblical command "Thou shalt not sow thy field with mingled seed," Leviticus 19:19b, to prevent hybridization that would normally result in sterile seed.