Seedling Report

Carolyn Schaffner asked for more details about the halfbred seedlings I
mentioned in my bloom report. 

>>	 Do I have it right, you crossed half breds and the resulting are more
awesome than the parents?  

Yes, to a point -- but there's more to the program I mentioned than that.   The
"awesome" aspect is not that each seedling is better than either parent, but the
overall pattern of inheriting the best traits from each parent.  This was an
unexpected, but most welcome, development.  The seedlings I mentioned are
actually the culmination of a 20-year, 4-step program involving parallel lines.
(Are you SURE you want this many details?)

Step 1.	Line-breeding conventional halfbreds.  I've grown thousands of
these seedlings.  Some were good enough to introduce.  Some were merely
interesting.  And there were some that not even a "mother" could love.  This is
the easy part:   a good percentage of "takes", good germination, lots of
seedlings to choose from.  The dowside is that this rarely produces any really
significant breakthroughs.

Step 2.	Crossing tetraploid arils with tetraploid TBs to get
first-generation halfbreds.  This is more difficult.  In the 20 years I've been
working with these, I've produced only one seedling that I think MAY be good
enough to introduce.  It has iridescent violet standards and falls so dark that
its black signal is hard to see, with a near-globular form that's more commonly
found in the near-arils than in halfbreds.

Step 3.	Intercrossing the first-generation halfbreds obtained in step 2.
The object is to get fully fertile halfbreds with known pedigrees and more
recent TBs in their ancestry than those from the 30s & 40s that were the
foundation of the advanced-generation C.G. White type halfbreds.   But this is
even more difficult.  

Step 4.	Crossing the first-generation halfbreds obtained in step 2 with
conventional halfbreds from step 1.  The purpose is to test the fertility and
breeding potential of the first-generation halfbreds.  

The "awesome" seedlings were in this last group.  I crossed the
violet/near-black seedling obtained from step 2 with an array of conventional
halfbreds with different colors and patterns -- crossing my fingers in hopes
that its deep color would not prove to be dominant.    And its offspring have
turned out to be amazingly diverse.  The ground color of its seedlings'
standards ranged from white through ivory & yellow to pinkish-violet,
blue-violet, and deep, smokey violet.  The ground color of the falls ranged from
white through ivory & yellow to reddish-violet and near-black.  Signals ranged
from small to HUGE, and from merely dotted to veined, stippled, or solid. 

For example:   1) violet standards and near-black falls; 2) near-white
standards, brick-red falls and dark signal;  3) medium red-violet with extremely
large signal; 4) pink-and-yellow blend with stippled burgundy signal; 4) yellow
bitone with nutmeg dotting and veining on the falls;5)  ivory standards, pale
green falls with rust dotting and veining; and 5)  violet-on-white-veined
standards and rust-on-citron-veined falls.  The one thing they have in common is
wide form.  They indeed have the best of both parents:  colors and patterns from
their conventional parents, the form of the first-generation halfbred.  

>>	Are you getting some recessive traits to come to the surface?  What are
they? Any breakthroughs?
In color, form, or patterning?

Yes, I'm getting breakthroughs.  But they're rarely from crossing halfbreds with
halfbreds.  Most of the real breakthroughs have come from wide crosses.  They
include quarterbreds with prominent signals, quarterbreds that look very much
like halfbreds, and near-arils that grow like halfbreds.  I'll gladly answer
further questions, but suspect this may already be more than you wanted to know!

Sharon McAllister (73372.1745@compuserve.com)
Southern New Mexico
Other Mailing lists | Author Index | Date Index | Subject Index | Thread Index