JimR wrote:
"David E. Ross" wrote in message
.. .
[snip]

As Hinsley indicated, the rootstock is NOT the parent. The parent is
the part of the tree that produced the fruit containing seeds. If you
graft known varieties onto seedling rootstocks, you will get more of the
known varieties, not new varieties.

Since citrus is apomictic (capable of forming viable seeds without
pollination), it's quite possible that seedling citrus will be "true to
form". That is, the seedlings will indeed be the same variety as the
parent that produced the seeds.

However, apomixis does not preclude seeds also being formed from
pollination. Thus, each seed is a guess. If you really want to create
a new citrus variety, you must thus carefully ensure that there is
indeed pollination.

--

David E. Ross
http://www.rossde.com/.

I've learned something here -- I'd always understood that planting the seed
from a particular type of citrus would not result in a new tree of the same
type. IOW, planting a Valencia seed would not result in a new Valencia. I
googled "citrus" and "nucellar embryony" and understand Ross's comment "each
seed is a guess".. I'd missed FW's comment, "you are probably unlikely to
get an orange tree like the orange your seed came from but let us know how
it works out."

Actually, in another location I did plant a seed from a Pomelo, and after 6
years got a new tree that also produced pomelos. At that time I attributed
this to the fact that the parent was an ungrafted Thai pomelo tree. I moved
too soon to really learn what quality fruit were being produced.





You could also plant lots of seeds, and only keep the ones where you got
more than one sprout per seed -- and carefully separate them. That
should guarantee you that some of the seedlings are asexual clones of
the parent variety.

Bob