The primary thing for me would be taste, both sweetness but especially flavor.
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My top-10 list In order of importance:
1- Disease resistance (particularly rot resistance)
2- High brix
3- Interesting flavor
4- Texture (firm and not too juicy would be good)
5- Size
6- Freestone (if large enough to make eating like a cherry not practical)
7- Heavy bearer
8- How well it keeps
9- Appearance
10- Consistent size/shape
3 & 4 are important and pretty close to each other for me, but 5-on starts to really fall off in importance.
One other interesting thing to shoot for would be an especially early or late season. Iām not sure where it would fall in the above list, but it could take something that was only average and make it into a must-have.
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I also need great fruit that can grow in colder zones. Some blackberries, plums, and peaches just canāt grow that far north. I see a huge niche, where one could make serious money if they could produce a good plum, peach or blackberry with top rate taste profile, that can grow in zone 3 or 4. This really is the main reason I want to breed. Some other reasons are a range of colors for raspberries. Having various colors is a great selling point. We lack a good dark orange color. Dark orange cultivars are sold in Europe. Also another project would be to migrate the texture and brix of sweetcrisp blueberry to the Northern Highbush cultivars.
And as I also mentioned I like Glo and Free, a cross of those two would yield a peach that Iām sure I would like, so I planted some crossed seeds outside this year, see what comes up?
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Drew there is a huge need for zone 3-4 blackberries and fruit . Hope to try breeding some myself . I would love to cross wild yellow bow cane with a domestic yellow . Make a yellow like the purple crosses .
Fruitnut, you will be my first fruit judge, if my Chocolate Jewel plum turns out to be a winner, I will send you some scions.
Your wish may become true, BobVance!
Next year, I will hybridize my Chocolate Jewel plum with a secrete cherry that meets some of your expectations, then from that cross, I recross it with a cherry with high brix.
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āā¦Another is to increase winter hardiness of peaches by introducing genes from tart cherriesā¦ā
That might create a sterile hybrid, so in order to prevent that issue, you have to create a ābridge hybrid/cross.ā A bridge cross would involve crossing a tart cherry with a myrobalan plum. And then with the peach. This cross will give you 50% peach,25% plum, and 25% tart cherry, or: peach x (tart cherry x myrobalan plum).
But you want the cold hardy traits from the tart cherry to be passed to peaches. So then you have to cross the peach- cherry- plum hybrid back to a tart cherry, this will give you: 25% peach, 12.50% plum, and 62.50% tart cherry, or: Tart cherry x [(( peach x ( tart cherry x myrobalan plum))].
But again, your goal is to create a cold tolerant peach- like fruit, so then you have to cross that complex cross back to a peach, this will give you: 62.50% peach, 6.25% plum, 31.50% tart cherry.
This will take too many years to accomplish this goal.
Or you could take chances and cross a tart cherry with a peach, and the result is going to be a 50\50 hybrid. Then cross it back to a peach, and the result is going to be 75% peach, 25% tart cherry.
Might? Why? How? Ploidy level will be the same with the use of Colchicine.
Diploid cells when treated with Colchicine, become tetraploid. This always happens, with treatment. I also learned I only need to treat the growing branch, not the whole tree. Only the branch will become tetraploid. If I have to cross back to the peach i will need to treat the peach a 2nd time. The first cross should have equal number of chromosomes, and should not be sterile. One use of Colchicine is to make sterile plants fertile again. Say you want to cross sterile flowering cherries, you can make the pollen and ovaries fertile again.
Another note, is I found a lab that sells the chemical for use on plant tissue.
Why? How do you know the cold trait was not passed the first round?
Also just a note on all of this. The complex crosses Zaiger did are for the most part not that great. the simple crosses so far have produced the best fruit. Well fairly simple, Pluot, Aprium etc.
I feel these more complex crosses are shots in the dark. the heyday of Zaiger genetics has passed.
I would expect 20 to 30 years of trials before anything good results in any crosses. One reason i would rather do brambles. Iāll be 89 in 30 years.
Although if i succeed, my heirs will be rich. Chances of that I agree though are very rare. I was thinking I should use a very large peach with the small pit. Carmine Jewel has small pits for a cherry. The offspring would be smaller than a peach but larger than a cherry. I might not have to go any further. Going back to the peach I might lose cold hardiness, but gain more size. Why it would take 30 years, as many crosses will be needed to find the perfect combination. And they would have to be grown out and trialed for the traits Iām looking for.
You canāt expect your first cross to be perfect, that is wishful thinking.
I may have to try numerous peaches and numerous tart cherries to produce what i want.
It would also be advisable to use a chemist to create the proper solutions of Colchicine. First one must dilute with ethanol, then expand with triple distilled water to the proper dilution. Iām a Med tech, and could do it myself. I have made many solutions of various chemicals while doing cancer research for Michigan State Universityās Anatomy department. I donāt have the facilities or equipment though to work at it. That would be another added expense.
Colchicine is a chemical that causes genetic mutations, luckily only in plants, still one must be cautious as HE double hockey sticks! The most dangerous solutions I worked with induced leukemia in mammals, if I were to contaminate myself, i could have induced leukemia in my own cells. At Sparrow hospital I handled very dangerous pathogens like the HIV virus. Although that was 30 years ago, and Iām not in no way anxious to handle dangerous substances again!
Luckily Colchicine is not that dangerous of a substance to mammals and is even used as a treatment for gout.
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Bob, your priorities are somewhat similar to mine. My top 5, I think -
*Disease resistant.
*Late blooming. Avoid the Spring killing frost that gets a lot of my stone fruits.
*Interesting flavor.
*Precocity,
*Highly pigmented. Maybe itās just me, but I like the flavors of dark fruits, and some think they are healthier.
*I know itās probably not possible, but if the leaves could taste like an unripe persimmon, and the stems and roots like horseradish, that would be nice for animal protection.
I donāt care much about big size, just not too small.
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I completely forgot about the colchine solution.
Itās not something that Iāll be doing right now.Interesting though.Have fun with it.I like flavor and sweetness too.
Here is a conversation on GW about Colchicine. Brady
http://forums.gardenweb.com/discussions/1748482/colchicine-use-in-tissue-culture
Yes, but may take some trial and error to use correctly. Down the road a couple years from now I will try it. For now, this spring I think i will try a White Gold Cherry and The Indian Free peach. Itās not going to have winter hardiness I talked about, but will grow fine in my zone! And should be rather interesting! Both Diploid, it should work, if I get lucky! Hmmm fuzzy cherries? Cherry shaped peaches?
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Hereās my peach x almond hybrid with flower buds. The flower buds resemble more like peach buds than the almond flowerbuds.
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Next year, I will cross my Bing cherry with my F1 Moorpark apricot.
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Weatherman, an apricot / cherry hybrid sounds delicious!
Do you emasculate the seed parent?
I think I will cross my Hollywood or Crimson Spire plums with apricots, and other plums. Both are cerasifera plums so I might see the effects of the cross via red leaves in seedlings. I dont know if that will work.
Good luck with your cross! Sounds great!
I think at times we will run into the pollen not being compatible, not because of ploidy differences, but other reasons maybe of structure, size, etc. So all crosses might not be possible.
All the same itās easy enough to try. I will keep site updated on any progress in my ventures into breeding.
It is best to emasculate the seed parent. Which should be done before flower opens. Itās not that difficult.
Yes. It helps me save water.
Red leaves will be very likely. I have several crosses between Santa Rosa plums, as the seed parent, and Myrobalan plum, as the pollen parent, and all of them have red leaves.
With my bad eyesight and stiff hands, fine work like that might not be possible for me.
Some plum varieties are self incompatible. Also most sweet cherries. Those should not require emasculation.
Emasculation can, interestingly, result in decreased or even no fruit set, for some Japanese plum varieties.
http://journal.ashspublications.org/content/135/6/556.full
I like using leaf color as a marker, throw away the green ones and keep the red ones that grew on green leaf trees. And vice versa.
I have a graft of Redfield apple that has red leaves. maybe I could use that the same way. I could use columnar apples as seed patent - North Pole or Golden Sentinel, and make a columnar, pink flowered, red flesh apple. Liklihood is low but I can daydream.