Day
gardener
When in doubt, grow it out.
Posts: 171
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Post by Day on Dec 19, 2017 14:10:31 GMT -5
(It seems I've been bitten by the 'hulless pepo' bug that so many others have. I was tempted to put this in the breeding projects category, but since it does not yet have a clearly defined aim I thought it might fit better on the general curcurbitacaea board.) This conversation began on Raymondo's Pepita Project board, but to avoid derailing the conversation on their specific and in progress project, I've started a side board here. First and foremost, has anyone worked with naked seed pepo types, or worked to breed the trait into other varieties? Did you have any success, or insights?The project I'm personally flirting with is using a large size pepo such as Howden to try to breed a hulless Jack-o-Latern type pepo with naked seeds and much higher seed production per fruit than the typical 5-10 lb naked varieties available (Lady Godiva, Kakai, Pepitas F1, etc.) Eating quality would be sacrificed, but flesh able to stand up to carving would be important. However, as it's been pointed out, there are a lot of potential difficulties with this project -- one of which is the number of plants that would need to be grown to recover the hulless trait in the F2. I welcome any thoughts/opinions on the projects, as well as any advice on or experience you've had growing naked seeded varieties.
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Post by oxbowfarm on Dec 19, 2017 15:16:29 GMT -5
oxbowfarm - I'm going to repeat some things and might sound silly, so forgive me if I've misunderstood or our wires crossed somewhere. When you say the picture is of the original naked F2 plant, I read that as: I planted the F2 seeds and this grew, with the seeds inside it being F3. Or is it that the picture is the F1 grow out, with the seeds inside being the F2? I don't have many people in my life willing or able to talk plant genetics with me, so while I know a lot of genetic terms, I sometimes struggle with how they're used conversationally. The info about Howden/Deppe is extremely useful - thank you! I've read several (but not all) of Carol's books but don't remember that bit. Though I wasn't breeding, or intending to breed, pepos at the time so I may not have stored it in my long term memory. If I start on this project, perhaps I will do exactly as you suggest and use Howden as the mother to get the most out of the variety, since I won't be backcrossing to Howden. That is correct, the picture was of F2 plant #6, from a packet of F2 seed raymondo gave me from his selfed F1 plant from his original cross. It may have been more than one plant, I can't recall off the top of my head. All of those F2 plants were selfed, I think I ended up with about 40ish living plants, and #6 gave me naked F3 seeds. All the subsequent work has been done descended from those seeds. Doing it that way took A LOT of growing space, approximately 200 or so row feet. It was a lot of fun, and great practice for hand pollinating squash, but thats not really a tricky thing to learn, and none of the squash in this picture were naked or particularly useful for anything.  I went back and looked at BYOVV and the squash breeding project I was thinking of was her "Sandwich Slice" squash story. Which is a great story and there isn't a better plant breeding author out there than Carol Deppe . Its basically all of Chapter 23 "Conversations with a Squash". What I'm thinking might be useful for you to do is change what raymondo did, and instead of selfing the F1, backcross it to naked again. This would stack your naked genes and mean you have much higher odds of finding a naked segregate when you grow out the backcross generation (I'm fuzzy on what to call a backcross like that, is it an F1 again?) with a lot few plants so you don't need nearly so much space dedicated to this. In terms of bush naked pepo varieties, the only one that I'm familiar with that comes close is Kakai. I've grown High Mowing's strain of it and they describe it as "semi-bush", which I'd say is accurate. Its kind of like a Costata Romanesca type plant, big and sprawling with 2 or so main branches per plant. Only not as huge and annoying as Costata (which I hate). This little blurb by Brent Loy about breeding naked seeded pumpkins is always worth reading. |
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Day
gardener
When in doubt, grow it out.
Posts: 171
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Post by Day on Dec 19, 2017 15:41:11 GMT -5
oxbowfarm - Gotcha! Ok, we're on the same wavelength again xD And wow, that picture is fascinating. I always love seeing the different phenotypes that appear when two varieties with very different shapes/colors are crossed. My nerdy version of eye candy, I suppose. Oo, I do vaguely remember the sandwich slice part. That is one of her books I have read. I have it at home, and once I'm back in town I'll definitely re-read that section. As for what one calls an F1 back crossed to a parent, I'm just going to quote this funny bit from this interesting project Backcrossing vs. selfing really does sound like the way to go. And that link! Very useful, I learned a lot for even such a short article. Even though my experience with bush plants has not been the same as the authors, this may have more to do with my long season and nutrient devoid/water deprived soil; the larger root system of vining plants were able to take up more moisture and nutrients and produce better, and took full advantage of my extra long season by continueing to send out side shoots and new flushes of fruit, unlike the bush varieties which pretty much produced their crop quick and early, then petered out. So while working the bush gene into the project for purely practical space purposes, as you and andyb have suggested, could be very useful, I wonder if it wouldn't be significantly less useful after the initial F1 grow out. And seeing as bush in a dominant trait, it would require another round of large grow outs to get back to the recessive vining habit. A lot to consider. As for seeds per fruit, I guess I will have to make a choice. Go exclusively for lots of seeds per plant, which favors production of lots of small fruit (with no eating quality). Or lots of seeds per fruit, which favors fewer but larger fruit per plant (but that could have dual purpose as a carving pumpkin.) The latter appeals to me more, but perhaps the former is smarter. Thoughts?
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Post by troppo on Dec 20, 2017 2:06:57 GMT -5
I’ll be following this project closely, I’m half tempted next season to cross a couple of crosses. Have run out of room this season with my orange fleshed spaghetti squash project.
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Post by walt on Dec 20, 2017 12:31:51 GMT -5
The little blurb was interesting and informative. Whole project is interesting.
Recently someone posted about a wild species that crosses with all domestic species of squash. It could be used perhaps to bridge the naked seed genes to the large-seeded C. argyrosperma squash. (I'm sure I spelled that wrong)
Sounds like a lot of work, though. Anyone need a chalange? Anyone need some bragging rights?
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Post by oxbowfarm on Dec 20, 2017 12:55:26 GMT -5
It would definitely be a huge challenge. Just from my own experience from the Ned Kelly project, theres a lot of luck that goes into such things when you are doing it on the side at a small scale without huge replications and grad students etc. LIke doing a backcross for example. In my experience, if you've got one plant for your mother and one for your father, the two plants NEVER bloom in the right sequence at the earliest part of the season when the best chance of getting a fruit to take occurs, so you need multiple plants of your mother and father plants so you can hope to have male and female blooms at the right moment. I've never even gotten a sniff of using a bridge species, but I bet there are a lot of areas where Murphy's Law can trip you up and set the whole project back a year, and usually we don't have the luxury of heated, lighted winter greenhouses like the research universities. At least I don't.
As far as moving naked to other species, I wonder if that is possible. It might be better to try and move the large seed phenotype over into pepo? Although, never having grown out the large seeded argyrosperma types yet, I don't even know how much of those big seeds are hull and how much are seed. I know that with the big fat brown maxima seeds, there is a whole lot of corky seed coat and a normal sized pumpkin seed deep inside it.
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Post by diane on Dec 20, 2017 13:32:28 GMT -5
the two plants NEVER bloom in the right sequence at the earliest part of the season when the best chance of getting a fruit to take occurs How long does squash pollen remain viable? |
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Post by oxbowfarm on Dec 20, 2017 14:02:29 GMT -5
How long does squash pollen remain viable? That's a great question, and I had no idea. I just googled it and found this article. Which basically says that squash pollen doesn't store worth crap no matter what you do. So the only thing you CAN do is harvest the male flowers a day before they shed pollen and keep them alive in the fridge till you need them. Which gives you at least a viable strategy for overlapping. I imagine there's a decent learning curve to keeping male squash flowers happy in a fridge, but at least its something. I just learned a new squash thing, thanks to diane |
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Day
gardener
When in doubt, grow it out.
Posts: 171
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Post by Day on Dec 20, 2017 14:55:00 GMT -5
I'm going to attempt to post this from my phone, so bear with me, this could look ugly haha. I won't even attempt to quote. troppo - orange flesh spaghetti squash sounds really interesting! I definitely haven't seen that before. walt - oh, I read that report too... I saved it on my home comp; I'll look it up when I'm home. On the subject of importing the naked gene to other varieties, check report 37 under squash, and scroll to the description of the naked seed, you'll notice it also lists moschata as possessing the gene. cuke.hort.ncsu.edu/cgc/cgcgenes/genelists.html I haven't done any further research on it, but very interesting! We should see if anyone on the forum is growing those large seeded agyros and wouldn't mind doing a little dissection for us xD |
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Post by oxbowfarm on Dec 20, 2017 20:03:05 GMT -5
So following some links around papers from the link Day posted above, I found a DOI for Chapter 16 of a book called "Oil Crops". The chapter is so-written by Brent Loy of UNH, Tamas Lelley of the University of Natural Resources and Life Science Vienna, and Michael Murkovic of Graz University of Technology. The Chapter is titled "Hull-less Oil Seed Pumpkin". You have to look it up on Sci-hub, but the it is DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-77594-4_16 talk about a deep dive into a niche topic. Just from my initial reading, it looks like my understanding of the genetics of naked seeded-ness is wrong, and I threw away a lot of potentially useful cultivars here. From what I'm reading, fully 1/4 of these were probably homozygous for naked seeds, but not the modifier genes making them 100% naked. I'd say Ned Kelly isn't even close to 100% naked now, much grayer in color than a dark green/brown of a true type 4 naked seed. So with my quick and dirty chew test I was tossing useful breeding lines. Oh well. This means its a lot easier for Day to find at least MOSTLY hulless strains without too many plants. |
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Day
gardener
When in doubt, grow it out.
Posts: 171
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Post by Day on Dec 20, 2017 20:46:38 GMT -5
So following some links around papers from the link Day posted above, I found a DOI for Chapter 16 of a book called "Oil Crops". The chapter is so-written by Brent Loy of UNH, Tamas Lelley of the University of Natural Resources and Life Science Vienna, and Michael Murkovic of Graz University of Technology. The Chapter is titled "Hull-less Oil Seed Pumpkin". You have to look it up on Sci-hub, but the it is DOI 10.1007/978-0-387-77594-4_16 Wow, fantastic! Nice work. Heading out to dinner, but that will definitely be the first thing I read when I get back. Here's a quick link, for my future reference purposes: www.researchgate.net/publication/227184866_Hull-Less_Oil_Seed_Pumpkin How difficult would it be to salvage Ned Kelly? Could a possible backcross to LG for one generation, as you suggested to me for the possible naked howden project, restore the necessary modifiers without risking too much loss in taste? |
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Post by troppo on Dec 20, 2017 23:19:45 GMT -5
troppo - orange flesh spaghetti squash sounds really interesting! I definitely haven't seen that before. I've been trying to cross orange-fleshed C.pepo squash with spag squash. So far I've used Winter Luxury and have selected 2 really nice F2's but I cant seem to find a C.pepo with deeper flesh colour. Sorry dont want to hijack your thread. |
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Day
gardener
When in doubt, grow it out.
Posts: 171
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Post by Day on Dec 21, 2017 13:20:36 GMT -5
troppo - No worries all good, you're totally fine. This isn't really a structured project yet, more of a casual chat/plotting thread for future shenanigans in the pepo species xD I'll keep my eye open for really orange flesh pepo varieties when I buy my seeds in January/ I'll be sure to let you know if I find any.
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Post by reed on Dec 21, 2017 14:06:33 GMT -5
Isn't acorn squash a pepo? I have one that has bush habit, it's nicely orange and very good flavor. I haven't saved seeds cause the flesh is so very thin, it's mostly just a shell full of seeds which I didn't see a lot of value in.
Anyway I have a couple still in storage, when we eat them I'll keep the seeds in case anyone thinks they could be of use in these projects.
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Post by walt on Dec 21, 2017 15:14:21 GMT -5
I'm going to attempt to post this from my phone, so bear with me, this could look ugly haha. I won't even attempt to quote. troppo - orange flesh spaghetti squash sounds really interesting! I definitely haven't seen that before. walt - oh, I read that report too... I saved it on my home comp; I'll look it up when I'm home. On the subject of importing the naked gene to other varieties, check report 37 under squash, and scroll to the description of the naked seed, you'll notice it also lists moschata as possessing the gene. cuke.hort.ncsu.edu/cgc/cgcgenes/genelists.html I haven't done any further research on it, but very interesting! We should see if anyone on the forum is growing those large seeded agyros and wouldn't mind doing a little dissection for us xD Grew some of them about 15 years ago. Three or four kinds. The actual kernals were bigger. But the species didn't do well under my conditions. I never tried them again. So why did I recommend something that didn't do well for me? I guess they must do well somewhere. |
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