Hi guys,
I'm the owner of Useful seeds. So pleased to see the Green Mountain Seed is working for you. Can't believe your luck getting reds and purples, I've had nothing like that. And the size you guys are growing - Awesome!
Really cheffed that I had a bit of hand in helping the project along.
Karl, I didn't have much luck with Yelwik stuff - looking at their website a year or so ago they seem to be a bit confused about allium variety names.
While I support your isolation and selection procedures, I'm using a slightly different approach. I just hang all my bulbs up in bird netting in the car port - if they survive, they are keepers, and get replanted. If they don't then they don't ge to have any offspring.
Additionally,
alliums can be somewhat plastic - it's possible to select within clones for desirable characteristics - don't ask me how it works, I have it from people who are way smarter and more experienced growers than me.
I'm also wondering where the red/purple might have come from. I got a single red plant from my seed from Kelly. You guys got the next generation of seed from my growouts of kelly's stuff, so if I only got one red, in what was the parent generation of your stuff, where's he red coming from?
I did grow out some Mill Creek Red Onion at one stage, but I don't think they were flowering in the same season as the GMs. Curious.
But that's got me thinking - why not intentionally interplant spud onions with red onions and let them flower together? Would take a couple of years of selection to narrow stuff sown, but could be interesting.
Too dark now for me to post pics of my growouts, but I'll try in the next couple of days.
regards, gregg
