The Target Of The Farmers In Tomatoes Planting
The secret was out. It, couldn’t be kept any longer. In fact, in the days of an intelligent gardening public, speaking familiarly of F, hybrids, dominants and recessives and demanding to know the nature of every new variety offered, to keep a secret such as how all-double petunia seed is produced would be utterly impossible.
After all, with every farmer growing hybrid corn to feed hybrid pigs or hybrid chickens, and with hybrid tomatoes and hybrid squashes in every garden, how could you hope to hide the fact for very long that an old garden favorite like the double petunia is… But wait, I am getting ahead of my story.
I became interested in double petunias back in 1960’s while studying for my Master of Science degree and working as graduate assistant at Michigan State. It was my duty that summer to care for the flower trials at the Horticulture Department.
It happened that the Japanese strains of all-double petunias were relatively new at that time and they were very pretty in our trials. I was puzzled and couldn’t understand how the Japanese could sell seed of double petunias when double petunias didn’t produce any seed. So I asked my professors. They didn’t know. In fact, no one knew. American seed growers were as mystified as I. The Japanese evidently had a monopoly on the secret of it.
The Japanese had found out how to produce a homozygous double. The word homozygous means of like ancestry; that is, both parents of a plant must have carried like factors for the plant to be homozygous. Likewise all the germ cells produced by a homozygous plant are alike. Thus the homozygous double, when crossed to a single, only produces germ cells carrying the factor for doubleness, and, since this factor is dominant and has the ability to express itself even in the presence of the factor for singleness coming front the single parent, al: the progeny are double.
But how did the Japanese produce such a pure-breeding double? To do so one would have to self-pollinate a double or to cross one double with another. But no one in this country, including Dr. Frost, had been able to get seed from a double flower. This was because the double flower does not have any pistil or ovary. But was this always true? Perhaps if I looked long enough, or tried enough different methods of culture, I could find a plant that did have a pistil and ovary. Or perhaps I could find a method of culture that would induce doubles to produce normal pistils.
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