Seed-grown domestic strawberries

This thread is a continuation of a thread on the old forum, which I thought had a lot more information about what I've done in it (maybe I posted that on other forums).

Today, I transplanted the rest of my seed-grown domestic strawberries, just south of where I transplanted Tresca earlier. I didn't split up any plants. I want to focus more on saving seeds for another generation from the first fruits, since the plants are diseased. I can try zapping the fruits next year to see if that removes the disease from the seeds. I can try zapping Reine des Vallees's fruits this year, though (it has some already); yes, it caught the disease, too. Anyway, the Quinault parent plant seems the most disease-resistant out of all my strawberries.

If up is east, and down is west, here's the order they're in:

* Tresca (previously transplanted)
* Fresca
* Ozark Beauty
* Quinault

Of course, Ozark Beauty and Quinault shouldn't be true-to-type, since they're seed-grown here, and they're octoploids. So, I'm very curious how they'll perform.

I don't know how Tresca and Fresca are supposed to be true-to-type domestoc strawberries, since they're supposed to be octoploids, too, as far as anyone seems to know. Stabilizing a tetraploid is no small task (if it even happens), let alone an octoploid!

Okay, so tomatoes, which are easily bred, are diploids. That means they have two sets of chromosomes. So, they have genes with two alleles per gene. So, for their leaf type, there are regular leaf alleles and potato leaf alleles, among others. Potato leaf is recessive to regular leaf. In order to stabilize that one tomato trait (there are many other traits to stabilize), if you want a regular leaf plant, you need to do some serious breeding to ensure that there are no potato leaf alleles. If you want pitato leaf plants, you just need to find a child plant with potato leaf leaves (since both alleles have to be potato leaf in order to be expressed).

Anyway, with domestic strawberries they have eight alleles per gene. Imagine how much harder it's going to be to get all eight alleles to be the same, especially for dominant traits. Fortunately, you can grow genetically identical strawberries without stabilizing them. Just grow the runners, if you want then to be the same.

This is my first time transplanting strawberries after it's already been freezing. So, I'm excited to see what happens and how well they weather the winter. I figure they need the vigor that overwintering often provides, and they're cold hardy. So, why not transplant in the cold, too. Hopefully the winter will kill the disease.

If you're wondering what happened to my Tristar strawberry seeds that I planted, they were next to heavily diseased plants (the runners that I rooted indoors). So, I threw them out before they sprouted. I thought I posted about Tristar on the old site, but I don't see anything of the kind there.

Anyway, to avoid disease indoors, I should have done this, I suppose:
* Zapped all the fruits before I planted them
* Not brought strawberry runners indoors
* Not misted my plants

For the outdoor plants, I oughtn't to have planted tomatoes near the strawberries either, let alone in the middle of the strawberry patch. I also shouldn't have accepted the Ozark Beauty strawberries that I was gifted (but rather just some fruits, and have zapped them; although I didn't know the need to do that then). The soil was also likely too salty (my hypothesis for the reason is cats using it as a litter box) and potentially too compact.

Anyway, even if strawberries have this disease, I can probably still grow out more generations, and probably still get fruit.

Well, this is a chance to work on breeding disease-resistant strawberries! I'm guessing if zapping removes the diseases, then repeated grow-outs from exposed generations of plants may eventually help future generations to gain immunity through acclimatization.

I'm also tempted to zap some plants (in water) to see if it removes the disease.