Hi B. You have definitely done alot of hybridizing work! I am truely a newbie at it. I have had little experience with grapes. We had a beautiful arbor here which was destroyed on the Inagural Day Storm..the year Mr. Clinton was sworn in. Probably the worst windstorm in modern history for our area. The arbor had table grapes..a red, a purple and a white. Of those, we have kept one, but use it more as an ornamental, keeping the vines quite short. However on the south side of the house, we have a Lemberger grape given to us by a commercial grower of wine grapes in Prosser, WA. The wines made from this grape are very good, but we just grow it as an ornament on a trellis. It actually yields quite well, but it has alot of seed so we don't eat or juice it. I don't know much about growing/propagating vitis, but if you would like some cuttings I'd be happy to send some. It does suffer from mildew as the weather gets hotter in August/Sept. We trim out leaves to give it more air, etc. It is a lovely leaf. Your work in attempting to breed a disease resistant vitis is very appealing! It would be a huge, and important advance for viticulture. I would love to work with columbines to try and develop a variety with some resistence to leaf miner. There is a species Columbine that has shown some resistence to the pest, but I have yet to fine a source of the seed. They don't hurt the plants, so they say, but they certainly do blemish the otherwise beautiful leaves. Do you have a system of record keeping for your hybridizing work? I assume you do. I'm wondering if you could post it? I have notes scattered all over the place, and really do need a system! Great to hear from you. Keep us posted. By the way...my husband would love the Salmon Berry Raspberry x should you succeed at that. I hadn't even heard of Pluots! Sounds delicious! SAM

Hi t-a-t, "I know nothing about zinnias, other than that they exist." Zinnias are a fun flower to do experimental breeding with. They are composite annuals with a wide variation in colors, flower forms, and plant habits. And they are easy to cross, because their reproductive plant parts are relatively large and easily accessible. Their seeds are relatively large and easy to handle, they germinate quickly, and grow rapidly and bloom in two months or less from the time they are planted. Each bloom lasts for a relatively long time (about a month) and the plant keeps blooming throughout its lifespan (several months). You mentioned breeding daffodils in another message. Daffodils are interesting to breed, but you have to wait four years or more for a daffodil seed to grow into a blooming sized plant. Zinnias provide you with a much quicker reward, so that you can plant seeds that grow to bloom in six to eight weeks. Then you can cross poliinate your favorites, get viable green seeds in a few weeks, plant them and see the blooms of your crosses the same year, with time left to cross pollinate your hybrids to get seeds of hybrids of hybrids, ready to plant the following year. That would take eight to ten years with daffodils. I am not saying that you shouldn't grow and cross daffodils, just that you should consider also growing zinnias for breeding experiments. In Australia, now would be a good time to start planting some zinnia seeds in-ground. Think about it. Zinnias can give you almost instant gratification. And making hybrids between your hybrids is great fun. "Does your Thanksgiving zinnia have more flowers than the normal zinnia? Or does it have a whole lot less?" It had about a dozen blooms, which is typical of some zinnias, but not nearly as floriferous as some zinnias. I have had some zinnias based on the scabiosa flowered strain of zinnias that had upwards of a hundred blooms on a very well branched and re-branched plant. Zinnias can have many different plant habits. There are short varieties that have plants only 6 inches high, and other varieties with plants 4 feet or more in height. And pretty much anything in between. "1. How F1 hybrid seed is produced (say, for a farmer); " Two inbred (homozygous) strains are crossed to produce an F1 hybrid, which is heterozygous, with hybrid vigor and uniform. Farmers require seeds that produce uniform plants. "2. Why we can't produce our own seed from the plants that are grown from this seed. " You can produce your own seed in an F2 generation, but the production of F2 seed involves producing a pollen grain that contains a random recombination of genes from the parents of the F1 hybrid and an egg cell that also contains a different random recombination of genes from the F1 parents. So the combination of those random pollen grains with those random egg cells results in many different possibilities in the F2 children. Farmers would not like that at all, because their harvesting machines depend on crop uniformity. But the home grower can benefit greatly from those many new forms that appear in the F2 generation, and select favorites and reject the variants that don't appeal to the home grower. By making crosses between the favorites, the cycle of recombining genes to produce even newer forms continues. The degree of variation that can occur in the F2 generation is even greater when the original F1 cross was between individuals selected from different species -- interspecific crosses. The Whirligig zinnias were derived from crosses between two different zinnia species, Z. violacea and Z. haageana, so the Whirligigs are interesting to work with and cross with other zinnia varieties. Because they have so much variety, there isn't any such thing as a "typical" Whirligig, but this is an example of one. Whirlgigs frequently combine two or three colors in the same bloom. But they have many other interesting variations, like this one. If you plan to experiment with zinnias, I would recommend including Whirligigs in your mix of zinnia varieties. I don't know what you options are with respect to buying flower seeds in Australia. ZM This post was edited by zenman on Fri, Nov 28, 14 at 21:33

my tabasco plants came from seeds that were in store bought tabasco peppers. I thought the reason why my plant is only 10" tall but wide as heck was because it was badly stunted. now I've got peppers turning red when they're tiny compared to a 'proper' tabasco (literally half the size), and hotter than a normal tabasco should be. I'm starting to wonder if I have some sort of weird hybrid going on too. if so, cool. I wasn't planning on keeping seeds for next year anyway, but now I might just to see what happens. if the new plant comes up short and stumpy despite proper care, I'll know I've got something weird going on.

If you remember your highschool biology, this is where punnett squares come in. You've got dominant traits (uppercase letters) and recessive traits (lowercase letters). Lets pretend Red pepper pod color is dominent, and yellow pods are recessive. So you have two purebred peppers next to each other, a red one (RR) and a yellow one (yy), and they accidentally cross. .....y.....y R..Ry..Ry R..Ry..Ry All of the seeds from that crossbreeding will be red, because the dominant red gene (R) is in all of the crosses, and it overrides the yellow. Now, that is your F1 generation. Say you save the seeds from that F1, and plant them. Say there is no cross pollination, only self pollination (which is most likely), you get this: .....R.....y R..RR..Ry y..Ry..yy So you end up with a 25% chance that the F2 is going to be pure Red, a 50% chance that the offspring is going to be a hybrid that is red, and a 25% chance that it will be yellow. If you were to take one of those Ry hybrid reds and backbreed it with a pure RR red, you'd get this: .....R.....y R..RR..Ry R..RR..Ry So your F3 would be 100% red, with a 50/50 chance of carrying the recessive yellow gene. Now, peppers have a lot more going on than just a single thing like this, but it gives you the idea. Heirloom peppers are generally stable breeds, aka ones that have been bred out for at least 8-16 generations to ensure there are no weird recessive genes lurking around. Hybrids may look normal for several generations and then spit something weird back out again. And then you get into the stuff with two dominant genes that end up creating actual hybrid appearances (like if in the above example Red and Yellow were both dominant, the RY offspring might come out Orange, for example, while still having offspring that come out Red or Yellow). Scrupulous seed dealers will only sell seeds that have passed at least the 8th stable generation mark (as in, 8 generations of seed grown out with no surprises), sellers like Pepper Joe on the other hand will happily sell unstable hybrids if they can get the sale. Its one of the reasons you need to look up the reputation for a seller, and never trust seed off of ebay. Because even if the ebay seller picks the seeds straight out of the pod and puts it into an envelope for you, they still might have been an open pollination cross that will mess it up for you. But please, don't let that scare you away from anything thats OP, as its very unlikely that an OP pepper actually hybridizes, majority of the time a pepper self pollinates. Which, as long as its a stable line, will get you more of what you want. Even then, I occasionally like to intentionally plant F1s from an unstable line (like the snacking sweet peppers you get from the grocery store) just to see what I get. Peppers sold for food don't need to be stable, and it can be interesting to see what grows (especially when it gives you a glimpse into what they're hybridizing to make the peppers they sell you). Sometimes the mystery of what grows is the most fun part!