North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

[Jwlehman@aol.com]

In a message dated 1/11/2005 7:50:45 AM US Eastern Standard Time, jfruth@uslink.net writes:

>   For those talking about attempting to grow items one zone colder than
> recommended for any species, listen up.  That's what I do and here's how I
> do it:  At least one seed out of 1,000 should produce a plant that will
> thrive in one zone colder.  And, at least one seed in 100,000 should produce
> a plant that will thrive in a two zones colder climate.
>   I produced/invented the Pequot Black Raspberry, a zone 3 plant, from
> hundreds of thousands of zone 5 black raspberry seeds.
>
> Jim Fruth
> Pequot Lakes, MN  

 

Hello all,

I'm not a trained geneticist or even Master Gardener. But I'm not sure I agree with the above in it's entirety over a broad spectrum of plant species. Also some plant species would be more homozygous reducing the likely hood of a specie's variability.   But I say go for it, try it and good luck. After all don't tell the bumble bee that speaking from an engineering point of view he can't fly.  

I've also been reading of the search for a huge amount of sweet cherry seeds looking to find a seedling more suited to northern growing to extend the growing range.

Go for ity, the advise I'd like to add is don't get all your seeds from one source, if possible. In all likely hood a single source supplier would have one, two or maybe three different seed parents from which all those seeds would be coming from, limiting the gene pool. You should collect seed from as many different parents as possible, especially those with characteristics nearly what you are looking for. Look for sources that have the greatest number of varieties within the orchard from which they came for maximum recombination variations of available genes.  I understand that finding one supplier is difficult, let alone several. :-) 

Jerry Lehman