workhorse_01
Well-Known Member
look john ( - = minus as in cut the tobacco stamen ).... LOL. I aint chewin no queermobaccy . It would be cool if at least the citrus flavor would carry over.
I've grafted quite a few apple and pear trees
As an aside. I just got some fresh rhubarb. Gonna stew it today. Can anybody smell fresh rhubarb pie on the breeze? (Yeah, You can tell the wife I still use lard for my crusts.)
John
the question still comes to bear, are the leaves of a tomacco smoke able? can you actually eat the fruit? is there a flavor difference to the fruit or leaves???? inquiring mind must know the answers!!!
Last year, I grew a single purple tomatillo. (It was started from seed, and the other seedlings died.) The plant grew to about 7', and produced 3 dozen small tomatillos. It was trellised in two steel tomato cones, wired together wide-end to wide-end....tomatillo plant... I only bought one before I found you need to to cross pollinate and I can't find anymore without taking a road trip.
look john ( - = minus as in cut the tobacco stamen ).... LOL. I aint chewin no queermobaccy . It would be cool if at least the citrus flavor would carry over.
Yes. I'll be crossing
Crosses will be done in both directions. This is to clarify the species of Mt. Pima and Papante, which seem to be frequently categorized as N. rustica, even though they seem phentypically to be N. tabacum. I believe this mis-categorization stems from the fact that they were cultivated for eons by Indians in the mountains of north-west Mexico. The fallacy is "Indian = rustica".
- Mt. Pima x Little Dutch (unknown x tabacum)
- Mt. Pima x Cornplanter (unknown x rustica)
- Papante x Little Dutch (unknown x tabacum)
- Papante x Cornplanter (unknown x rustica)
- Little Dutch x Cornplanter (tabacum x rustica)
Bob
I grew neither of them. Because they would be F1 crosses, I would have needed to plant many (say 30 to 100) of each of the two crosses, in order to see the range of hybrid traits. Since Mt. Pima as well as Papante seemed to offer no particular traits that would have been likely to improve Little Dutch, I elected to satisfy my curiosity by simply concluding that both of them were N. tabacum, and not N. rustica.I read the links. I am curious about whether you subsequently grew the Papante-Little Dutch or Mt Pima-Little Dutch crosses.
I was under the same impression and now seek an answer to this.I guess my train missed a switch back there a ways. I thought tobacco plants were hermaphroditic.
Here you mention male and female. Where did I jump the track?
Thanks,
John
In a blossom, the pistil contains the ova (which have to be fertilized), and the stamen produce the pollen (which will fertilize the ova). Both are found within the same blossom. If isolated (bagged), then a single blossom will fertilize itself--that is, its own pollen will fertilize its own ova.
In deliberate crossing, you establish an isolated female by manually opening the blossom a day or two before it would naturally open, and physically removing the stamen (I believe there are exactly 5 per blossom.), leaving only the pistil in the center. The female-only blossom is then sealed with some paper masking tape. The intended male contributor is obtained by using the pollen from a different variety plant, and transferred on, say, a camel hair brush, to the female-only blossom, which is then resealed until the blossom falls off the developing seed pod.
To produce crosses in both directions (female A and male B, as well as female B and male A), you perform the same approach with each variety. Some of the metabolic determinant genes--contained within the mitochondria--will stay with the female (the plant producing the seed) for each cross.
It might be interesting to do both crosses between two dramatically different variety conformations. For example, crossing in both directions between Big Gem and Little Dutch, might demonstrate if the short short stalk, close node spacing and long, narrow leaves of Little Dutch remain with the female parent Little Dutch. Would "Little Gem" develop on the Little Dutch female, and "Big Dutch" appear on the Big Gem female, or would it not matter much? Making a taller, wider-leafed tobacco with the smoking qualities of Little Dutch would be a boon.
I still worry about the need to have ready blossoms simultaneously on two different varieties. Last season, the blossom time varied as much as a month between the earliest varieties and the latest. This may be mitigated by the long flowering time of some of the varieties.
Bob