Meanwhile the rubus odoratus hybrid
Who’s your daddy?
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I’m fairly happy with with the current berries sold, I’m more interested in making them better. Like one idea, not really making them better, but getting a rainbow of colors. One missing in the USA is an orange raspberry. I’m still working on it, when time permits. I don’t have time this year unfortunately.
I want a rainbow of colors. I hope to try again next year.
So far all I have is a pink named Irene. It does present orange, but when ripe is pink.
In my last round I didn’t get anything I was trying for but did get one interesting plant. A yellow raspberry thornless and trailing. It’s more a vine, strange bird!
I can’t complain about the ones I grow, I’m getting to that rainbow.
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jealous! someday. the one you sent me is struggling but survived the winter. going to hit it with fish and seaweed to see how it reacts.
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I found the old emails, and one of them said they were a batch of seeds from 2012, from Mig4 and Mig5 (both tetraploid Mignonette), and he said they’d have to be compared with a standard Mignonette by flow cytometry to compare ploidy. I have no way of confirming that ploidy. Should I still go for it?
We have rosifolius and probus growing on the island, most people don’t tell them apart. Rosifolius is rounded oval, mealier and of milder flavor. Probus (still milder than a temperate raspberry) has a stronger flavor, is juicier, and is a flatter berry. Both are delicate, neither could withstand shipping, but I can vouch for the probus as being worth growing in a home garden, at least for those who can’t grow temperate raspberries.
I had a probus on my property a few years ago. I wanted to make a tropical counterpart to the purple raspberry, crossing probus with niveus. Gotta get my hands on both.
Keep us posted! I have odoratus seeds in the hopes of conferring perennial canes to the raspberry. A perennial, everbearing berry would be excellent for the home garden!
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My initial desire to work with diploids was in the hopes that they’d properly pair up with each other… it hadn’t occurred to me that the chromosomes would fail to pair up. With that in mind, using tetraploids definitely feels like a more sound method, but tetraploid gametes are dihaploids… would a cultured dihaploid possess the same fruitfulness and reproductive fertility of a standard diploid? Would a hybrid composed of two dihaploid chromosome clusters have a decent chance of being fruitful and fertile?
I’m also starting to prepare the other experiment. Burbank made a strawspberry, Schoener made a Rose-Apple. I tried the chromosomal math, and it doesn’t make sense to me… The rose has a monoploid number pf 7, the apple has 17. The Spitzenberg Apple he used is a diploid, and the Rosa pomifera he used was a tetraploid. Apparently his experiment worked better for him than the berry did for Burbank. It’s a shame the hybrid was lost in a fire. I have the apple rose (together with the diploid rugosa and roxburghii). Now I need an apple. Are there any tetraploid apples out there? I feel like this experiment is worth trying at the tetraploid level.
Schoener’s hybrid: http://bulbnrose.x10.mx/Roses/breeding/Schoener/SchoenerCD1938.html
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*Edit: Tetraploid Mignonette, not diploid.
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I have 6 r probus potted plants as a novelty. They are super easy to grow and very vigorous. In a couple years I will see how the berries taste
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I’m confused why they would be believed to be anything other than diploid if they were collected from regular diploid parents. I thought that to force chromosome duplication from the seeds they have to be chemically treated during germination. The only way that untreated seeds would reliably produce tetraploid progeny is if the parents were already tetraploid.
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Apologies, I accidentally wrote diploid and I meant tetraploid (I edited the post now). They are tetraploid Mignonette (the standard form is diploid). But yes, he said the ploidy had to be confirmed. I’m not sure why.
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When plant material is treated to induce ploidy doubling, the resulting plants are typically a mixed bag. Some will be double, some not and some will have extra chromosomes, but not fully double.
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I’m not sure what country you’re in @Caesar, but in the US I found a daylily breeder who is set up to do ploidy testing and seems to have reasonable rates. I’m not sure what the requirements would be for sending samples if you’re outside the US, but here’s a link:
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Thank you! Then I’ll re-contact the 4x Mig breeder and give it a go. Hopefully I’ll get some plants ready for ploidy testing in a couple of months.
I’m in Puerto Rico. US territory, but whether we’re treated like the states or like another country depends on the business.
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Read up on the Balloonberries and it would indeed be a super-interesting cross if it works! Of course with the disadvantage that the fruit will grow on a low bush, but still with self fertility and perhaps fruit that is more easily picked it might still be a huge advantage compared to current arctics.
I guess you grow a single clone of arctics together with the balloonberries and far away from any other arctics?
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You guessed right. I have them both in a greenhouse bed. If I see any berries on the arctic raspberry I’ll know they got busy together. I don’t know what chances the hybrid would have of being fertile, probably slim but then I could try chromosome doubling. It’s a bit of a long shot but whatta hell.
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Both are diploid so lets keep fingers crossed. Would be nice if it can be forther back crossed
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A video on raspberry breeding for the pacific north west:
Their list of succesful hybrids is especially interesting
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Does anyone have any actual tetraploid raspberries? I’m not aware of any commercially available cuitivars. There was talk a few years back of a tetraploid R. parvifolius, the “Fenmanhong Giant Raspberry of Jilin”, but it seems to have disappeared from public commerce before I could acquire it. I haven’t seen any other tetraploids except as part of professional breeding efforts.
I contacted the scientist for the tetraploid F. vesca, and we’re hashing out the shipping details. I also found an eBay source for Rubus armeniacus, so I hope to acquire them soon.
I’m not sure if it’s my OCD, but I’m particularly interested in making precise evenly split hybrids. 50/50 genotype, with intermediate phenotype and flavor qualities. That’s why I’m looking for R. armeniacus, R. ulmifolius, R. allegheniensis, R. argutus, and avoiding modern blackberry cultivars (for breeding purposes; for growth and consumption, I’ll take every cultivar I can get). It’s (almost?) impossible to find a modern blackberry cultivar that doesn’t have loganberry (and thus, raspberry) somewhere in its pedigree, and even R. ursinus was found to have salmonberry in its distant ancestry. R. armeniacus and the aforementioned diploids are pure Eubatus, with no genetic contribution from the other subgenera (even R. caesius, a tetraploid that I have seeds for, seems to have contributions from other subgenera). I also cluster raspberries by flavor and phenotype, with traditional red-fruited species on one side and dark-fruited blackcap species on the other. I wanna breed a good purple to use in breeding with the blackberries. The commercially available purples either have an undisclosed pedigree, or involve backcrossing to either parent. I even backed out of using Ohio Treasure and Autumn Britten for my project, because despite presenting a pure phenotype for their respective categories, they both descend from hybrids between red and black raspberries. As far as I’m aware, Jewel has no red raspberry, and Caroline has no blackcaps in their pedigrees.
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Irrelevant side note… Does anyone know the ploidy level for Jennybelle Juneberry? I wanna breed it with other pommes, but I haven’t found anything regarding its ploidy. I already have one potted up and hardening off.
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The eastern, erect type blackberries are tetraploid and have nothing to do with Loganberry or raspberries. Only the high ploidy, trailing types developed in Oregon may have Loganberry or Boysen type hybrids in ancestry. So all the U of Arkansas releases are pure blackberry, although they are derived from more than one species of blackberry.
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Most modern thornless types descend from Austin or Merton Thornless, don’t they? Don’t those types get their thornlessness from Lincoln Logan?
*Edit: Chester Thornless too.
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Second Edit: I found Prime Ark Feedom’s pedigree (PAF is the eastern tetraploid I have growing). Apparently it gets thornlessness from Thornfree. I couldn’t find any taxonomic info on Thornfree, no idea of its species parentage, but apparently it is a strongly trailing blackberry cultivar. Are there any eastern trailing Eubatus blackberries, or are they all R. ursinus?
The pedigree:
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Final edit (this is getting ridiculous):
The source claiming that Thornfree is trailing is “My Blackberry Plants”. Other than that, it seems difficult to find reliable information for this cultivar. Some sites claim it to be shrubby, others confuse it with Chester. So far, I’m not sure I’d consider any of them reliable.
Also, the source for PAF’s pedigree:
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The eastern thornless are derived from Merton Thornless, which is recessive, and originated in a wild trailing blackberry from Europe, R. ulmifolius. The primocane fruiting trait was from a diploid blackberry found in Virginia.
https://growingfruit.org/uploads/short-url/kpQ4nuvlcaNQQJdbQ2frWCOXzoH.pdf
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So the UofA blackberries are pure Eubatus? No influence from R. ursinus? That bodes very well for my breeding projects. I’m glad my suspicions were way off base; I’m really not as familiar as I’d like to be with blackberry pedigrees, especially regarding the species taxonomy of the different varieties.
PAF will suit my project just fine then, no need to look for R. armeniacus. I also found seeds for the tetraploid R. glaucus on eBay. Now if I could only find that 4x Raspberry…
Is Olympic berry a tetraploid? It’s a Phenomenal Berry x Black Raspberry hybrid (6x x 2x?). I’ve been waiting for a chance to get it from Raintree nursery, but they seem to be out of stock on almost everything.
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BTW any progress on this? Purple raspberry/occidentalis hybrids are “easy” to find in stores. I am surprised that yellow raspberry / wineberry is not a thing as a corresponding “yellow” variant.
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