|
|
Post by keen101 (Biolumo / Andrew B.) on Aug 17, 2016 12:14:30 GMT -5
looking good! Up until this last week or two it's been a rough summer for my melons and watermelons, but they are setting fruit and growing now. I don't know if i will get any good ones to eat, but i'm hopeful that i will at least get some to replenish my seed. But there is some time still yet, we will just have to wait and see.
|
|
|
|
Post by notonari on Aug 17, 2016 13:13:35 GMT -5
My watermelons didn't really do anything, I have one tiny fruit that doesn't seem to be growing anymore.
The Blenheim Orange produced some nice fruits but they're not very big, maybe 10-15cm. We'll see if they manage to ripen.
|
|
|
|
Post by glenn10 on Aug 17, 2016 19:06:10 GMT -5
|
|
|
|
Post by philagardener on Aug 17, 2016 19:54:12 GMT -5
Looking great! Not taking any chances with slugs there  |
|
|
|
Post by glenn10 on Aug 17, 2016 20:13:56 GMT -5
Us Canucks have very little slug issues LOL
|
|
|
|
Post by steev on Aug 18, 2016 1:19:23 GMT -5
Do all your melons produce those Molson cans? Do they ripen properly, or are they blanks?
|
|
|
|
Post by ferdzy on Aug 18, 2016 16:25:48 GMT -5
Us Canucks have very little slug issues LOL Speak for yourself! Our slugs are epic. Also found a li'l green worm doing damage to my largest and earliest watermelon a day or so ago. |
|
|
|
Post by philip on Aug 19, 2016 10:25:06 GMT -5
I was pondering over my melon breeding efforts this morning, when i thought that if only i had been clever enough to label which seed bag gave rise to which plant i could have known from which bag of seed my last year's super Blenheim Orange x whatever came from.
I had adopted the habit from the start to bag all seeds from each of the fruits separately, but always labelled them according to the mother variety. But i hadn't gone through the trouble of keeping track which plant came from which bag of seeds.
So my best plant last year, Blenheim orange that had crossed with Something else, made 15 ripe, super tasty melons of which i saved the seeds of about 10 different fruits. So now i have 10 seed bags of BO1, BO2 and so forth... But then i go and mass sow them all and i don't keep track of which plant came from which seed bag. This is something i first came across whilst reading a post by Soeren Holt who refered to Carol Deppe calling it Power Breeding, but i read Carol's book and i can't remember that part. Anyway, if you grow melons on a large scale like Joseph there is no way you could label all seeds from each fruit separately and then record the seeds all your plants were grown from. It would just be way too much work and if you grow so many plants you always have lucky combinations due to the sheer numbers.
But if you only grow 5 - 20 melon plants this type of power breeding is the way to go. Had i done it, i would know now from which seeds my great plant came from last year and i could have sown loads of those. It makes the whole breeding project so much more efficient.
But this leads me directly to a question i have:
In an open pollinated landrace situation different fruits of the same plant can be pollinated by different male pollen, of course. What about the seeds from one single melon fruit? Are they all pollinated by the same male parent or can the pollen of several different plants contribute genes to the seeds of one and the same fruit? |
|
|
|
Post by philip on Aug 19, 2016 10:59:22 GMT -5
The differences between plants can be amazing. These are two plants in my plot growing side by side. They both came from the mass sowing of 10 of last year's BO seed bags and 4 BO seed bags of the year before. The plant on the right has 5 decent size melons and the one on the left has no fruit whatsoever. But the two plants are roughly the same size and flowered at the same time.
The plant on the left with 0 fruit:
The plant on the right with 5 nice melons. This is my best plant this year and most closely resembles last years 15+ fruit plant which was much bigger and i had actually removed 4 to 5 melons cause i thought it's not possible that one plant can have so much fruit and it went on to make 15 super tasty melons. I am just hoping these melons will ripen and that they will taste good.
|
|
|
|
Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Aug 19, 2016 11:00:24 GMT -5
The seeds in a single fruit all have the same mother, but they can have many different fathers... It's easy for me to plant "sibling-groups". A sibling group is a group of seeds that all have the same mother. So that would be seeds from a single fruit, or from a single plant... They are a mix of full-siblings and half-siblings. I often save seeds as sibling groups. When I plant the seeds, I'll plant the siblings together in a short row... It becomes easy to see the strengths or weaknesses of particular mothers. So for me what that looks like, is I'll plant about 7 seeds per mother, skip a few feet in the row, then plant 7 seeds from the next mother. With melons, I might plant one sibling group per hill. I don't keep records when I plant the sibling groups, but the strengths and weaknesses of the mother often jumps out at me... For example, one year in the corn patch, an entire sibling group fell over in a wind storm. Almost nothing else did. So it was easy to cull that sibling group. It's easy to notice sibling groups that grow much more robustly than the others. Saving muskmelon seed as sibling groups.  I save and replant about 10 to 20 sibling groups of muskmelon seeds per year. Things that were notable for some reason or other: The earliest fruits. The tastiest. Interesting shapes, colors, or textures. Then when I'm planting, I plant 7 to 11 seeds of each, skip a few feet in the row, then plant the next packet. Then I finish off the patch with bulk seed. |
|
|
|
Post by philip on Aug 19, 2016 11:14:20 GMT -5
Ok, there's my question answered. I guess that makes power breeding a tad more difficult, but the idea of sibling planting is intriguing. I was already doing that in terms of seed saving but didn't follow it through while planting. Since you can't know who the fathers are the only point of reference are the mothers and their characteristics become obvious through observation of the sibling patch. Hmm food for thought... |
|
|
|
Post by glenn10 on Aug 20, 2016 9:23:47 GMT -5
Here are this years first melons. The muskmelon was good, the canary style was the texture of mashed potatoes(not whipped LOL) and tasted like mildly sweet cucumber. Still edible though, my father in law ate it and said it was good.   |
|
|
|
Post by philip on Aug 22, 2016 14:39:45 GMT -5
Glenn10 : Congratulations, that's very early for ripe melons. Last year i only had my first ones around the 10 th of september, i think
notonari : I totally got it wrong. I went out and mesured my melons. The longest one is 13 cm long and 9 cm wide. Most are around 10 cm. I don't know how i thought they were 20 cm long. Maybe they were bigger last year or smaller things seem bigger when you get older :-) |
|
|
|
Post by toad on Aug 29, 2016 13:59:30 GMT -5
Power breeding: I might have mixed up "Power selection" and "Power inbreeding" from Carol Deppes book.
|
|
|
|
Post by glenn10 on Aug 31, 2016 5:41:47 GMT -5
|
|
