I have several bramble crosses to try this year . I have a thornless boysenberry wintering in the garage . I would like to try a zone 3 - 4 raspberry and a local dewberry for hardiness . Some say boysen is dewberry raspberry cross . Some say a Hawaian raspberry x western blackberry .
I have a Kiowa blackberry that I would like to cross to a local blackberry for a huge berry that really can fruit in zone 5 unprotected .
I plan to treat the seeds through a chicken . Have to keep the chicken caged to recover seeds .
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That would work really well! I have all kinds of volunteers from bird droppings. I kept them too.
OK. You had me ready to try seedling blackberries all the way up to running the seed through a chicken/bird. Is this necessary or is there another method available?
There are other ways . I have tried some . Still learning . A complex system really . Some will grow without much help . They need warm stratification then cold stratification . Scarification or acid treatment . I find going through a bird then planting the poo in a pot or marked location is as close to natural as you can get . Seeds should pass in 24 to 48 hours . The seedlings look like strawberry plants the first year . A little bristly at first . They send up canes second year and fruit in year 3 . I have some that will fruit this year .
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I use battery acid. I’m running a test this year. Seeds soaked for 15, 30 and 45 minutes. See what works best. Battery acid is 30% sulfuric acid. It can burn, but not really bad. Easy to work with. After soaking I wash them in a strainer then they are ready for stratification.
I want to make is simple, so after I picked the berries I cleaned and scarified them. I then planted them in a seed tray and left in the garage. It is still warm in there in the fall, then winter will cold stratify them. See if this works. I have scion, fig cuttings, and such in the fridge. Plus the summer’s harvest. I have no room for more stuff! I could do it, but I wanted to make it simple, I’m keeping them moist all winter and in March will put them outside.
I need to keep things simple. With my stone fruit I planted seeds in root pouches. I don’t want yet more seeds in the fridge! I also store my large tomato and pepper seed collection in the fridge, so my wife won’t give me one more inch of room in there.
Here they are today
Yes the snow is here. Root pouches are not like pots. Hardy plants seem to do fine. Here is a yellow black raspberry, 2nd year in container, outside, got to -16F last year and it came through fine. Hard to see but canes are yellow, not purple like most black raspberries. I can’t wait to try these!
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Hope this method works well for you. Looking forward to hearing your different acid test results. Bill
Drew, I’m very excited to try the yellow blackcap too! I brought it inside, it’s starting to wake up. Whoa, -16, well I think it should not ever worry about the “cold” here in SC. Wonder how it will deal with the heat though. Thanks again for letting me try it!
Clark, did you just set them under a tree that had FB?
I was thinking about, in the future, planting out a bunch of seeds from crosses and then try to kill off most of the seedlings by exposing them to FB. Maybe sprinkle some CAR globs in there, be really really mean to them.
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Kate,
Drag a Fireblight infected limb over your seedlings a dozen times under perfect weather conditions. You already will know the perfect weather because you have limbs infected. If they survive that they don’t get FB easy. Most of the seedlings will die as they are very susceptible when really young. If you want to leave the branch in with them. I can tell you even seeds from kieffer that most will die. Some trees are carriers that don’t die and that’s particularly true of pyrus communis. Wild Pyrus calleryana aka ornamental pears typically show no signs of fireblight at all but can’t be crossed easily with European pears pyrus communis.
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Clark, thank you for all the info!!!
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I have been doing a lot of research on brambles . It seems a lot varaieties traces back to Rubus Ursinus through Boysenberry and Loganberry . I always wondered how anyone way back then knew how to breed brambles . Said to be natural crosses . Sounded like a really long shot since brambles self pollinate . I discovered Ursinus has male and female plants . So it was as easy as planting a female Ursinus among raspberries . Ursinus or California blackberry are sometimes called a dewberry . Hence the conflicting info about blackberry or dewberry in the parentage . So I will try crossing hardy raspberry and local zone 5 dewberry on my thornless Boysenberry . Probably try the local dewberry x raspberry also . Bloom timing could be a problem . May have to store pollen . Since nobody has created a northern Boysen since the first cross I will give it a try .
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Cool, Jerry, certainly worth trying. I’m not doing any crosses with blackberries till 2017. I am trying to make an orange raspberry for fun. I have been using polka as the pollen parent and Anne as the seed parent. I emasculated the Anne flowers, and after pollination not all the drupes formed, so it looks like I managed to remove the male parts, and all drupes that formed should contain hybrid seed. Yellow and red mixed make orange, well at least with paint!
I do have one volunteer blackberry and 3 volunteer raspberries I kept. Probably all from bird droppings. Curious as to how they will do? So I found spots for them.
Thanks for the heads up! In the UK they have the cultivar Valentina which is a great orange cultivar. Not available here. Cool, I will have to grow those next winter. Too late to start this year. Plus they are out of stock.
You here about fruits breeding true to type but few of these stories put a name to such fruit though one with potential is wolf river Wolf River Story
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Thanks for starting this thread Kate. I’m new here and had no idea this forum existed till I saw the link from the north american scion exchange. I’m all about citizen breeding. I’ve been crossing apples for a few years and trying to convince other people to do it. I’m also doing potato onions and daffodils, and I’d like to mess with cherries, peaches, leeks and potatoes. I’ve got a bunch of articles and a section for plant breeding on my website, skillcult.com and I’m doing a video series showing my apple techniques and following my progress on my youtube channel, www.youtube/skillcult . I’m hoping to get the first fruit from intentional crosses this year. Mostly I’ve mixed red fleshed apples with what I consider to be high quality dessert apples, or those which have some other trait that I want, like long keeping. This year I made some crosses between various dessert apples. I am hoping to work on very late hanging apples to try to get more good varieties that can hang on the tree in good eating condition through December and January and hopefully beyond, high sugar, intensely flavored crab apples for out of hand eating and juicing, maybe early apples, and definitely russets. If only there was more time and energy!
I probably have around 125 seedlings growing now. I put them in rows on dwarfing stock. I have a few on mature trees. I would caution though that a tree used to trial apple seedlings should be virus free and not have other random varieties added to it in case they might be infected. Most varieties don’t show any signs here. I have put my seedlings on a very close 12 inch spacing, 6 feet apart. It’s tight, but I think it’s going okay. I’d like to play with some ideas for encouraging faster fruiting. I was thinking about trying the rind reversal, but haven’t gotten around to it. My general approach is very unsophisticated. I’m kind of most interested right now in what results can be seen just by following intuition and selecting good parents, because if reasonable results can be had at that, then more people will try it. The effort can always become more sophisticated as dictated by interest or need. I try to keep it fun and reading about genetics isn’t fun for me.
My feeling about citizen breeding in general is that we should be doing it! Not all of us obviously, but from the interest I’ve seen and this thread is a great example, there is a sincere and widespread interest among fruit hobbyists. There are a lot of lines that won’t be pursued by commercial breeders that we can pursue as citizens, and if we are doing it in numbers, that is a powerful force toward varietal improvement. It’s not as though it is anyone else’s responsibility. If we leave plant breeding up to goernment and commercial interests, our choices will continue to narrow. It’s super fun anyway! More life and diversity is more better! I like to encourage people to think of their experiments and projects breeding edible plants as a sort of group effort. If we are essentially altruistic in our intent and breeding for everyone, then it really is a group effort. Maybe I will only ever plant out 250 apple seedlings, but if you do to and 1000 people plant an average of 20 seedlings, that adds up pretty fast.
I had an epiphany the other day that given this amazing resource to communicate and share with information and to find each other and share resources like genetic material, we may very well be on the verge of the golden age of apple breeding. Suddenly we have access to literally thousands of varieties to play with and can communicate with others at lightning speed to share impressions, experiences, information and knowledge. I’m kind of hoping that fruit breeding will go viral!
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SkillCult, very awesome!! And excellent videos! Congrats on Bite Me!, and a great name too. 
Yes, I very much hope fruit breeding will go viral! I am very interested in seeing some of the outcomes of everyone’s various projects here, hopefully we can use this thread to keep up with them and encourage other to try.
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I think we are actually ready for a forum. Something like a citizen breeders hub. I’ve thought about doing one for apples, but I can’t really bite that off right now with all my other projects. I envision, ultimately, a forum site that is dedicated to amateur edible plant breeding with categories/groups for each different plant so that people can have a ready access to other breeders, files and archives related to say pea breeding or plum breeding. That way there could be more of a group brain/knowledge, not to mention the sharing of genetic material. I think there is enough momentum now to make such a project successful. I’m sure there are groups out there on the net, but it would be great to have them all in one place for ease of use and cross-pollination. Someone should totally do that
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Well we all have different goals, mine is retirement, I won’t be sharing any genetic material, I’ll be taking it to the patent office, and look for a nursery to grow it out.
I agree, it is a pretty vast subject, especially when broken down into each type of plant. I know it would be helpful to have all that info in one place.
I am probably not the best person to start such a thing, but I could try to put together something if there really is interest in it. But I know myself, when spring comes I have zero interest in spending time on the computer…So probably best left to someone else.