Posted on Jan 27, 2023 11:09 PMI tried a number of crosses in spring, but only ended up with 3 pods. Here are the results:
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Despite an insect (I suspect an earwig) burrowing into one chamber of the seed pod quite early on, this still reached maturity and produced 26 seeds. It remains to be seen how many are viable, but getting anything out of this cross will be surprising considering the damage to the pod. I don't have many IBs, so given both parents grow well for me I thought this would be an interesting experiment.
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I was really hoping for a good yield with this cross, as I was hoping to get some seedlings exhibiting the luluglgl genotype (2 copies of the luminata allele, 2 copies of the glaciata allele) to further my understanding of how plicata genetics work. 'Spendthrift' and 'Volcanic Glow' are both luminatas (luglglgl) and VG probably also carries the anthocyanin enhancer gene (since the falls are more solid than those of 'Spendthrift'), so the cross of the two should yield 25% glaciatas, 25% luluglgl genotype seedlings and 50% luminatas. Unfortunately it only produced 8 seeds! My germination rates aren't particularly high, so here's hoping that one of the few that grows is the target genotype.
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Finally, I took a chance on one of my first-flowering seedlings of ('Saffron Drift' X 'Handshake'), as it had already produced two new growths. Clearly this was highly compatible, as it produced
51 seeds in the pod! This should give me just enough to work with, as depending on whether the seedling inherited the pl allele or the gl allele from 'Handshake' affects the outcome. 5/6 seedlings will be regular (probably bicolours) and the remaining 1/6 will be one of the plicata types - either luminatas and glaciatas, or plicatas and plicata-luminatas.
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