Messing around with lettuce

[12540dumont]

Ox, those are beautiful. This will be my last week for lettuce, it's all going to bolt, so I'm replanting.

This is Lieven's lettuce. NOTE: no bug holes! Alas, the gophers have eaten almost everyone. This was a 25 foot row that I was going to let go to seed. Now, I guess I'll just eat them.

Lieven...how you coming with that seed company? I need to order lettuce! So I can play lettuce bingo with Oxbow and Galina.

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[galina]

I love the term lettuce bingo!

Quick update here on the F3 grow out. Austrian Greenleaf x Grandpa Admires was the original cross. AG very frilly and convoluted leaf shape, light green - GA broad green leaves, round, rumpled with red margins and blotches. Easy to spot the parentage, because I have not grown another lettuce with the leaf shape of AG and the original cross showed up in the GA bed. This was the F1 parent lettuce of the experiment here.

In the F2 generation I had a merry mix, including many lettuces that were romaine (cos lettuce) shaped. This year I followed up only one lettuce, the largest, prettiest convoluted, frilly lettuce that was the last of the F2s to flower.

I expected all the F3s to be convoluted and frilly, like the F2 plant I had taken seed from. The result is far from it! About half are the cos/romaine lettuce shape, none the Grandpa Admires shape, the other half are the expected convoluted shape, either plain green or with red. My lettuce bed is not large enough for valid statistical analysis. However it is interesting that the new leaf shape that happened in the F2 generation - (the cos/romaine leaf shape) - is still coming through strongly in the F3 generation. The lettuces with the cos/romaine shape are mostly stretching now and getting ready to flower, most of the convoluted shapes are still not showing any signs of flowering. This is similar to what the different leaf shapes did in the F2 generation.

There is one of the frilly types that looks most like the F2 parent, which I will save seeds from. And another that is a beautiful cos/romaine type with a lot of red in it, but the leaves are a little wider than the standard /cos romaine and quite rumpled or quilted looking.

Looking forward to hearing other F3 reports.

PS: The thinking that the basic new variety after a cross is more or less fixed in the F2 generation is clearly not true for lettuce. And it was not true for my bean experiment either (pity, because the near white bean I had in the F2 generation never came back in the F3!). But this should really be a different post. :-)