Allotments 4 All
Produce => Edible Plants => Topic started by: Dirty Digger on April 28, 2010, 16:27:20
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I've just gone and spent a tenner in Poundland on fruit bushes (new stock and I made sure I picked the ones that were definitely alive), however, I could quite easily dedicate a much larger area to soft fruit, so was wondering if anyone had any experience and tips they could give me on growing gooseberries/tayberries/rasberries etc from seed.
Anyone with any useful knowledge, feel free to post your info here.
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Best to use cuttings. Each year when you prune stick the cuttings in the ground. They nearly all take.
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Best to use cuttings. Each year when you prune stick the cuttings in the ground. They nearly all take.
Ok, that's a good idea but would still like to know about growing from seed.
All good educational answers most welcome.
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I agree with worldor go the cutting route!
As a matter of fact last year when I pruned my blackcurrants I stuck thirteen prunings in the ground along side my parent plants and on looking at them this morning all thirteen have taken and there were flowers/berries on all of them.
I will leave them in their present position until planting out time in the autumn and distribute them among other plot holders where I hope they will donate a few bob to the allotment funds.
I do the same with strawberry runners! I think there are very few people on our plots who do not have strawberries that have originated from my plot.
Who knows next back end I might increase my gooseberry stock in the same way!.
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As far as I know, the only fruit that are readily available from seed are some strawberries and huckleberries and possibly Saskatoon's.
I have however, seen gooseberry and blackcurrant seedlings among my mature bushes, but have never grown them on as most of the seedlings are likely to be inferior to the mother plants. They will also take longer to start fruiting than rooted cuttings.
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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.
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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.
Ok, so are most fruit bushes F1's?
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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.
Ok, so are most fruit bushes F1's?
Mostly, yes.
It's like this with most vegatively propagated plants. Because each cutting/runner/tuber produces a clone of the source palnt breeders don't need to stabilise the cultivar. Basically you can save seed from any cloned plant then sow them, if any of the offspring produce something great then you clone this plant and you have just made a new variety. You can do this by saving seed from a potato fruit for example.
This is the reason you get such enormous variance in blackberries. The seed are rarely stable because most of the physical reproduction is not sexual, but when a bird eats a blackberry then excretes the seed the offspring will be very different to the parent.
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as a interesting sidepoint if you layer a cultivated blackberry[a method of vegetative reproduction] you can get the original wild blackberry as the offspring this is due to the outer
"skin" of the plant having different cells to the interior
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It's not an F1 in the commercial sense. they don't mass produce the seed, they just do a cross, and if they think it's commercial they propagate it vegetatively and offer it for sale. But the rinciple's the same; it's the first filial generation (hence F1) from a cross.
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They're not F1's as such, but the seedling will not come true.
I don't think any of the rose-family fruits are difficult to grow from seed so as a bit of fun you could grow a few on. It's odds on they won't be very interesting, but you never know.
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Actually, if the seed were self-polinated would they come true? Sorry if that's a stupid thing to ask, but my plant-genetics is only what I remember from O-level biology. Of course if they do come true then there's no advantage over cuttings which are way easier, but I'd like to understand how it works.
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Actually, if the seed were self-polinated would they come true? Sorry if that's a stupid thing to ask, but my plant-genetics is only what I remember from O-level biology. Of course if they do come true then there's no advantage over cuttings which are way easier, but I'd like to understand how it works.
No they wouldn't come true, there would be segragation.
On the topic of F1s, actually commercial crops are not like typical F1s. The breeder made a cross and obtained an F1, but the two cultivars used in the gross would not have been stable themselves, so this f1 will not behave like a typical F1, it will show segragation in the first generation. Often there isn't any need to make a cross because seed obtained from say a potato would all produce different results anyway, because of the heterozygousity of the parent, which teh original breeder had no need to stabalise.
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The breeder made a cross and obtained an F1, but the two cultivars used in the gross would not have been stable themselves.
In my limited understanding of what an F1 is, this is not the way you get to it.
First of all, you need to breed out all the various crosses so that both parents are stable and true breeding. It takes up to 7 generations to get the correct parents, so F1's are the dogs doo dahs and well worth spending good money on.
You then pick the best parents with the characteristics you wish to bestow upon the F1 children. For example, large fruit, strong taste and vigorous growth. Both parents must have the same characteristics to get the full benefit. Then their children (the F1's) will have the full qualities of its parents added together.....much larger fruit than its parents, much stronger taste than its parents and grow much more vigorously than its parents.
Anyway, that's how I understand F1's.....all thanks to two pages of an Alan Titchmarsh book I read.
Just crossing any old plant with another is not an F1.
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Just take care when you are weeding. I always find baby fruit trees and shrubs around and plant them up into little pots.
Learning to identify weeds and seedlings is all part of gardening to me, there are often gift plants out there, either self seeded or 'donated by the birds'. If a plant does not turn out to be what you hoped, you have not wasted anything by throwing it out later.
A lot of seeds grow better if they have first gone dry. I take them from peppers and tomatoes, anything and everything. Put the seeds and any slimy stuff on to a little kitchen paper, toilet paper or tissue and let them dry out then simply put several in a pot of wet compost (paper and all if they are stuck to it and cover with dry, then keep them moist. If nothing appears after a couple of months, re-use the compost and plant something else in it.
Don't be put off by negative responses about hybrid and f1 nor about the plant not being true or any of that stuff. I think it is put about by people who have never actually tried it them selves, just read something somewhere. You will get results and will love your little babies all the more for rearing them yourself.
If you can not afford pots, use old cartons with a hole in the bottom and if you have no compost, steal the soil from a mole hill. Collect rain water in a tub to water them for free too.
Don't be tempted to take self seeded plants indoors for too long either, it can get too hot for them but a window sill can help when and if it is frosty.
Peppers and chillis wont germinate in light, so always cover them with a decent layer of compost and be patient I was just about to dump a pot full yesterday I had planted on the 23rd March and as I tipped the pot the top layer fell off revealing little shoots which had not hit the surface yet.
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In my limited understanding of what an F1 is, this is not the way you get to it.
First of all, you need to breed out all the various crosses so that both parents are stable and true breeding. It takes up to 7 generations to get the correct parents, so F1's are the dogs doo dahs and well worth spending good money on.
An F1 in a non-cloning population is derived from stable parents, there is no stability required or present in cloning populations. An F1 in a stable population produces no segregation, in an unstable cloning population there is no stability in the F1, you simply sow all the seed, and if you like one of the segregants you clone it.
F1s are only the bees knees if your are dealing with an outbreeding plant that suffersd inbreeder depression, otherwise OP varieties will suit most needs far better.
You then pick the best parents with the characteristics you wish to bestow upon the F1 children. For example, large fruit, strong taste and vigorous growth. Both parents must have the same characteristics to get the full benefit. Then their children (the F1's) will have the full qualities of its parents added together.....much larger fruit than its parents, much stronger taste than its parents and grow much more vigorously than its parents.
It doesn't really work like that at all, the F1 will have the characteristics of the dominant alleles supplied by each parent only, every F1 is identical genetically. You will only see a combination of all the best characteristics of each parent among some of the F2 population.
Anyway, that's how I understand F1's.....all thanks to two pages of an Alan Titchmarsh book I read.
I think he should have explained it differently then.
Just crossing any old plant with another is not an F1.
Yes it is, it may not be a commercially viable F1, but it's an F1. An F1 is any hybrid resulting from two distinctly different parent types.
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Fruit bushes and trees from seed will vary, not only in their flavour and season of cropping, but also in their size. You might plant what looks like a blackcurrant, only to find that it grows far larger than the parent bush and that it's a gooseberry cross! At least, that's how the seed that the birds left under my mother's apple tree turned out. It tasted foul and my brother weeded it out. :P
If I had the space for more fruit trees and bushes, I would prefer to grow more apple cordons for a bigger range of varieties throughout autumn, and a few other choice fruits. However, I am growing on a couple of seedling gooseberries that have appeared in my garden. One of the joys of gardening is surely having the freedom to choose what you grow, in whatever way you want. Whatever else is going on your life, at least you can have the pleasure of choosing what you grow. ;D
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In my limited understanding of what an F1 is, this is not the way you get to it.
First of all, you need to breed out all the various crosses so that both parents are stable and true breeding. It takes up to 7 generations to get the correct parents, so F1's are the dogs doo dahs and well worth spending good money on.
An F1 in a non-cloning population is derived from stable parents, there is no stability required or present in cloning populations. An F1 in a stable population produces no segregation, in an unstable cloning population there is no stability in the F1, you simply sow all the seed, and if you like one of the segregants you clone it.
F1s are only the bees knees if your are dealing with an outbreeding plant that suffersd inbreeder depression, otherwise OP varieties will suit most needs far better.
You then pick the best parents with the characteristics you wish to bestow upon the F1 children. For example, large fruit, strong taste and vigorous growth. Both parents must have the same characteristics to get the full benefit. Then their children (the F1's) will have the full qualities of its parents added together.....much larger fruit than its parents, much stronger taste than its parents and grow much more vigorously than its parents.
It doesn't really work like that at all, the F1 will have the characteristics of the dominant alleles supplied by each parent only, every F1 is identical genetically. You will only see a combination of all the best characteristics of each parent among some of the F2 population.
Anyway, that's how I understand F1's.....all thanks to two pages of an Alan Titchmarsh book I read.
I think he should have explained it differently then.
Just crossing any old plant with another is not an F1.
Yes it is, it may not be a commercially viable F1, but it's an F1. An F1 is any hybrid resulting from two distinctly different parent types.
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?
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F1s are only the bees knees if your are dealing with an outbreeding plant that suffersd inbreeder depression, otherwise OP varieties will suit most needs far better.
Just to explain this bit, an outbreeding plant is one that habitually cross-pollinates, like squashes, brassicas or sweet corn. Inbreeding depression is where the plant needs to have genes from multiple parents. It inherits pairs of genes, one set from each parent. Some plants, peas for instance, are inbreeders, and don't care if they've got two identical sets. So they can self-pollinate quite happily. Others can't.
To use bees as an example, sex is determined by a single gene, with lots of different forms (known as alleles) If it has two different genes ( in technical terms, it's heterozygous), it's female. If it isn't, it's male. If it comes from an unfertilised egg, with only one set of genes, then it can't possibly be heterozygous, so it's a drone. If it has two sets of genes, and both sex genes are the same, it's not heterozygous either, it's homozygous. If this is allowed to grow up, it turns into a monstrous overgrown drone, but in practice such an egg is always eaten. If a queen is inbred, she produces a lot of these diploid drone eggs, and as a result, the hive will always have less worker eggs, and less workers, than it should have.
I don't know the details, but sweet corn is a plant which suffers badly from inbreeding depression. You need about 200 plants pollinating each other to maintain a variety successfully, which rules out most people. I'm not convinced that F1's are any better though. I see no reason why a stable supersweet couldn't be produced easily, except that farmers would then be able to save their own seed, and might not be back every year to buy more.
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even I with my hopeless ungreen fingers, now have 4 gooseberry bushes instead of 3, after cunningly trimming and pushing a broken off branch into the ground in the autumn. It is still quite small but it has grown vigourously with absolutely no help from me.
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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.
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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
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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.
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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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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
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.