Guilherme Marques

Michael Cox wrote:

Greg Martin wrote:One thing I didn't know is that if you cut off the individual flowers, not dead head, of an Allium that you will get top sets.  What a neat way to make lots of clones fast of a desired Allium.....nice way to share too!  My interest in this case will be in doing this to the seedlings I get from my packets of hybrids to see how large their bulbils get and how much variation in that trait there is.  Then when I make a landrace from them I'll repeat it to see the same among the individuals so I know which ones I may want to do further breeding crosses with.  

I learn something new every day!  :)

WHOA... can you explain that again. Is this ANY allium? What exactly do you mean by cutting flowers instead of deadheading?

I actually read that somewhere around the internet as well (will try to find later). But as far as I remember the idea is, after the flower head starts opening up and you can see the separate flower bodies, you delicately remove them individually, leaving the "base" of the flower head behind.

To get true garlic seed people do the opposite: remove the bulbils that already develop easily, to allow for the flowers to mature and hopefully generate seeds.

Edit: I haven't tried any of that yet, only read about it.

Hello, did you make any progress on this? It's an interesting project to me.

I guess I just need to cultivate a different attitude towards the thorns!

I also have som blackberry that I'm hesitant to plant in the ground, due to their thorns. But I love their fruit, so I'm missing it...

Hi there. I won't be able to contribute much to your questions, but might give some info...

I've grown some of them a couple of years ago, had two plants going reasonably well. They were not very close to each other, and had a nice fruit set. Their first flowers didn't set fruit, and I got some impression that it might be related to temperature or humidity, but it's just an impression.

The flowers are quite pretty, and if I'm remembering well, they got some pollinator activity. I do believe they're self-compatible.

Interesting thing is that now I'm getting some volunteers around the garden, some 10-20 meters from where I originally had them (and it's been about 2 years, so the seeds are rather resilient... maybe the low germination is related to this?). The volunteers seem to be a bit slow, but I have given them zero attention and love...

Flavor-wise, it seemed to me rather like a low-acidity kiwi fruit. Pleasant, but not very remarkable. I only ate them raw.

Regarding cold resistance I can't help much, as we don't get below 0C around here.

And now a question of my own: how to deal with the thorns? I haven't planted it recently because interacting with this plant is quite masochistic...