#dahliabreeding

It’s early in my dahlia breeding journey. It’s been fairly passive. I planted 90 dahlias in my hoop house from seeds of the most elaborate, colorful, and large blooms in the garden last year, and so far I’m only getting singles from red to maroon (except for this one red double at the top left). I was just reading somewhere that if you have any singles (open-centered and easy to pollinate) within 50 feet or so of your doubles, you’ll likely get singles from seed. For the majority of these plants, I’ll taste-test the tubers because their blooms are not unique enough to warrant keeping them for cut-flowers in future years (I’ve already got countless red and maroon singles in my collection). I also read that you can expect to get one “good” one from 1000 plants. #dahlias #aztecfood #acocotli #cocoxochitl #dahliabreeding (at Delaware County, Pennsylvania)

The dahlias are coming!! Called Cocoxochitl and Acocotli by Aztec people, they are traditionally a food crop. Some make bigger, tastier tubers than others. While most plants and animals (including humans) have two sets of chromosomes, dahlias have eight (they are octaploids) as well as jumping genes (aka transposons). Both contribute to a huge amount of variation in their flowers, leaves, tubers, etc. I’ve read that if you want to have some amount of control over how a seedling dahlia will turn out, you should plant like types with like types. Like if you want to breed a new cactus type, you’ll plant a bunch of cactus types together - because otherwise they’ll drift toward the single, simpler forms. I’m starting easy by having one section for double flowered dahlias, and another for single flowered dahlias - maybe I’ll get more complicated in the future. Meanwhile, last year I grew 90 plants from seed gathered randomly and unlabeled, and got some great new varieties. This year I’m growing from labeled seeds, though from un-isolated plants. #slowlybutsurely #acocotli #cocoxochitl #dahlia #dahliabreeding

64 Dahlia Seedlings! I remember first working with dahlias with William Woys Weaver being somewhat resentful for the amount of time we spent on them. Now I’m totally obsessed. Originally an Aztec food crop called Cocoxochitl, the tubers are edible. The plant has lotttts more chromosomes than your average creature, so like apples, when you grow them from true seeds (instead of asexually reproducing them through divisions, cuttings, or grafting), they surprise you by turning out pretty different than their parents. I’m particularly excited about the red-purple plants in the upper right-hand quadrant, which are seedlings from Truelove Weaver. I named that dahlia in honor of Will after he identified the seedling as his favorite last year among the 90 in my hoop house. He told me it had breeding potential. We will see! I already love all 64 of them. #dahliabreeding #cocoxochitl #acocotli #dahliaseedling #trueloveweaver

See the seeds? Black and creviced in the base of the dried out petals of the dried dahlia flower. It hybridizes easily so we are always creating new varieties - and when they are beautiful, we save the tubers and crowns and we clone the beauty. A lot of the food we eat is cloned: potatoes, sweet potatoes, garlic, bananas, apples. Unfortunately, thousands of years of cloning can impact the ability for the plant to reproduce sexually (bananas, yacon, etc.) so it can be hard to introduce more genetic diversity and therefore resilience and resistance to disease and changing climate. Dahlias (aka Acocotli) were domesticated by the Aztecs for eating the tubers and for the stems as a source of water. Because of its endless ability to shapeshift and create new types of pretty flowering plants - many people have been breeding dahlias sexually for this purpose since the introduction of the plant to Europe in the 1500s. In addition to breeding back old Victorian varieties, we are working on again breeding good eating varieties so stay tuned! #dahliasoftheday #dahlias #edibledahlias #roughwoodseedcollection #dahliabreeding #breedingdahlias #plantbreeding #sexualreproduction #cloningplants #cloning #tubers #seedheads