@Richard is making a good point that even an expert cannot tell the difference in warren and magness. Why would it matter which you got you might ask? Warren is resistant to fireblight, is a good pollinator of other pears, warren and magness do better at different locations. No one can tell them apart by site so if you post a photo and say is this warren and it is really magness i will say sure that looks like warren.
I won’t go back to the thread, but there was a recent description of Kieffer that was obviously not Kieffer. It is worth some effort to maintain records of varieties grafted to ensure the correct variety is being grown.
DNA tests are about to make this conversation moot. When you can have a variety tested for $20 to find out for sure what it is, there will be no excuse for all of the misidentified varieties currently being propagated.
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On that note, my mathematical paper concerning horticultural genomics has been accepted for review. It’s going to take them awhile. First they have to wait for qualified editors and reviewers to become available and then there’s the business of the 40GB of data. Should it be published, it will set your estimate of $20 verifications back a decade or so.
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Perhaps. On the other hand, the technology to do the tests is currently available. What is not available is a reliable standard set of cultivars of known identity. Even the USDA repository has multiple errors. Also, how to identify a sport of a known variety will be a problem. Consider that there are a dozen known sports of Bartlett in circulation. That is not counting the misidentified varieties often declared as Bartlett sports.
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Think about the cross of old home x farmingdale actually would up being old home x bartlett. The rootstock is the basics we start with. If you noticed the harrow pears are a cross of the actual parents old home x bartlett. This occurred long before the real parent trees of ohxf rootstocks were known. Some of our best tasting most disease resistant trees to this day are the harrow pears. If we could find out seckles parent trees we could possibly make a full sized version of seckle.
No it isn’t. That’s part of what my paper addresses. I show that what they think they are measuring is not in the genome. Instead they are getting aberrations of the device.
The repositories face two problems: They don’t have proper technology (few people do) and the statistical software they use to measure genetic distance contains mathematical fallacies.
This was a data resolution problem, e.g. trying to identify a bird from a photo with only 4 pixels and no gene information. Sports are parentless and so certain portions of their genome are identical to the host plant – especially in the sex genes.
We could only do so if the parents still exist and they are found through next generation genome matches with the forward and reverse strands of the Seckel genome.
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Years ago I went to a local nursery and bought a yellow Fatalii pepper. I grew it out all season and it ended up being mislabeled. That being said if you have a mislabeled plant there is very little you can do. I had already grown the entire season so the time was already lost. With standard size pears you may very well go 10 seasons/years before you figure out the fruit you got is wrong. I know I have a Warren pear from Edible Landscaping and it is 2 feet. Needless to say that is going to be along time to produce so I am not figuring that out any time soon. My seckle pear from Stark Bros sat there with a few leaves for an entire season and is just now starting to send out branches this season a year later. Getting it from a nursery instead of a big box stores helps but may not fix the problem. The only way you can know cultivar is true for sure is if it grows out super fast. I know my purple passion asparagus is true to name from Stark Bros because they all have sprouted 2 years in a row now and they are purple when they first come up. I think most online nurseries they will be true to name. I think when they are not true to name they are mislabeled. I would think how nursery get the wrong cultivar is by customers browsing and changing out tags. I used to do it and can see some changing out tags for a cheaper price. That is one of the jobs of a self checkout cashier. They are to monitor making sure tags are not changed out during self checkout. With plants it is a bit harder. If their nursery is purely online and no customers are allowed to browse that limits mislabeling.
A simpler explanation for mislabeling: trees are handled by fallible human beings.
If nursery business was treated more like rocket launching business where mistakes results in critical and catastrophic loss, there would be less mislabeling. Of course trees would cost a lot of money from such a nursery as preventing error detection and correction is costly.
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Like I said by the time you realize mislabeling it is too late either way. Either you grew out the annual for the entire season and you get 4 dollars back. The other scenario is you have a perennial. We can assume you were taking care of it for 3-17 years with the lower amount of years being things like cherries or peaches, the mid years being apples or pecans and the final years being things like pecans. In the lower end of the years and the annual you are hoping the nursery trust you. With the annual you get 4 bucks back if they trust you and if the nursery trusts you in the perennial piece with trees or bushes on the lower years you better hope they refund current prices and not past prices. Besides cutting the tree or bush down would be a costly endeavor at that point. With a mislabeled apple, pear or pecan you hope the nursery is still there and maintained their records. I have seen nurseries like Stark Bros claiming 100 years of service and I think Raintree claimed 50 years this year but many nursery are just not around that time. Many times these nursery are owned by older guys/ladies and no one wants to inherit it because it is a lot of work and not a lot of profit compared to other industry. Luis Rossman talks about how he makes hundreds of dollars fixing a motherboard in 15 minutes and in a nursery you wait 2 years to make 60 bucks on a tree. Like I said above though most of the plants listed from a nursery are going to be correctly labeled at the end of the day. The longer standing nursery like Jung Seed, Raintree Stark Bros etc. have reputations to uphold. If they start selling a bunch of mislabeled trees talk gets around and they struggle to make sells and may even have to make alias like TYTY nursery.
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Even on this forum members often refer to their seedling tree as “(parent name) seedling”. I’m sure there are plenty of instances of people calling the offspring by the parents name.
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Italian researchers point out this has been a common practice for centuries. For example there are both male and female “Dottato” figs. Consequently this name is better used for a landrace of figs instead of a single cultivar.
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Im very interested in how many types of seckle exist. Makes me question how long it will take to find them all.
My “Seckel” fruit do not hang down. They are mostly upright until ripen. They look like Seckel but are small fruit.
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Those do look like seckle. This year im going to narrow a couple of these down based on size of the pears. As you said seckle should be very small. Many people are growing early seckle, giant seckle, worden seckle or one of the many other variants.
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I think mine stick up like that too. And Seckel is supposed to have small fruit.
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Seckel =? Seckle
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Seckel /= Seckle
From what I can see, the only pear referred to as “seckle” is “Worden Seckle”. I haven’t delved into history on the variety enough to know the history. It looks like someone did not know how to spell Seckel which resulted in PI 541286 in ARS-Grin.
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