Sunday, November 24, 2013

2013 Rose Breeding Season Winding Down

The rose breeding season is quickly winding down for 2013.  All of the hips have been harvested, most of the lesser desirable seedlings culled, and seedling beds are being prepped for the removal of the surviving seedlings.

The weather has continued to cool such that the Hulthemia blotches are at their darkest.  In fact, the blotch of the seedling highlighted in the Invisible Revealed post, where I mentioned that for the first time in that seedling's life that I was finally able to see that it was a Hulthemia, has continued to darken.


With the petals removed, it is very easy to see the blotch now.  It is amazing to think that as a young seedling, the blotch was not evident at all.


The above seedling is expected to have rather larger blooms as can be seen when compared to other Hulthemia seedings as shown below.  All of those in the following photo have some "clean genes" that will hopefully help to clean up the group from black spot.  The larger white seedling and smaller white seedling both have mixed Knock Out pollen (I collected and mixed pollen coming from 'Knock Out', 'Double Knock Out', 'Sunny Knock Out', and 'Milwaukee Calatrava') as their pollen parent.  The smaller white seedling's seed parent was 'Eyeconic Pomegranate Lemonade' to which it owes it's superior heat stable blotch.  The thornless coral pink seedling in the upper left corner is from a cross of "O352-1" X "Basye's Thornless".  "O352-1" has been highlighted elsewhere in this blog (The Largest Blotch - A Deadend and Hulthemia Fertility - Update on Seedling "O352").  The yellow seedling is the result of a complex Hulthemia seedling crossed with a very clean Hulthemia half-sister of 'Thrive!'.


Though most of the culling is done, about half of the remaining seedlings will have to go.  As the blotches darken, it is more difficult to cull seedlings with good blotches.  I'm not sure whether this next one will survive the last round of culling.....








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