tomatos

[Twoflower]

   Does anyone know how you make a open pollinated plant from F1 seeds?
                         Twoflower

[Twoflower]

[chriscross1966]

Take the F2's, select the ones with the traits you most value and grow seeds from them and cross-pollinate yourself if needed, re-select a few times and you should get an open pollinated strain with the traits you want. Some will be impossible to stabilise as they are strictly co-dominant genetically....

chrisc

[Twoflower]

ok i understood all that apart from whats an F2? and the bit at the end ??? about codomy thing........I know you can do it with these seeds as i got talking to the man who now owns seeds by size. Forgot to ask him how to do it ;D

[chriscross1966]

F2 is the child generation from F1... so if you sow 25 seeds collected from F1's then theyll come up as all sorts. From the plants of that (F2) generation that you like the best collect some seed, then repeat the process until you have a stable population with the traits you want. in some cases it is impossible as the trait you want relies on one gene from each of the F0 parents being present as they are both active, when that happens the genes are known as co-dominant, usually a plant only expresses one gene for any given posistion. You'll never achieve that in an open pollinated.  Keep reselecting and by the time you get to around F8 or so you should be getting a fairly stable landrace.

[Robert_Brenchley]

Just keep selecting the ones you like from each generation. They'll soon settle down, and you won't have to worry about technicalities if you don't want to. I had a bellyful of genetics at school and college, but unless I'm looking at bee breeding, which is seriously weird in some ways, I don't even think about it.

[Twoflower]

  Thanks, think i have it now. Going to have a go at queen breeding this year so come september my brain will really hurt ;D

[Robert_Brenchley]

Unless you're really going into it, all you need to do is pick your queen every year, and raise a few queens from it to requeen some of your worse hives.