26 April 2014

Green Mountain Spud Onion F2 seedlings

I collected seed from my Green Mountain plants, well, from the few that flowered. An interesting phenomenon is the number of these F2s that are chloritic - lacking or low in chlorophyll. I noticed it in the first batch I sowed a month ago, but my recent sowing shows a considerable proportion with charateristic. Of the 16 or so plants I grew from Kelly's original seed 2 plants were chloritic, and succumbed at about the pencil stage.
In this generation, 15 out of 34 emerged seeds are yellow. This will only be a problem if they fail to thrive, so it will be interesting to see what eventuates.

4 comments:

  1. Six months on, how have they gone?

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    1. Sorry for the late reply Yuri. I haven't followed he individual chloritic plants - I just left them to grow on, and the survivors got planted out into the garden. When I only had a handful of plants each was precious, no that I've got established lines, survivorship is a bit more important. I'll get round to a update post soon.

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  2. I recently sowed some green mountain onion seeds, and i have experienced this also, there are numerous seedlings which are a pale yellow. What causes this?

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    1. Hi colin, thanks for the comment. This seems to be a genetic thing with this particular line of onions. Some offspring just don't have the right genetics to succeed. However you should get enough seedlings that do succeed. I haven't tried subsequent generations to see if it continues to crop up. If you need more seed, I've got heaps available over on Usefulseeds.com

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