Post by DarJones on Mar 29, 2015 19:39:23 GMT -8
I have about 200 seedlings growing from TPS this year. Earlier today, I was potting up to cell trays and made a few notes about the differences in the seedlings.
Chellan seed threw 3 purple leaved out of about 40 seedlings. I had Chellan planted next to Azul Toro in hopes this would happen. These seedlings were extremely vigorous in the 4 to 6 inch tall range where other seedlings were only 2 inches.
Azul Toro seedlings give a range of colors from deep purple leaves to green with small amounts of purple in the leaf axils. This suggests the purple color is from a couple of dominant genes with perhaps red and white genes lurking in the background.
Sarpo Mira seedlings were in a range of colors with a few having purple leaves and several with clear green leaves. I'm very interested to see how Sarpo Mira TPS performs in my garden.
TPS grown from another of Tom's varieties were uniform in leaf structure highly resembling the parent. The level of parental similarity is easily 90% or more.
It is interesting that in a bee saturated environment I can only point to about 10% of the seedlings as clearly from bee made crosses. This might change as the seedlings develop.
One of the problems with plant breeding is the difficulty of stacking multiple genes into a single variety. This gets down to one of the tenets of genetics which is that the more desirable genes a single variety carries, the less likely it is to be crossed with similar elite germplasm. Over time, the genetics tend to stabilize toward the mean, not toward the extreme represented by the highly selected elite line. This is why it is so important to carefully select crosses to maintain the genetic progress already achieved while adding in new genes that can benefit the select line. I can see this being a problem with Sarpo Mira which is a highly selected elite line that will be difficult to pair up with something equally desirable.
Chellan seed threw 3 purple leaved out of about 40 seedlings. I had Chellan planted next to Azul Toro in hopes this would happen. These seedlings were extremely vigorous in the 4 to 6 inch tall range where other seedlings were only 2 inches.
Azul Toro seedlings give a range of colors from deep purple leaves to green with small amounts of purple in the leaf axils. This suggests the purple color is from a couple of dominant genes with perhaps red and white genes lurking in the background.
Sarpo Mira seedlings were in a range of colors with a few having purple leaves and several with clear green leaves. I'm very interested to see how Sarpo Mira TPS performs in my garden.
TPS grown from another of Tom's varieties were uniform in leaf structure highly resembling the parent. The level of parental similarity is easily 90% or more.
It is interesting that in a bee saturated environment I can only point to about 10% of the seedlings as clearly from bee made crosses. This might change as the seedlings develop.
One of the problems with plant breeding is the difficulty of stacking multiple genes into a single variety. This gets down to one of the tenets of genetics which is that the more desirable genes a single variety carries, the less likely it is to be crossed with similar elite germplasm. Over time, the genetics tend to stabilize toward the mean, not toward the extreme represented by the highly selected elite line. This is why it is so important to carefully select crosses to maintain the genetic progress already achieved while adding in new genes that can benefit the select line. I can see this being a problem with Sarpo Mira which is a highly selected elite line that will be difficult to pair up with something equally desirable.
