To cross, or not to cross?

[Julie]

As all you folks know ad nauseum, I have some E.obesa.

I also have a meloformis (Mel, hehe) who has today decided to pop out stigmas from what seemed to be sleeping winder buds that had not moved for a month. So she is a girl after all.. I suspected this as she had dead girl flowers and seed husks in her soil when I repotted her.

And since I have a boy obesa (little Y), should I try the obvious?

I'm wondering if they are similar enough to produce seeds, I guess eg. a very different sort of Euphorbia pollen would not be recognised by the ovaries as DNA...?

Has anyone here tried crossing the very succulent Euphorbias?

[MikeT]

Julie

They'll cross easily, you'll get viable seed that you can grow next year. They reach flowering size in a few years. You can then cross the hybrids with either of the parents etc.....
I did grow some 1/4 meloformis 3/4 obesa's a few years ago, they looked like plain obesa's.
Like obesa, you need to watch out for the meloformis seedpods exploding their seeds everywhere

Mike T
Sheffield

[Phil_SK]

If you do cross them you might want to consider how easy it will be to keep the seed separate when the pods pop and avoid a mixed seed of meloformis and the hybrid, assuming your meloformis has other seed pods on it.

[Julie]

So I'm not a pioneer then.

Phil - all females have caps to keep the seed. Each seed has a page in a log book with it's parentage, date of gathering and so on. So each new plant can be labelled correctly.

The thing to do now, is to find a way to mark seeds in a narrow tray, eg. a notch in one corner and a cocktail stick next to each seed, and a corresponding diagram.

This is of course assuming that the obesas. symms and mel are pure....

[Julie]

I didn't make that clear, now I've read it again.

The only boy is an obesa. The girls are 3 obesas and one mel. So all pods can only have one possible parentage... so long as it's recorded who was the mother. All seeds have mum and dad catalogued.



Post Edited (11-22-06 23:35)