Red Marble Onions

[ferdzy]

We bought these last year and then when it came time to plant them out we realized we had way too many onions to fit. So we plonked them in the "lawn" where there had been a big pile of manure the year before, and which was still "bald", along with 2 other varieties of onion. Then they were engulfed in weeds and forgotten until this spring, when they came up and flowered.

We left them all to flower, and I intend to gather the seeds when they are ripe. Presumably the red marble has crossed with the other 2 varieties so who knows exactly what we will get, but onions presumably.

I did check for pollen, being mindful of the CMS problem. As far as I could tell, all three varieties had all parts present and accounted for.

So, at last, I get to my question... I looked Red Marble up and a couple of places describe it as an F1 hybrid! I didn't know that, or I wouldn't have bought it. Most sellers don't describe it as OP or F1. Does anyone know if it is, in fact an F1? Or anything else about Red marble? Anyone grown it? Because they got forgotten in the ex-manure pile we haven't even tried them.

[Joseph Lofthouse]

I see seed catalogs describing "Red Marble Onion" as either F1 or as Open Pollinated. For all I know, the phrase is a generic term that means small red flat onion, and the seed companies substitute germplasm on a whim. It would certainly be easy enough to take an open pollinated red marble onion and backcross it onto a sterile cytoplasm and call it a hybrid.

I grew onion for seed this year that were supposedly F1 hybrids, in an isolated field with no pollen source anywhere nearby, and they look perfectly normal. I think that the seed company didn't really sell me hybrids even though they said that they did.

[ferdzy]

Joseph, I've heard of seed companies selling things as hybrid, that weren't, in the hopes of discouraging their customers from growing them out. Or possibly, there is still the odd F1 onion hybrid out there that doesn't have CMS. Or since one onion seed looks an awful lot like another onion seed, maybe somebody mislabelled the bins. Who knows?

Well there is no point my stressing about it. These are going to be "Surprise!" onions anyway, given their mongrel pedigree. Hopefully there is some interesting stuff there; who knows.

[paquebot]

Red Marble Cippolini is a hybrid. Although a number of companies do not note that in their description, I have not seen one which claims that it is a fixed variety.

Martin