Re: Hybrid Vigor

Your defiantly have the correct idea in mind, basically. The problem in
actually doing this kind of breeding lies in the vast number of seeds each
plant produces. Who is actually going to grow all 300 and something seeds,
take time to watch and chart the very best plants and pollinate every plant,
them do the same thing for several seasons? This would require a commercial
sized growing plot, excessive amounts of time, and a lot of documented
research.
I was just about to jump in here, and your post made me do it.... you don't need
to plant all 300, but just a number derived statistically that would get you a, say
"95% confidence level that one of the seeds is in the top 10%", sort of thing.
These numbers are big but not huge... for example, for a pumpkin that had 500
seeds, this number may be in the range of 12 to 15. That is, plant 12 to 15
seeds from the same highly regarded pumpkin, grow them in identical conditions,
and choose the best of what results. Repeat the process.

I could do the mathematics (consult my Statistics textbook) but this sort of number
is really in the ballpark. If you take 12 to 15 seeds from any one pumpkin, one of
them is very likely (by a measureable amount) to be in high side of the "bell curve"
of the potential of all the seeds in that pumpkin. Note that 3 seeds won't cut it, and
one seed is really a random "crap shoot", and there is really nothing grown under
identical conditions to compare to...

If we had growers that had the time and space and inclination to plant so many
seeds on one sole seed stock, I think we could really advance the genetics.
(Not that we're not already doing that!)

If you read the story of Helmut Laemelle on AGGC, how he just selected seeds from
his largest pumpkin each year, and continued planting those, you can see that
perhaps he was using this same process. (His seed was then crossed to become the
567.5 Mombert...)

Regards, Cliff

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