This year was my first try at controlled breeding of persimmon - taking my cue from James Claypool, Jerry Lehman, and Don Compton. Looks like the pollinations took. Fingers crossed that I get mature seed in the fall. My crosses this year are:
H-118 x C-88
I-94 x C-88
L-89 x C-88
Had a bit of subterfuge by a crafty bumblebee when I unbagged one of my branches. No sooner did I get the bag off, and he flew in and crawled all over the flowers I had been isolating. Couldn’t have been any more efficient at it if he had planned his ambush. Thought I was living in a cartoon for a minute there. Luckily, I had another bagged branch on the same tree.
I also found a male branchlet on my Early Golden, so I pruned all the competing female limbs on the same lateral. Will see if I get a durable male source of Early Golden pollen next year. Thinking about crossing with either Pipher or Knightsville - or maybe the abandoned cultivar I found at Carl Meyers old homestead. John Gordon told me Pipher (discovered by Ralph Krieder) was the mother of Prok, so sounds like a good candidate. I have them growing next to each other, and the relationship definitely looks plausible to me.
My main issue at this point is that I only have one good male tree with known genetics. Jerry Lehman had a couple of good ones (100-65M) and (100-63M) of which I know the lineage, but I don’t know how to get wood for them at this point.
Would love to get a hold of the old Golden Gem and Woolbright for some crosses but not sure if they still exist anymore.
Inbreeding depression. I want to make sure my lines have an adequate level of genetic diversity even at the cost of potential reductions in fruit improvement. If you look at James’ records, you can see the the crosses between EG and EG (or Garretson) don’t have evaluation scores. That’s because the plants were genetic rejects and not worth evaluating. At the current time, I would have to cross EG with superior wild selections which is pretty much just replicating the F1 generation that James created.
This is my first year of flowering on Knightsville, so not sure yet how good it is yet. Topworked my Evelyn this year; that was the only persimmon I have that I didn’t like. Got a Shoto graftling from Perfect Circle Farm this year. Very excited about that one; thought it was extinct. Was originally discovered in Danville, IN just down the road from me in the 1890’s.
In the article I’m looking at Lon Rombough does mention the issue of inbreeding depression. Though plant genetics isn’t something I ve studied, and I tend to get lost in all the twists and turns. The parents of Valeene Beauty was Lena x EG wasn’t it? With EG being the pollen parent?
I just uploaded an old spreadsheet I got from Bill Heiman from the Indiana Nut Growers Association many years ago. This is a raw data list of the parent crossing for each accession in the orchard. It also has scores and notes resulting from the INGA/Claypool evaluation trials. They haven’t been statistically corrected or anything; it’s basically a raw data dump.
F-100 was selected because it was novel in that it is a male that puts out fruits. It hasn’t been shown to be any better a parent than any other male. Interestingly, there has been a lot of research out of Japan on diospyros sexuality. They have shown it to be epigenetically controlled. This helps explain a lot of the sexual fluidity exhibited by the hexaploid American persimmon. Males and females are essentially the same except one gender has methylation on the OGI gene and the other doesn’t.