>> How many seeds of water-melon Schochler is necessary for you for a multiplication?
Stacy, what do you think? What's a safe number to request? It seems awfully easy to me to lose one whole crop!
And would you like to send some to someone else in good water-melon-growing country, to protect against some grazing animal eating them all?
I'm hoping that after you and maybe others grow out some plants from the 2008 Vavilov crop, you'll offer seeds to Drs. Pederson & Jarret at USDA ARS in Griffin, Georgia, and Dr. Dr. Todd Wehner (NCSU – Raleigh). I think that NCSU seems to be the most serious watermelon researchers / academic preservers, based on their website.
Then three groups have expressed a definite interest in preserving the strain, I assume also considering making it available commercially again.
Baker Creek
Sustainable Seed Company
Victory Seeds
Or I don't know - if one harvest produces a salable number of seeds, maybe the Schochler family could once again sell their family heirloom to a distributer! ("The Schochler watermelon shall rise again!")
My feeling is that Stacy should decide what happens to any seeds that are sent, as the Schochler family member who initiated the search.
I'm trying to find out what the 'safe" number of breeding individuals is, to protect against inbreeding depression. For different crops, that can range from "a few" up to 100 plants (corn is fussy that way).
It sounds like watermelons are in the "just a few" category, or maybe even "just one", but does anyone know for sure?
If the Schochlers became the
only preservers of the strain, maintaining genetic variety might be "desirable", but much easier to save seeds from as many plants as convenient in the first generation out of the seed bank, and send some from each plant to the Griffin GA seed bank, and also to a few seed vendors and breeders.
http://cuke.hort.ncsu.edu/cucu...
"Since there is little inbreeding depression in watermelon, inbred lines are developed using self-pollination with little loss of vigor from the parental population."
http://cuke.hort.ncsu.edu/cucu...
Inbreeding Depression and Heterosis
Watermelon is monoecious, and is naturally cross-pollinated like maize. However, there is not as much inbreeding depression or heterosis as one might expect. This is similar to other cucurbits such as cucumber and melon. It has been suggested that the lack of inbreeding depression is due to the small population size used by farmers during the domestication of the species. Watermelon plants are large, so only a few plants probably were grown in each area. Therefore, even with monoecious sex expression and insect-pollinated flowers, there would have been considerable inbreeding among the few plants representing the population. Since there is little inbreeding depression in watermelon, inbred lines are developed using self-pollination with little loss of vigor from the parental population.
