Morning Glories: Becky's garden - Summer 2010, 1 by beckygardener

beckygardener wrote:
One of the most valuable things shared here in the MG Forum community is the valuable posts full of questions, information, and photos. Truly outstanding! This forum has a wonderful sticky thread for everyone to read and reference any time. Many, many people’s posts and work have contributed to that thread! There is so much information in that thread that it literally boggles my mind to read through it!

I don’t have a Bachelor or Masters Degree in Botany or Entomology. I wished I did! When I read some of the posts, internet links, and discussions relating to topics in the sticky as well as some of the other posts on this forum, I do my best to try to fully understand the information. But I must confess that some of it goes right over my head ! And sometimes I am not quite clear about written instructions. I just happen to need a little extra information such as a photo or video. Which is why I posted the links to gardener2005’s hand-pollination and Yoneda’s website page above in a previous post. Great visual cues for me to fully understand details. A picture speaks a 1000 words, as they say, and I have to agree! :-)

I appreciate the fact that gardener2005 went the extra mile to actually take step by step photos. I suppose anyone could have done that, but only she did. I’ve since tried to do the same for others. I appreciate the effort made on behalf of those of us who need that extra bit of helpful information.

I really like Yoneda’s website and his online book, so if you have not had the chance to really look through it, I encourage you to check it out! It holds a wealth of information. There are many other sites, too! But Yoneda’s is one that I refer to over and over again. It seems to be written in layman’s terms that I can easily understand. http://protist.i.hosei.ac.jp/Asagao/Yoneda_DB/E/menu.html

I don’t know about other people, but I am a hands-on learner. I can read about other people’s experiences or experiments, but it often doesn’t really stick with me until I actually do it myself. I learn best by doing! And I've learned a lot since first coming onboard here several years ago!

I’ve been growing out seeds from trades for a number of years. Sometimes I get exactly what I was expecting per the traders/sellers photos and other times I get something that makes me wonder where the seeds really came from. I will admit that many times I figured the person either mixed up the seeds or mislabeled them. But in most cases, I now suspect that the seeds were F2 seeds of crosses that didn’t exhibit/carry the same dominate genes as the F1 vine.

Gardener2005 recently shared with me from her own experimenting. She stated that in her own grow-outs that the F2 seeds that are a cross of a speckled bloom and a solid color bloom will yield roughly a 10% occurance of a speckled one, so I should start a lot of seeds and pick through the vines as they bloomed. I was thinking about that ... out of 10 seeds, maybe only 1 is speckled or out of 20 seeds, 2 are speckled? Hmmmm ... the odds of F2 being true are not as great as the F1 seeds. So that means that many of the crosses I share with folks here will most likely not grow true to the F1 I grew. That explained to me why a “hybrid” is so different than a “cross“.

I don’t know how many other folks here have ever tried to create a hybrid. Gardener2005 was the only one I know of on the MG Forum who did and actually shared her info about it. I falsely assumed that once I crossed two MG blooms, I created a brand new cultivar. Geez was I ever wrong! And I was totally surprised when folks I traded with got something quite different. I KNEW I labeled the seeds correctly, as I am meticulous about collecting seeds and bagging them by vine cultivar name. I had no idea what was going on until Gardener2005 told me. Was she the only one who knew this because of her own experimenting and efforts to create a hybrid? Which is why I am sharing this information with folks here on the forum now. I didn’t know and I wondered how many others didn’t either.I hope this information is as helpful to you as it has been to me! It’s been quite an education.

So now I am wondering if I will get the same odds with the Blue Speckles seeds I am collecting? Might be a fun experiment to try as a grow-out! I also had a lot of partially sterile vines on my current grow-out and guess which vines I used pollen from to fertilize all these vines? LOL! Yes sir! I used Blue Speckles and Sidare who both produced pollen consistently. So my seeds this year may definitely NOT come true to the parent vine/blooms! Just warning y’all! :-)

Maybe they will exhibit solid blue blooms? Small blooms? Speckled blooms? Blizzard blooms? Rayed blooms? The wide range of possibilities are most interesting to me! And if I do the grow-outs and work to stabilize these genes, does anyone care? I have to wonder, if YOU put in the time, effort, and work to create your own hybrid, would you want your name listed as the hybridizer for it in places like PlantFiles? So that folks know who to contact for information or questions? Or even to get a little recognition for your work? Something to ponder ...

Here are some of the different blooms taken of my Blue Speckles vine. An interesting variety. Which sure has me wondering what the F2 vines will produce! :-)

This message was edited Jul 31, 2010 5:55 PM