Author Topic: Fruit Bushes from seed  (Read 6832 times)

Nemesia

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Re: Fruit Bushes from seed
« Reply #20 on: April 29, 2010, 17:51:27 »
They don't come true from seed. You might strike lucky and get something good, or you might not. Cuttings come true, and are a lot faster.

There are two fruit bushes in my garden and I did not plant them so I assume they
are from seeds which flew in.  After watching the fruit garden TV programme on BBC2 last night it looks like my bushes are blackcurrant - and they look very healthy. I'll be so disappointed if I don't get any fruit. 

allaboutliverpool

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Re: Fruit Bushes from seed
« Reply #21 on: April 29, 2010, 18:12:30 »
If you have the space and patience, the obvious answer is to grow several plants from seed and taste the resultant fruit, and record the plants vigour and resistance to disease and pests.

If you happen to produce a winner you can take cuttings and name it after yourself

Ribes negrum "Dirty Digger"

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Dirty Digger

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Re: Fruit Bushes from seed
« Reply #22 on: April 29, 2010, 18:55:40 »
If you have the space and patience, the obvious answer is to grow several plants from seed and taste the resultant fruit, and record the plants vigour and resistance to disease and pests.

If you happen to produce a winner you can take cuttings and name it after yourself

Ribes negrum "Dirty Digger"

http://www.allaboutallotments.com/index.html

Now I like that idea very much......i've always wanted to be immortalised somehow.

Perhaps i'd even get a Royal patronage on it.....actually sod that....the Germans can make their own soft fruit variety.

Unwashed

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Re: Fruit Bushes from seed
« Reply #23 on: April 30, 2010, 10:15:03 »
For all the benefits of cloned varieties there is a significant problem with the lack of genetic diversity in that a disease that is troublesome for one plant will be troublesome for all.  Like potato blight and mildew on goosegogs.  Dutch elm disease is the classic example - the English elm was always propogated from suckers and didn't really set viable seed, and without the genetic diversity there was no possibility of the tree developing immunity.  All of our cloned varieties to some extent are going to be susceptible to catastrophic disease which open-polinated varieties might hope to avoid.
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Dirty Digger

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Re: Fruit Bushes from seed
« Reply #24 on: April 30, 2010, 11:06:33 »
If you have the space and patience, the obvious answer is to grow several plants from seed and taste the resultant fruit, and record the plants vigour and resistance to disease and pests.

If you happen to produce a winner you can take cuttings and name it after yourself

It just so happens I have a fair old amount of space, infact, i can picture the majority of the garden perimeter being covered in fruit bushes for this exact experiment.

Obviously it's going to take a few years but "Rebus Dirty Digger" could well be in the swap forum of the future

galina

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Re: Fruit Bushes from seed
« Reply #25 on: May 01, 2010, 12:56:11 »
I can only speak for myself, and I know it is against common recommendation to go with seedlings, but I had a present from a bird parcel (presumably), let it live and now have a mature gooseberry plant.  I thought it might be a gooseberry seedling (it was), a fruit we didn't already have.  Gifthorse and all that ....

The yields are very heavy with nice tasting fairly sweet green gooseberries.  Some berries grow quite large.  At the moment it is absolutely covered in flowers.  The only problem is that the bush is very compact in height with long branches.  There is not much gap between the branches and picking has to be done with a lot of care by pulling a branch up with well-gloved hands and picking with the other.  Last year I had nearly a gallon of berries from a compact bush.  No mildew.

It worked for me, maybe I was lucky.  I have bought a second gooseberry this year (a red one) and planted it next to the 'stray'.  In a couple of years I will  be able to really compare.
« Last Edit: May 01, 2010, 13:02:10 by galina »

amphibian

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Re: Fruit Bushes from seed
« Reply #26 on: May 01, 2010, 23:08:51 »
Amphibian, I bow to your superior knowledge re F1's, however, your answer is too "text book" like for me to comprehend, so is there any chance of explaining what you mean in easy english?

I'll try, but I find it hard to explain complex subjects without it sounding complicated.

Okay.

Tomatoes are inbreeding, the flower contains both male and female parts and hangs downward. When the pollen is shed by the male parts it pollinates the female parts on the same flower. The plant breeds with itself. Tomatoes are happy to do this, as are French beans, lettuce and many other crops.

Now humans are outbreeders, we all know what happens if we inbreed, i.e. breed with people too closely related to us genetically, yes?

Some plants similarly have to breed with other plants, plants that are genetically sufficiently dissimilar enough as to not cause issues, sweet corn is one of the prime examples of this along with most brassicas. In outbreeding crops, teh variety is genetically similar in the characteristics which matter, say form, colour, taste but vary in lots of unseen and unimportant characteristics.

Plants can breed sexually, like we do, or they can reproduce vegetatively, by a part of the plant establishing a new plant, this is seen naturally with potatoes, strawberries, bindweed, raspberries, blackberries. This state also occurs unnaturally in fruit trees and bushes, where instead of growing the plant by seed we take a cutting. Where vegetative reproduction occurs the offspring is identical to its parent.

This has a profound effect on the gentic nature of the plants.

Imagine some tomatoes (a natural inbreeder) we have a indeterminate red tomato and an determinate yellow tomato, these traits are controlled by two genes, the growth habit we will call A and the colour B. Each plant has one of two possible versions of each gene, A or a; A is dominant to a and causes indeterminate growth, B is dominant to b and causes a red tomato. Most living creatures inherit two copies of each gene, one from each parent, our red indeterminate is AABB or yellow determinate is aabb.

What happens if we cross them? The F1 will inherit one of the pair from each parent, and will be AaBb, because A and B are dominant our F1 will look just like the AABB plant, it will be a red indeterminate, every single F1 would be exactly teh same to this, though the F2 (their children) would be different to one another.

Now let's us imagine a potato, many years ago a breeder crossed two potato plants, let's assume that each of the potato plants were genetically stable plant 1 being AABBCC and plant 2 being aabbcc, the F1 would be AaBbCc, they would all be identical. The F1 wasn't what the breeder wanted, he wanted some of teh traits from the paprent with the recessive (non-dominant) genes. So the breeder sows some seed from his F1 plants (by seed here I mean from the potato fruit, not tubers) the genes wil all resegregate, one of the children is AaBbcc and has all the traits the breeder wants, if you were to grow its children from seed again, they would be different to one another, the breder doesn't want this, he wants the traits he's got now. But it doesn't matter because he can take tubers and grow from these, all the children will be exactly the same, clones of the AaBbcc parent. This is how all potatoes have been bred, as a result potatoes are not stable, if you grow them from the fruit seed rather than the tubers you'd get offspring that vary from one another. Because of this if you cross two potatoes the F1s from ths cross will be different to one another too. This is true for all the crops we grow from cuttings, tubers, rhizomes, from suckers, bulbs or by layering.

A strawberry plant is identical to its parent, because it is a clone of its parent, but the parent contains differnt versions of the genes, these different versions would appear if we grew it from its seed instead. Just as an identical human twin is a clone of its sibling, but their children differ from one another.

As allaboutliverpool has mentioned above, because of the insatbility contained in cloned plants seed, you can just sow some seed, the children will all be different, if you find a winner, take cuttings and you have a new variety of your own.

I hope this makes sense.
« Last Edit: May 01, 2010, 23:10:25 by amphibian »

Robert_Brenchley

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Re: Fruit Bushes from seed
« Reply #27 on: May 02, 2010, 00:15:26 »
Now humans are outbreeders, we all know what happens if we inbreed, i.e. breed with people too closely related to us genetically, yes?

You've only got to look at our royals. Until after the First World War, royals were the next thing to God, and they were so special they could only marry other royals. So they were all related, and they'd been marrying cousins for I don't know how many generations. They have two inherited genetic disorders, haemophilia and porphyria. Queen Victoria originated the first, and the second was what affected Mad King George.

superspud

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Re: Fruit Bushes from seed
« Reply #28 on: May 02, 2010, 16:08:15 »
Two years ago I moved an old pre tenancy gooseberry plant from under the hedge, it was Invicta. Last year it was doing a lot better in its new home, then one of the kids stood on it and broke a twig of, Dad did the indian war chief dance and threatened all with pain of death if they trod on my plants again, I put the twig into the ground next to the main plant and forgot about it untill I looked at the goosegogs this year and lo and behold found the twig had fresh green on it ... I dug it up and it had a nice big root system growing on it so I moved it to the end of the row.

It gave me new hope of multiplying my stock and the kids were duly forgiven  ;D.

Ignore me I'm having a breakdown.

 

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