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Entry Date
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Sunday, November 10, 2024
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big moon
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Bethlehem CT
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Entry 186 of 187 |
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https://www.walshmedicalmedia.com/open-access/seedless-pumpkin-vegetable-production-using-gibberellic-acid-ga3-as-plant-hormone-and-genetically-modified-technique.pdf
An interesting article about giberellins, Giberellins are quite commonly used in the early blooming stages to enhance seedless fruit production, Clementines and many varieties of citrus have little viable pollen and may also have poorly functioning ovules. (these are actually the desired traits that create a seedless orange) Many of these seedless varieties would have very poor ability to set a crop and it would not would not be economically feasible to grow them with out the aid of Giberellins. Pumpkins are far different than these citrus varieties and have very viable pollen and good ovules that produce lots of seed with proper cross pollination. But they can still be made seedless (according to the attached study) with the use of giberellins. Maybe this could be another way to produce a seedless watermelon? Right now all the seedless watermelons are from seeds that produce tetraploid melons. (tetraploids are sterile).
I have been interested in giberellins lately but didn't intend to uncover this. I had just seen a video on Youtube about how they have to put nets over mandarins to keep the bees out to grow seedless mandarins. I didn't understand how that would work. Because a perfect flower(like a citrus) will still produce seeded fruit when properly pollinated. (Think of a greenhouse tomato, they still produce plenty of seeds when you just flick the bloom to pollinate it.) This youtube video brought me into some research and I discovered that seedless citrus fruit varieties are quite different, even though they have perfect flowers, those flowers may not be able to pollinate themselves, yet often the tree can still be fooled into growing a fruit without any seeds. Some varieties are better at setting seedless fruit while others are very poor producers. The poor producers are the ones that need their fruit set to be enhanced by giberellic acid.
I know there is much false information out there on youtube, and I might not always catch it or know the difference with politics or some other topic that someone is trying to mislead me in, but in agriculture, I have a pretty good bullsh...... detector. In the above case it wasn't BS, it's true that bee transferred pollen will increase the seed count in certain mandarin varieties which would lead to seedy fruit if nets were not used.
The following is an example of what I am talking about. A few years ago several CSA customers of mine were asking for female eggplants. They then took the time to show me which ones were female based on the shape of the fruit. This idea all started from some internet video about how to choose the best eggplant by sexing the finished fruit!
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