Tetraploid watermelon variety?

[Hristo]

Is there any available tetraploid varieties. Other than Tetra Baby, which I have, but past 3-4 years it does not perform well. Yes, my soil is not very good for watermelons too, but this variety performs especially bad. Is there other varieties?

[castanea]

I don't know of any, but this professor at North Carolina State probably knows as much about tetraploids as anyone in the US:

cuke.hort.ncsu.edu/cucurbit/wehner/wehnermain.html

[canadamike]

I doubt they would ever be released. This is research material, none in the genebanks... It would be worth it to treat tetra baby like a precious thing, as it is not important for the quality of the fruit but the few 4x seeds it produces. I was not lucky with it either, downy mildew killed everything, citulus and others, in that patch...

[Hristo]

Considering how many tetraploid lines exist around the world it's a bit strange that only one variety is (barely) available. No seed leak! And even Tetra Baby is very hard to find, especially now when Ken Allan's site is down. Sure it's precious thing. BTW for 3 or 4 years growing I was able to taste no more than 2-3 well ripe watermelons and I find the taste not bad at all, even I would say very good!

[Alan]

Feb 20, 2010 21:18:20 GMT -5 Hristo said:

Is there any available tetraploid varieties. Other than Tetra Baby, which I have, but past 3-4 years it does not perform well. Yes, my soil is not very good for watermelons too, but this variety performs especially bad. Is there other varieties?

I agree, Tetra Baby never does well here or I would already have released seed for it, I'm in the third year of increase now and plan to offer it next season. Taste wise it is very similar to sugar baby.

I too have been searching for other Tetraploids Histro and can't find any either, perhaps someone will see our posts here and point us in the right direction?

Alan Kapuler?

[canadamike]

These lines are not released because they are thr chicken that lay the golden egg.

Seedless watermelons are a cash cow for the industry...they keep them sealed...I guess some of us will have to work with colchicine...just befriend your pharmacist, folks...

[Hristo]

That is true. But I'm sure there are A LOT unused/inferior/abandoned lines that will do no harm to the company's $$$ if released. Probably the main reason for their scarcity is because there is no demand for them. Very few people know what tetraploid watermelon means and for what is used.

BTW does anyone know the history behind Tetra Baby?

[canadamike]

Yep, Ken Alan told me:

His favorite seedless watermelon became unavailable, a food chain having bought the rights.

He went on a mission of creating his own, and after a lot of trial and error, not really knowing what he was doing, he found, amongst loads of weird plants, a true tetraploid. It is an inspiring story in a way, and more of us should be doing like he did, if there is a crowd who can it is us.

It is possible to find ideal cilchicine concentration data on the net. And it can also be used on buds in trees or plants etc...

Tetraploids are not necesseraly productive, they are around to play havoc in the genes, really...and never produce many seeds.

[raymondo]

So, are all tetraploids not very fertile? Or just the watermelon tetraploids? It seems odd, doesn't it, that these watermelons should be so mean with their seeds when a doubling of ploidy after a wide cross is often very helpful in restoring fertility.
And where would one buy colchicine?

[robertb]

The old emmer and durum wheats (modern ones are hexaploid) must have been productive of seed since that's the whole point of growing the stuff! It may be purely a squash characteristic.

[Hristo]

Getting pure colchicine is even harder than getting tetraploid variety. I have never been able to get it. I see there are pills containing it, but I imagine how low is the content, sinse it's a deadly poison too.

[spacecase0]

I have a colchicine plant growing (colchicium),
anyone know how to proses it ?
I thought that you take the plant and mash it up (I could never do this to mine as I have grown attached to it now)
then mix it with water, mix, remove the pulp, and then evaporate the water, and the powder that is left is mostly colchicine, but I am not sure about this.

a few other plants also have colchicine in them,
it should be possible to come up with some on your own.

my issue is that I have no idea how to use it on plants, or I would have come up with some by now.


edit:
I found this
www.ijpsonline.com/article.asp?issn=0250-474X;year=2006;volume=68;issue=6;spage=806;epage=809;aulast=Bharathi
so it looks like Gloriosa Superba may be better at getting your colchicine

[spacecase0]

0.5 g of powdered plant material was extracted twice with 25 ml of petroleum ether with frequent shaking for 1 h, followed each time by filtration. The solid residues were air dried and then extracted with 10 ml of dichloromethane at room temperature for 30 min with frequent shaking. Then 10% solution of ammonia (0.5 ml) was added to the mixture with vigorous shaking for 10 min; the mixture was left undisturbed for 30 min and then filtered. The residue was washed twice with 10 ml of dichloromethane and then combined with the filtrate. The organic phase was evaporated to dryness and then dissolved in 1 ml of 70% ethanol to yield the test sample.

I bet that you only need the petroleum ether, ammonia and ethanol to extract the colchicine

[canadamike]

The quantities ( % of actual colchicine in the solution) are actually lower than what is in the pills. I am a good friend of my pharmacist and he agreed to give me some last year, asked me what the needed concentrations would have to be, he as a scale precise to 1/1000 gram

There is info on the net

[jonnyyuma]

Hello,
We find when converting diploids to tetraploid some strange things occur. We aren't too successfull, even at the level of culturing thousands of attempts. The concept is simple but weird things occur all the time. Often times we get nothing out of it at all. Most seed companies do tetraploid breeding. Almost all tetraploids are very related and come from a small gene pool. This is because of the difficulty of getting a good tetraploid. There appears to be genetic control of this, but no one has done the work on it academically speaking. If you want tetraploids and don't mind paying for them, you can buy 1000 seeds of a commercially grown seedless watermelon, plant them out and do one of two things: 1. Keep pollinators out of the field and what ever sets is tetraploid as tetraploid pollen will not work with triploid. 2. Buy a blocky seedless type and look for elongated or round shapes of the ovary prior to pollenation. Round and elongated shapes are fixed and you cross the two to get the heterzygous "blocky" shape. The only problem with this is that 1000 triploid seeds is like $120-150 U.S.
If anyone wants to know the history of seedless watermelons send me a pm. It is quite a long one and I don't want to take up the space here.
Later on,
Jonny