andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Dec 26, 2017 12:53:08 GMT -5
I've got some. PM on the way.
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Dec 25, 2017 23:36:49 GMT -5
nicollas any updates on this project? I just received some P. polystachios in trade and am planning to attempt crosses between it and P. acutifolius and P. coccineus this winter. By the way, thanks for posting all the links to / snippets from the papers you found.
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Dec 19, 2017 2:05:17 GMT -5
Day, for purely practical reasons, why not grow the smallest bush plants you can? That way you could keep the population size up and avoid having to spread each generation over several years.
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Dec 18, 2017 1:08:49 GMT -5
Day Welcome back! How's the growing-things going? Any good successes on your projects this last growing season?
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Dec 13, 2017 22:51:04 GMT -5
I'm going to make a first attempt with selfed pollen from a stigma on the same plant tonight. I'm guessing it'll take some experimentation to figure out all the details of the procedure, and figuring out exactly how to dissect the flower is one of the first steps. I won't have any tepary pollen to work with for at least a few weeks.
Any info you can find out about pollen germination media would be greatly appreciated. I'll definitely post updates when I have results to report.
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Dec 11, 2017 23:20:05 GMT -5
steve1 Thanks. I'm really having fun with the project(s) and I like the mix of success, near-success, and failures I'm having. Keeps it interesting. That's a really good suggestion about applying pre-germinated pollen to cut styles. What I'm seeing with crosses using tepary pollen is completely consistent with poor pollen germination or slow/short pollen tube growth. I just did a few minutes of googling and came up with a paper talking about in-vitro peanut pollen germination. All of the chemicals appear to be readily available, so why not? No sterile technique required!
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Dec 11, 2017 22:16:51 GMT -5
i noticed that book mentions bean-pea hybrids on page 46!!! They also proposed launching seeds on ballistic missiles to do mutation breeding! It must have been interesting doing cutting-edge plant breeding during the heyday of the USSR.
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Dec 10, 2017 1:13:29 GMT -5
I've continued crossing and back-crossing common and runner beans, and have continued trying to cross these plants with tepary beans. I've got a fair number of different little projects going on, so I'll give a brief description of each.
Bush Runner Bean I have a (GGC x MolR) x GGC plant growing alongside a MolR plant and have attempted 12 crosses so far, with another one every few days. There are a few pods set, with the oldest at 14 days. This is my third attempt to get a runner / common cross with runner bean cytoplasm, with the other two failing. I planted another (GGC x MolR) x GGC and a MolR a couple weeks ago, so I think I have a pretty good chance of getting at least one seed. Aside from trying to move the bush trait to a runner bean, I'm hoping that I'll be able to use this line to make crosses from pure common beans without having to do the long process of crossing / back-crossing / cross with a runner seed parent.
Tepary Wide Cross Last winter, I had some (FPVC x MolR) x FPVC plants with extra flowers, so I tried pollinating them with tepary pollen. I got a shocking (and suspicious) 8 mature bean seeds. The first three that I grew out were definitely not real crosses. I have four more seeds planted and one seed left in storage that I'll grow out sometime later.
My guess was that my emasculation procedure wasn't perfect. I confirmed this guess by emasculating some flowers and then either pollinating or not pollinating the flowers based on a coin toss. Some of the "emasculated" flowers produced pods and mature beans. I repeated the experiment but with buds two days from flowering, and with an alcohol dip for my tweezers between emasculations, and didn't get any pods set. I was doing my crosses in the evening and I think that some pollen had already been released. I think I also spread that pollen between flowers by not sterilizing my tweezers.
So, I'm now doing an alcohol dip before starting to work on each new flower. I also switched my grow lights so they turn on at 7:00 in the evening. Since I'm making the crosses shortly after my kids are in bed for the night, I'll end up doing them in the plants' morning. I'll repeat the emasculation test to see if this is good enough.
If the seeds I recently planted aren't tepary crosses, I'm planning to discard them and plant...
Greasy Runner Bean I made some White Greasy Bean (WGrC) x MolR crosses this summer and have some seeds to work with. The goal is to breed a runner bean for use as a green bean that has smoother, less hairy pods. I'm also hoping that the WGrC doesn't have that anthocyanin gene. If they don't have the gene, I'm planning to use them in...
Non-antho Common Cytoplasm Line One of the plants that I was hoping had a tepary parent turned out to not have any anthocyanins. I saved some seeds from it and plan to use it in a congruent back-cross line that I'll use for a bunch of crossing attempts with teparies that have an antho gene. That way, I can use antho as a marker to confirm any cross that ends up being successful.
Blue Speckled Tepary x Menager's Dam Brown Tepary I had these two varieties growing and no other flowers, so I made a bunch of crosses and ended up with 20+ seeds. I'm growing out two plants and plan to let them self. They both have antho, so I've confirmed that they were good crosses. I'm planning to offer these F2 seeds for trade in a few month, along with a bunch of the F1 seeds.
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Oaks
Dec 8, 2017 22:51:03 GMT -5
Post by andyb on Dec 8, 2017 22:51:03 GMT -5
william I was thinking about oaks in Montana and remembered that I knew of one and only one house that had oak trees in front of it when I was a kid growing up in Helena. They're probably still there, just a few blocks from my parents' house. Since they're in the strip between the sidewalk and the street, it would probably be fine to pick up a few acorns when they're in season. If they survived for 40+ years in Helena, they must be pretty cold-tolerant. Let me know if you'd like me to ask my parents to check them out when they're on one of their evening walks.
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Oaks
Dec 6, 2017 22:46:02 GMT -5
Post by andyb on Dec 6, 2017 22:46:02 GMT -5
I cold-leached some coarsely ground acorn flour one time. I put it in a jar, filled it with water, let it sit for a few hours, then drained and repeated the process until most of the tannins were gone. I dried it out to a doughy texture and cooked it sort of like you cook corn tortillas, in a dry pan.
It was one of the most delicious wild foods I've ever tasted, but it was so much work that I haven't ever done it again.
I have no idea what kind of oak it was; something growing in the landscaping outside a bank in Tucson, AZ.
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Dec 2, 2017 0:17:25 GMT -5
A thumbs-up to billw's and keen101's comments above.
I refuse to use FB and deleted my account several years ago.
As for proboards, I have no loyalty but I do appreciate some things about them. First, I like it that we can have a discussion like this without some super-moderator coming in and squelching it. The forum is also almost always available, with almost no downtime for technical or server or whatever other issues that may bring down a web site. They must have some pretty good system administrators. I also think the user interface is perfectly adequate except for the picture thing. It's also free, which is nice.
For downsides, I think the biggest one for me is that everything we post here is owned by proboards. That's why they can get away with preventing web site scraping. Having the full history of posts in one basket doesn't seem very robust. If they go out of business or their server farm burns down or any of a bunch of different bad things happen, the whole forum could disappear overnight. The picture thing is also totally annoying. It's annoying that we can't post them directly and it's annoying that old threads have stale links to images that are now behind paywalls. Storage is really cheap nowadays, at less than 0.03USD/gigabyte.
So, I'd have no problem switching over to a new forum if it's done well and if there's a consensus that we're all going to switch, particularly if I could have a copy of the entire forum downloaded as a backup.
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Nov 28, 2017 22:51:47 GMT -5
I'm actually already setting for indoor growing and I'm comfortable with making Phaseolus crosses. My biggest problem is time to do all those crosses. Growing P. polystachios might be another but I can't say atm. How successful are your crosses with P. acutifolius? Oh, that's awesome! So glad to meet someone else who's making bean crosses! Are you doing full emasculations or fertile x fertile crosses? It does take quite a bit of time. I find that if I'm doing any more that about 7 crosses in an evening, it's just too much. The record keeping takes a lot of time, too. I haven't had any success with the P. acutifolius crosses yet. My current strategy is to work on several different projects, trying to transfer various traits from common beans to runner beans, while having a tepary plant or two growing at the same time. Whenever I have extra flowers on a plant from a common / runner project, I attempt some crosses with a tepary. I'm hoping that I'll get lucky someday and come across a plant from a complex common / runner cross that can grow a mature seed from a tepary cross without having to resort to embryo rescue.
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Nov 28, 2017 0:21:54 GMT -5
Nice to have another runner bean grower on the forum!
I googled seed companies in Estonia and came up with Seemnemailm. I don't know anything about them, good or bad, but they have a runner bean mix and another white-seeded variety. If they're growing their own seed for the mix, which seems possible, the genetics should be pretty mixed up. Even if they aren't, if you grow them together and get mature seeds, some of them should be crossed.
I've found bulk runner beans in Italian or other specialty grocery stores. They're often called buffalo beans or something like that, and are usually white. Sometimes white runner beans are also sold for eating as butter beans. Some butter beans are lima beans, though, so you'd have to grow them out or try to figure them out by seed shape.
If you're having trouble getting mature seeds from plants grown in your garden, you might want to try to grow them indoors under artificial lights. I've had quite a bit of success with this, just growing them under shop lights in my basement. The flowers need to be triggered (moving the stigma around by pulling gently on the wings) for the pods to set. If you learn to trigger the flowers, it's relatively easy to do manual fertile x fertile crosses, so you could get some F2 seeds in two generations.
If you want to make crosses with P. polystachios, growing the plants indoors and learning to make P. coccineus x P. coccineus crosses first might be a good idea. That's been my approach when attempting interspecific P. vulgaris, P. coccineus, and P. acutifolius crosses.
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Nov 14, 2017 18:49:03 GMT -5
I just picked up my copy of "Wide Hybridization of Plants", on interlibrary loan from the University of Idaho. Fun stuff!
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andyb
gardener
Posts: 179
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Post by andyb on Nov 14, 2017 18:41:41 GMT -5
Do most people in your area get feed from the same place?
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