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Post by MikeH on May 24, 2014 3:06:52 GMT -5
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on May 24, 2014 17:59:13 GMT -5
A few weeks ago I planted about 25 sunroot seeds that were from a commercial clone that I think was pollinated by wild sunroot pollen. So far 2 of them have germinated. They are in the greenhouse, so I expect to transplant them in a few weeks into the garden.
I also planted second generation seeds from the feral population into the garden. The parents were selected from among the best growing, most productive, and most agronomically pleasing parents of a feral population and then allowed to cross pollinate. The ones I selected as parents are still feral, but they are somewhat more useful than what I started with.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 25, 2014 1:21:09 GMT -5
A few weeks ago I planted about 25 sunroot seeds that were from a commercial clone that I think was pollinated by wild sunroot pollen. So far 2 of them have germinated. They are in the greenhouse, so I expect to transplant them in a few weeks into the garden. I selected the 8 quickest growing and most robust seedlings for transplant into the garden. I harvested the plants today. One of the plants didn't produce any tubers. Two plants produced a few small tubers. One plant looked wilted the whole growing season. I discarded those plants. I kept the tubers from 5 plants. As a recap: The mother plant was the commercial clone (on the right) in the following photo. The pollen donors were probably feral sunroots (on the left). The 4 best of about 29 seed-grown feral plants were inter-planted with the commercial clone.  The children of the cross looked like this: 2014-1. The most robustly growing seedling. The most productive plant. Short stolons and tubers grew near the surface of the soil making it the easiest to dig. The most like the commercial clone. Knobby tubers make cleaning harder.  And a closeup of the tubers.  2014-4. Long stolons that produced deeply buried tubers. Hard to dig in my hard clay soil. Most of the tubers got damaged during digging. Flowers were notably larger than typical. This plant produced an abundance of seed! The seed was somewhat immature when harvested, but I tilled my fields today, so I collected what I could get. I've started entertaining fantasies about "abundantly seeded" sunroots. Reminds me of the fantasies I was entertaining 5 years ago about "abundantly fruiting" potatoes.  2014-6. Short stolons producing easy to dig tubers. Not all that productive, but better than the best of the feral clones. This plant had red leaves! The commercial clone and the feral sunroots didn't display that trait.  2014-7. Long stolons, but shallow so OK to dig even though digging requires about 9 times more area. That would translate to 9 times more labor at harvest time for less total harvest, so not ideal. The tubers sure are pretty though, and not knobby so easy to clean & slice.  2014-8. Short stolons. Not very productive. Red leaves.  Culled: This is similar in productivity to the feral variety.  2014-6. Showy red leaves.  I planted tubers from the 4 best plants in a row next to the commercial clone. Sunroots are winter hardy in my garden so I expect a great patch of sunroots next year. And five terribly weedy patches where I have worked on this project in past years. Because I am doing a breeding project I need to move the bed every year so that I can distinguish new plants from old weeds. |
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Post by philagardener on Oct 25, 2014 14:13:47 GMT -5
Very pretty and lots of diversity there! Were the leaves on those clones red all season or just in the Fall?
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 25, 2014 18:57:50 GMT -5
The reddish leaves were a fall-only trait. The plants had red-stems the whole growing season, but so did other plants that formed typical yellow leaves.
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Post by darrenabbey on Nov 18, 2014 21:28:28 GMT -5
Two years ago, I attempted a cross of a commercial JA (H. tuberosus) with H. annuus "Russian Mammoth" and recovered some 70 seeds. The goal of the project is to combine the giant-growth phenotype from "Russian Mammoth" with the tuber-production phenotype from JA.
I grew three plants which turned out to be hybrid this year. The three plants were highly divergent, ranging in size from 5ft to 10+ft. All had very red stems (and reddening leaves on one at end of season), while neither parent had red stems. One of the plants produced one tuber, as well as a secondary growth from the main root crown. I attempted to harvest seeds too early, finding immature and soft seeds filling each flower head, except in two of the flowers of the least interesting hybrid (which had many flowers, but was short and had no tubers).
I've previously kept JA tubers alive in this condition [in a fridge, with moisture] for 1.5 years before replanting. I'm storing the root crowns and tuber in a fridge over the winter, as survival of the hybrids in-ground here is questionable. I should be able to get F2 seeds from the more interesting hybrids next year.
I also collected seeds from local wild H. tuberosus this year. These plants did seem to produce pollen, but it took dissecting several heads before I found developing and mature seeds.
I could totally see your wildly-fertile JA being derived from a cross with H. annuus. Counting chromosomes, or some more detailed technique, would be needed to test the theory.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Nov 18, 2014 22:11:33 GMT -5
darrenabbey: Thanks for the grow report. Sounds like a wonderful project. I'm looking forward to progress reports in the coming years. I don't look any further afield than bird predation and self incompatibility of clones to explain the lack of seeds that people generally observe in sunroots. To add to my previous report. Last night I stopped by to visit a gardener in my village because he said he had something for me... He gave me sunroot tubers and seed heads. I had shared half of my F1 seed with him of the cross: [Commercial clone X feral sunroots]. He grew them out and returned a portion. The tubers looked about the same as what I collected. I retrieved about 35 F2 seeds. My ground is frozen, so I suppose that I get to store the tubers in the fridge until spring.
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Post by darrenabbey on Nov 18, 2014 22:21:17 GMT -5
My ground is frozen, so I suppose that I get to store the tubers in the fridge until spring. The technique which worked for me is to store them in a sealed ziplock bag, with some moisture added with the tubers. Those kept exposed in the fridge will dry out rapidly. |
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Post by starry on Nov 19, 2014 8:34:09 GMT -5
Two years ago, I attempted a cross of a commercial JA (H. tuberosus) with H. annuus "Russian Mammoth" and recovered some 70 seeds. The goal of the project is to combine the giant-growth phenotype from "Russian Mammoth" with the tuber-production phenotype from JA. . A few of us are working on a sunroot x sunflower hybrid breeding project. You can check it out here perrenial-food-crops.proboards.com/thread/17/sunroot-sunflower-crosses |
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Jul 12, 2015 18:30:15 GMT -5
I had given seed from the F1 cross to a collaborator. He grew it out last summer and gave me tubers. So I planted the tubers from his grow out in the next row over from mine. They all survived the winter fine, and are growing fine... F1 Sunroots:  Also, both of us collected seeds from our F1 tubers. I planted some of them and selected the best of the F2 plants for transplant into the field. Three have survived until now. F2 Sunroots:  I might also be inadvertently growing some of the [sunroot X annual sunflowers] that were mentioned in a previous post. I screened for some that may match that phenotype as seedlings, but last I checked I couldn't find them in the garden, so either they died, or I wasn't looking properly. By the way, I have a terrible sunroot-weed problem in the field where I have been conducting this project... |
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Oct 14, 2015 1:16:18 GMT -5
I opened a few of the F1 sunroot seed heads. They are full of seeds. I put pieces of floating row cover over some of them to protect them from predation by birds. The plants are about 10 feet tall. That's much taller than either parent.  |
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Post by billw on Oct 14, 2015 1:38:47 GMT -5
After several years of mostly natural selection (fall windstorms), my sunchokes don't get any taller than six feet and most are closer to five. Part of that may be climate as well, since none of them ever grew taller than about 8 feet even when the wind didn't cut them down. The trend seems to be toward shorter, bushier plants. This year a few plants topped out under 2 feet tall, which was a big surprise. I'll be very interested to see what the yield is like on the short plants.
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Post by littleminnie on Oct 15, 2015 21:12:55 GMT -5
Can I ask a couple questions. I haven't read this whole thread. I have mostly Red Fuseau. It seems to have overtaken the stampede I used to have. Today I had an old volunteer out of the garden I could tell was Stampede from years ago. I dug it and it was yellow but with the same shape as Fuseau; no longer stampede except for the color. ? Also I let sunflowers volunteer for years. They have become cocoa scented like the sunchokes. What's up with that? I want to bring the best sunchokes to my new house. Suggestions? The red are so hard to dig!
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Post by steev on Oct 16, 2015 0:52:12 GMT -5
Improve your soil to make roots easier to dig.
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Post by philagardener on Oct 16, 2015 7:08:48 GMT -5
Can I ask a couple questions. I haven't read this whole thread. I have mostly Red Fuseau. It seems to have overtaken the stampede I used to have. Today I had an old volunteer out of the garden I could tell was Stampede from years ago. I dug it and it was yellow but with the same shape as Fuseau; no longer stampede except for the color. ? Also I let sunflowers volunteer for years. They have become cocoa scented like the sunchokes. What's up with that? I want to bring the best sunchokes to my new house. Suggestions? The red are so hard to dig! , there is a white variety of Fuseau, so a somatic mutation may be responsible. Stampede is supposed to have knobbier tubers. Worth keeping! Sunflowers apparently are interfertile with JA so you might have had a cross (read back in this thread) - dig a few and see if they made any tubers! As for digging, is the problem that the Red Fuseau are forming tubers farther from the stalks? That's a trade off with this variety. |
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