North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Lon J. Rombough" <lonrom@hevanet.com>]

Title: Re: [NAFEX] selecting trifoliate

Actually, mutation breeding might be the faster way to go.  That would mean exposing seed to radiation or mutating chemicals, though.  The way to go is to find out what the LD50 for the seed would be (how much mutation would kill half of them), then see if a university in your area has a radiation source to expose them.  I saw this done with cuttings of Perlette grapes at the Univerisity of California at Davis, as part of a program to get a sport of Perlette with looser clusters than the original.  If you contact the horticulture department of the university, they may be able to help you, and if you are really lucky, you can sometimes get your lot of seed in with someone else's experiment, which can go a long way to keeping the fee low.
    And before anyone thinks otherwise, this is NOT genetic engineering.  Mutations occur in Nature due to things like natural radiation.  This is simply a means of speeding up the process.  And the seed is NOT radioactive when it comes out.  
    With luck, there may be some seedlings with sweeter or less resinous fruit.  There will definitely be a lot with odd growth habits - variegated leaves, dwarf growth habit, twisted growth habit (like Flying Dragon), etc.
-Lon Rombough
Grapes, writing, consulting, my book, The Grape Grower, at http://www.bunchgrapes.com
Winner of the Garden Writers Association "Best Talent in Writing" award for 2003 


> If breeding trifoliate with palatable citrus results in loss of
> hardiness, then the approach to take would be selecting and hybridizing
> only trifoliate plants then?  
>
> There is a trifoliate in the neighborhood here that I eat the fruit from
> for amusement a few times a year.  The flavor is tolerable, the seeds 
> multitudinous and the resin aggravating.  Possibly many generations of
> breeding could produce a success story similar to the develoment of
> apples and asian persimmons...
> At any rate, i have started some seedlings and we'll see what
> happens...perhaps a sport that tastes like a King mandarin. ;-)