Russian Academy of
Agricultural Sciences
Ministry of Agriculture
All-Russian Horticulturae Michurin Institute
|
| 1st Virtual International Scientific conference on Lonicera
caerulea L. |
B. Bors
Breeding of Lonicera
caerulea L. for Saskatchewan and Canada
Only the University of Saskatchewan is breeding blue
honeysuckles in
Canada. Our goal is to develop cultivars
adapted to mechanical harvesting and processing. We
are interbreeding lines from Russia,
Japan, and the Kuril Islands to bring together traits desirable for
mechanization. Russian germplasm is most valuable for uniform ripening,
early
fruiting, and easy to detach fruit, but fruit is often tubular shaped
and
small. Japanese germplasm has heavier, more rounded fruit but usually
is hard
to detach and ripens unevenly. Kurile
Island fruits can be large and round but these accessions have low
productivity
but have good disease resistance. Good
flavour is very important, but can be found all 3 germplasm pools above.
Farmers are growing half the seedling from our program in
a cooperative
project. Perhaps 30,000 seedlings from
controlled crosses have been planted in the last 5 years, but 95% of
these are
first generation hybrids. We recently
released two cultivars we consider superior for our location, but
expect more
improvements in future generations.
Collecting wild Lonicera caerulea
from the boreal forests of Canada began in 2007. So
far, 650 accessions have been gathered
from 131 sites in 6 provinces. Plants
and leaves are quite variable in the collection. The
few plants that had berries on them when collected tasted good
but were
small. It will be a few years before
these plants are large enough to evaluate their usefulness for breeding.
Download: Full text pdf; doc
