Of course, but they will be open pollinated. There were complications with my volunteer status at the museum ( being accepted officially is a lenghty process, they made an exception to let me plant everything but eventually I had to be away for the time of the process to go on, plus another bug I do not want to talk about, and I was away during pollination time. I still have a short supply of the pure seeds though, but I would need collaborators that can garantee the purity of the next generation of seeds.
I see them as our collective property, but also our collective responsability. I am convinced that a lot of the ones I have coming from Gatersleben aren't there anymore, their melon accessions numbers are shrinking like hell. One that I have not pictured here because the melons were picked so unripe than the picture would be a lie is temporarily called ''SARA'', IT IS A SMALL INCREDIBLY DELICIOUS GREEN FLESH melon that looks like your ordinary small muskmelon, but has a seed cavity only large enough for a spoon. I hope I get good live seeds, even OP, out of it.
I have many others here ( and also lost the bulk of the 140 plus melons harvest to an extreme attack of powdery mildew, barely treated in order to see the most resistant ones), but there is sooo much stuff to process that they are too rotten for pictures. The seeds are safe though, they rotted in plastic bags and I picked them up...
One of them is FIOJIN. I remember very well looking at this smallish true cantaloupe with an almost sexual desire while in the field ( OK, OK, I am pushing it a bit
), the darn thing looked so beautiful....but I guess it is one of those who got picked up by people, like my LUNÉVILLE melons.
The neet thing about having a research garden in a public museum is the support. The bad part is that a LOT of people see your stuff, and since this garden is far away from the main buildings...it is soo hard to resist temptation. I know for a fact that many people indulged in the melon patch. Its fucks up any productivity statistic but for the obviously untouched ones. Gusto 45 and Voatango gave me 5 huge melons one one vine each, so I can anyway witness their productivity, but I would have loved to do it for all of them.
There is one thing I would like the people here to help me with: I have a decision to make. Up to now, I have been the hell of a ''bitch'' in the way I treat my melons, but for lots of manure and black plastic.
Powdery mildew never bothered me much as a disease, being usually so easy to get rid of, at least around here. It was basically the only thing I treated, albeit very lightly. But this year was terrible
we had a subtropical summer, temperature wise, with peaks of 114F in the shadow. But as opposed to the american south, we are in the place on the planet with the largest body of soft water. There are 10,000 lakes in the region, not counting the rivers, amongst the biggest in the world. Not counting the small ones wich I call creeks, the ones the size of the rivers in France ;D ;D ;D
So it was hyper humid during the peak heat.Even Florida, which I visited in the humid summer, was easier to deal with.
Powdery mildew wrecked most of the plants.
DO YOU THINK, SINCE ALMOST ALL MELONS ARE SENSITIVE TO IT, THAT RESISTANCE TO PM SHOULD ''NOT'' BE TAKEN INTO CONSIDERATION, giving us amuch larger platform to work with, with the understanding that it is an usually easy to treat problem, or should we embark into a breeding adventure to get rid of it.
If so, we have a few starting points. But I will not do it alone.
The best starting point is VOATANGO, from Madagascar. It does not taste so good this year, given all the water coming from the sky and how robust it is. Robust growers, in my experience, like LUNÉVILLE, tend to soak up more water. The big rains here tend to come at the end of the summer, at ripening time, but this year we had 3 TIMES THE AMOUNT OF USUAL RAIN.
Gusto 45 did produce a lot, but the vines were nevertheless dead when I picked them. They made it before THE FLOOD I think, which is great in fact.
But VOATANGO was still pumping out flowers yesterday, despite the cold canadian nights that killed out the other plants. The darn thing is even more resistant than LUNÉVILLE. We came close to zero last night and I am not in the garden today, so I do not know if it made it through the night. I am going away for a few days. If ever it is still alive, I am launching a ''VOATANGO ALERT'' all over HG
Anyway, this one should get into a lot of breeding schedules.
I would like to say to the good folks here that it is sold by Kokopelli in France, and they are not in the habit of selling tasteless junk, quite the opposite. Call it french finesse...
So, I need advice on that Powdery Mildew thing....