TWM,
That sounds like an excellent idea. You have got all the good traits there. Good luck.
Tony
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Speaking of Flavor King pluot, I believe it also includes peach in its parentage. According to DWN, Geo Pride pluot is a plum x apricot x peach cross. And according to both patents, Flavor King and Geo Pride pluots both share the same parents. So that’s what makes Flavor King pluot so delicious, it’s peach parentage?
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For those cherry enthusiasts, what would be the best cherry variety to hybridize it with a plum?
itheweatherman,
Have any of your hybrids produced fruit?
My peacharine, plumcot, and Chocolate Jewel plum produced a few fruit this year, but a late frost wiped them all.
Next year, they will be in full bloom.
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Hope they all do well net season. You have me excited to see your results/fruit.
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For what it’s worth, European plums are Prunus domestica and are hexaploid, 6x chromosomes. Asian plums Prunus salicina, and myrobalan plums, Prunus cerasifera, are diploid, with 2x chromosomes. Prunus domestica is thought to be a hybrid of Prunus spinosa, 4x, with Prunus cerasifera, 2x. Such a hybrid between plants with different chromosomal numbers is less common than plants with compatible chromosome numbers.
So, it’s a long shot to get a hybrid between hexaploid European plums, and diploid Asian plums. I’m assuming *P. simonii,*and P.americana are also diploid since hybridization among these and P. salicina appears relatively straightforward.
I am not expert on this and welcome correction and further information. I will look for some info on other stone fruit, but first guess is most are diploid 2x.
http://www.diagnosisnet.com/bbeq/system/files/bbeq/i_23_2009_2/1189-1193.pdf
After this reply I found an article stating sweet cherries, P. avium, are diploid 2x, while sour cherries, P. cerasus, are tetraploid 4x. Duke cherries are hybrid between sweet and sour cherries, created from a doubling of the sweet cherry contribution to 4x before hybridization with the sour cherry. So, a hybrid like Nadia would be possible because both the plum and cherry contributions are diploid. A sour cherry would be harder to create a hybrid with an Asian plum.
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Excellent info thanks! What about peach trees? Also what about self fertile sweet cherries? They must be tetraploid! As the self fertile gene is from sour cherries. Yet they can pollinate non-self fertile cherries, so maybe not? Of course pollinating and producing viable offspring are two different things! The seeds maybe sterile.
OK, I guess I’m going to use Nadia to pollinate Indian Free, and maybe White Gold. I would rather use a dark sweet cherry, but I don’t have one! Peach must be diploid too as some crosses exist by Zaiger of Asian plum and peach.
Of course using Carmine Jewel a sour cherry would probably not work, although it is not a pure tart cherry. it is crossed with a Mongolian cherry. Chances are it is still tetraploid.
Thanks much for this info!
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If they turn out to be great tasting varieties, I might release them to the members.
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So it seams like we have a few experts here on hybridizing fruits. I have no clue how it’s done but would someone care to give us a quick and dirty general explanation of how you actually hybridize a fruit? Do you cross pollinate two fruits and then grow seedlings from the resultant fruit? Seems like that would take a long time.
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Yes, yes, and yes. Why I’m more interested in brambles.It’s a lot quicker!
Although I like Arctic Glo and I like Indian Free. So a hybrid of them that could possibly ripen in-between them would be perfect for me. So I pollinated Indian Free this year with Arctic Glo pollen. Results should be a peach. If I grow it out and pollinate again with Arctic Glo i could get a nectarine.
Seeds are now planted outside, I decided to let mother nature handle stratification.
I’m naming it Indian Glo peach. I’ll show results in a few years.
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Drew thanks for the comment. Plants tolerate changes of ploidy (chromosome number) better than animals. Most of the bearded irises we grow now are tetraploid, and a lot of daylilies. For those, changing from diploid (2n) to tetraploid (2n) is done artificially with a chemical (colchicine) that originates from a plant (Autumn crocus, what my grandfather called “squill”) and is used in humans to treat gout. Colchicine causes a change in the chromosome separate in the plant, which makes the chromosomes stick together in reproduction, so the end result is 4N. There’s an art and science to converting plants to tetrapoloid, and I don’t know how to do it.
I would love to see someone cross more plums with peaches to make the peaches resist leaf curl disease that destroys the trees here in PNW. Or a late blooming plum with Apricots to create apricot trees that don’t bloom early and get killed by the late frosts here. I am curious about whether Neils Hansen accomplished that in the early 1900s with crossing Asian plums or apricot-plums with American plum species to create Hanska, Ember, and other hybrid plums. Crossing a Prunus cerasifera plum with a peach could give a beautiful tree and a burgundy peach plum that has a zingy flavor. Unfortunately, the Dave Wilson / Zaiger PeachPlum “Tri-lite” was a susceptible to leaf curl as any of their peaches and I finally culled it.
Here is a nice brief article about ploidy in prunus species, from USDA. I would say that reading about plum ploidy pleases me, but I won’t. The article states "Prunus is a large, diverse genus with a basic chromosome number x = 8" and relevant to this topic, " from the genetic improvement perspective, the subgenus Amygdalus,to which peaches and almonds belong, and the subgenus Prunus, which includes section Prunophora comprised of diploid Japanese plums and hexaploid European plums and section Armeniacacontaining apricots, are considered to be a single gene pool (Watkins, 1976). The subgenus Cerasus, comprising diploid sweet cherry and tetraploid tart cherry constitutes a distinct group distantly related to the other two subgenera… breeding barriers exist among taxa possessing different ploidy levels, even within the same section, but hybrids are generally successful when both parents have the same ploidy level (Okie and Weinberger, 1996). " So the best bet is to use species with the same number of chromosomes, and that appears to be the case for most, except Euro plums and sour cherries.
Weatherman, I hope I’m not hijacking your topic. It’s interesting to me and maybe this info is helpful. You seem to be the new pioneer on creating prunus hybrids, very impressive.
Drew, I think the self fertile sweet cherries are still diploid, or they wouldn’t pollinate the non-self fertile ones. I could be and often am wrong, however.
Zaigers remove the anthers from their flowers before pollinating them with pollen from other types, to ensure not self pollinating, but if you use changes in leaf color or shape to select progeny, I think that is reassuring the cross pollination occured, like Weatherman has with red leaf progeny on his baby trees. Especially your Indian Free that can’t pollinate itself. I think you are right about peaches being diploid.
Speedster, as an amateur I would use a small paintbrush to collect pollen from one type, and brush the pollen onto the stigma of the other. Such as, brushing on pollen from a red leaf plum, onto a non-red leaf plum or other Prunus. Then you can plant the seeds, and keep only the ones with red leaves. Or, if your female fruit is a peach and you pollinize with a plum, you can select only the seedlings with a wide short leaf - plum - like, that came from the peach. I have genetic dwarf peaches that I used to pollinize “normal” peaches. One seedling looks like a genetic dwarf. We’ll see how it grows out.
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So on your Indian Glo seedling would it be possible to top the seedling and graft the wood onto an established tree to speed up the process?
How does pollen parent vs recipient effect the hybridized fruit? You said you pollinated Indian Free with Arctic Glow Pollen. What if you used Indian Free Pollen on Arctic glow. Would you expect a much different seedling?
With crosses like a Nectaplum or a Pluerry how does this work? How can Nectarine Pollen pollinate a plum flower? Considering that often times certain species of plum can’t even pollinate other plum species how can we ever expect a nectarine to pollinate a plum?
Confusing stuff. My mind is melting right now.
Yeah I don’t know? You mentioned Colchicine. I have heard of that. I have a very old book about growing pot that mentions using it. Photos of very strange looking marijuana plants from using the chemical are in that book. Yes you could use it to cross plants for sure.
Yes I do that with brambles. It’s not that hard to do. It needs to be done on closed flowers before they open. If open, pollination may have already taken place. I use a razor blade to remove petals and anthers. Then I bag the flowers with Organza Drawstring Pouches to prevent any unwanted pollen from entering flower.
Also just a note Spice Zee Nectaplum is a peach-plum cross. I have one too.
LOL!
With a certain amount of luck. Zaiger does thousands of crosses, and most probably do not work!
I don’t always use a paint brush. I sometimes use the flower itself.
Yes, but I expect every seed to be different as each plant contributes half of their DNA, so an infinite amount of combinations are possible. Technically it should matter little who is the pollen parent. Each seed no doubt will be different from each other. I use Indian Free ovaries as the plant is not self fertile, and Arctic Glo is. If I don’t emasculate the flower of Glo, I could just have a self crossed seedling. I know with Indian Free it has to be a hybrid. Makes it easier and emasculation is not needed.
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Drew, very informative.
I think some, but not all, of the hybrid plums are also not self pollinizing. Asian-American plum crosses are that way, it seems like several have nonviable pollen. So chances are, if you pollinize the seed parent of a non-self-pollinizing interspecific-plum-cross with something else, it will be a hybrid of the two types.
The organza sounds excellent, probably doesn’t weight down the bud.
No, and you can see through the bag once a fruit starts you can remove it. I cut it open and leave it tied, so I can see what flower(s) I hand pollinated. On raspberries some drupes were not pollinated, so the berries have missing fruit drupes. It tells me my technique worked, and that other pollen was kept out. Yeah this year my wife was showing my garden to her mother and she ate one of my crossed berries! Argh! Luckily I crossed about 5 berries so had plenty of seeds.
Yes good observation. Interesting to note that the Spice Zee Nectaplum is self fertile. For me the Arctic Glo and Indian Free were so good I found the nectaplum fruit rather boring. It was good, but glo and free just grab you and have a wow factor lacking in many fruits. Friends and neighbors I gave fruit to were asking me for more. Some is your own tastes, which is very subjective. I thought Flavor King was like that. It was really different from any plum i ever had. A definite wow factor also. Hoping Nadia is like that too!
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Drew, I didn’t like the Tri-Lite peach plum either. It was bland for a peach, and not as juicy as plums. That may be, it did not like my cooler climate.
Floyd Zaiger’s people grow out 50,000 crosses a year. They are ok with one out of 10,000 working. The numbers in the article are daunting for the hobbyist. But - they have priorities different from the home gardener - shipping, yield, size, appearances, uniqueness, etc as well as flavor. I think there is still a place for the home gardener dabbling on some pollen in their back yard - as long as we are realistic that our product won’t be in 1,000 grocery stores in 10 years. Or even one grocery store.
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Yes, but I do know one home grower who has a black raspberry selling at Nourse Farms and Gurney’s! Pete Tallman. I have emailed him a few times and he even sent me seeds. Some very cool unique black raspberry seeds. He is retiring and gave me his latest creation as he has no plans to market it.
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If they hybridized with each other, the peacharine will have fatter and longer leaves than the peach parent.
I ordered an Indian Free Peach for the 2016 season. And I’m planning to cross it with Flavor Top Nectarine. I will use Indian Free peach as the pollen parent because if the crosses were successful, the nectarine seedlings will inherit the red-flesh from Indian Free Peach.
In my case their is no “if”, the tree is not self fertile, it has to be a hybrid.
Yeah that would probably work! I hope to have a number of seedlings, I will see if the wood after next summer is large enough to harvest a scion. I could use the rest as a rootstock too. That’s the plus of this too. Many growers grow out peaches to use as rootstocks. I plan to do that too. I can clone trees myself this way.
I would like to move, although moving keeps getting pushed back. If I do I can take my trees this way.
Hey that sounds good! Any scion?
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