Creators are beautiful creatures

It seems that we sorted out a little with the stock. Let us pass to the second component of the fruit tree - the scion. The most diverse parts of a plant can be used as a graft. If we cut off the tree growth in autumn in the summer, we will get lignified cuttings, which can be planted in autumn, winter, spring and even in early summer. They are well preserved in the refrigerator, basement, you can and snow them.

The cut off growing young shoot with leaves also divide into pieces and inoculate. It is only necessary to ensure that the reserve kidney located in the axillary of the leaf is not damaged. And you can also prepare a shield from the escape. In the classic form, the graft is any vegetative part of the cultivar.

It seems that initially the people used randomly caught plants, which grew out of the seeds of natural hybrids, for the graft. By means of folk selection, apple varieties Antonovka( common, stony, etc.), Anise( gray, scarlet, etc.), Cinnamon striped, White pouring, Grushovka Moscow, cherries - Vladimirskaya, Lyubskaya are obtained.plums - Skorospelka red and many others. Speaking of "people's selection", of course, we must bear in mind that this term hides someone's name, alas, forgotten in the vicissitudes and vicissitudes of history.

Several generations selected and saved not just yielding plants with fairly large, tasty, beautiful fruits. A very important criterion for evaluation was the suitability of the fruit for their specific use. Thanks to this approach, varieties were created that are exceptionally good for cooking jams, or for drying, or for compotes, or for the preparation of purees and juices with enhanced medicinal properties, etc. Maybe you also had to hear about Antonovka - frozen andsoaked, the apples of this sort had no equal - and about the wagons with the "Ryazanka", which was the subject of export. Of apples of the same variety grown in the gardens around the town of Beleva, which is in the Tula region, at one time they were preparing a pasta that carried good fame far beyond the Russian state. By the way, the merits of the varieties Anto

novka and Grushovka Moscow are so diverse and specific, they are so persistently and comprehensively passed on to the offspring that until quite recently Seeds and seedlings of these varieties also served as exports. From the free pollination of the Grushovka variety of Moscow in Canada, the summer Mantet, which has become very popular in the Soviet Union, is outstanding for its taste qualities.

Folk selection, the selection of the best of what is accidentally obtained naturally( for example, from seeds obtained from free pollination), has an ancient history, continues to this day. However, the creation of new varieties took a more active form when scientists joined it. They began not only to select the best of what nature has offered, but to pollute flowers of some varieties of pollen taken from flowers of something of a different sort.

The man who first explained the reasons for the diversity of offspring obtained from apple seeds was Andrei Timofeevich Bolotov, an outstanding Russian naturalist, one of the most educated people of his time. Pay attention to his years of life - 1738-1833.What a long life! A century and a half passed after his physical death, but modern and subsequent generations of breeders will benefit from the idea expressed by him. More than two centuries ago( 1778) A.T. Bolotov published a short article about the pollination of an apple tree, in which he gave a detailed description of the arrangement of the flower and emphasized the special importance of pollen: "... this very necessary seed dust, scattered, falls on the tip. ..pistils and this should help to ensure that the fruit on the tree is tied. "Maybe now these lines seem naive, but at the time when they were written, not only was the fertilization process not investigated, but the presence of sex in plants was questioned. Based on the results of the study of the structure of flowers, the designation of their components and the role in the sexual process, AT Bolotov first described and grouped various sexual forms in plants, generally accepted to the present day( plants of dioecious, monoecious, etc.).Do not think that this is a trifle: planting seabuckthorn plants, currants and strawberries with an imperfect type of flower, you will not get a crop if there are no pollinating varieties nearby. More than 200 years ago, Bolotov recommended artificial crossing as the most effective method for obtaining new varieties and gave a detailed description of the technique of artificial crossing. In his article "Experience over apple seeds" in 1823 Andrei Timofeevich expressed the idea of ​​cross-pollination in apple trees and the important role of bees in this process.

The decision on which plants to take as the source( parent) is preceded by a very painstaking analytical work. Firstly, the task is clearly defined: what are the characteristics of the plant. Further information on plants possessing these characteristics is collected, and on the sets of genes responsible for the transfer of specific features, the combinational capabilities of the selected donor varieties are determined.

The honor of the first scientist who applied crossbreeding as a method of practical plant breeding belongs to the professor of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a contemporary of AT Bolotov, Josef Kelreiter. But his first publication with some theoretical and practical conclusions appeared only in 1772 - twelve years after the experiments - and only in Russian,

therefore his work in other countries were unknown. So it turned out that when in Russia the effectiveness of crossing was practically proved as a method of creating new varieties of different cultures, in Western Europe there was still debate about the presence of sex in plants.

It was not easy for the first breeders to practice. Not simpler and modern. Despite the fact that lists of donor plants are already known, up to 30 percent of the time and efforts of the breeder spent on obtaining a new variety are spent on studying and selecting appropriate pairs( and more often a whole group of varieties).

Artificial pollination of flowers during hybridization is not an easy task, but it is necessary to prepare all the inventory in advance. First of all, it is necessary to sew gauze insulators to protect flowers before and after pollination from visiting by bees and other insects. Their dimensions depend on the object. For an apple-tree, this is, as a rule, made of gauze "sleeves" in length 35 and 20 centimeters wide, for cherries and plums, respectively, 70 and 40 centimeters. In the "sleeve" pass a branch with buds, and the upper and lower holes are tied with twine.

For collection and storage of pollen, small carefully washed dry glass jars are needed. On the jars must be pre-pasted strips of paper for inscription pollen. To protect the pollen from drying out and getting pollen of other varieties, the jar from above should be covered with a cotton or gauze swab. For convenience of work on trees, jars of pollen can be tied to a thin lace and put on your neck.

To extract anther from buds, you will need tweezers, metal eyelets, which can be replaced with clips, pins or something similar.

The main tool is a "dust", necessary for applying pollen to the stigmas of pistils. The most convenient in work and economical in the expenditure of "dust" from the soft pencil eraser, which must be cut into small pieces of triangular shape( 1-0.5 centimeters).The thick end of such a triangle is placed on the dissection needle, and the "dust" is ready. Each variant of crossing should be carried out with a clean, not used "dust".

To install jars of pollen and transfer them during operation, you need a box or box. It is best to store the pollen in a desiccator( glass vessel with ground lid), on the bottom of which is placed calcium chloride, which absorbs moisture well.

When working with small stamens and pestles( currant, gooseberry, bird cherry, etc.), a magnifying glass( magnifier) ​​may be required. Labels will also be needed, which are tied to branches with pollinated flowers. They record the name of the pollinating variety, date and other information. All variants of crosses are fixed in the notebook.

The plants, selected as parents, need not have, as they say, at hand. Pollen can be obtained from afar or, on the contrary, to send it to another place where it is pollinated by the desired plant.

The technique of sending pollen and storing it is sufficiently worked out: pollen is poured into paper bags, placed in a glass with a ground lid, where several granules of calcium chloride are preliminarily deposited. You can put the pollen in an ordinary tube and plug it with a cotton plug, into which several granules of calcium chloride are wrapped. The plug is poured from above with molten paraffin. At a temperature of up to 10 ° C, the pollen is stored for a short time. The optimum storage temperature is a little lower than C ° C.

From hybrid seeds( after stratification) plants are grown in which a complex of traits or individual features inherent in the original plants are preserved( inherited) to some extent or other, and new ones are formed.

The foundations of modern genetics were laid in 1865 by Gregor Mendel, a monk from the Czech city of Brno. After 35 years, the main "laws" were again "discovered" by three scientists - de Fris, Correns, Cermak, independently of each other. In1910, the American biologist Thomas Morgan and his students substantiated the chromosome theory of heredity. In the 1920s and 1930s, the work of NN Vavilov, NK Koltsov, SS Chetverikov, AS Serebrovsky, and others played an important role in the development of genetics in our country. Genetics is the science of the laws of heredity and the variability of organisms, the methods of controlling them. Its laws allow us to foresee the results of selection in advance.

At the present stage of development of science, a breeder can become only a versatile trained specialist. First of all, he must be a professional biologist who knows the anatomy and physiology of plants well. Serious selection work is impossible without deep genetic knowledge. It is also necessary to know the patterns of species evolution in nature, of course, the breeder-designer should be well-versed in modern and promising areas of agricultural technology,

We hope, it is understandable that the above-mentioned stages of the selection process are just a truncated, very shortened concept of obtaining a newMany schools of scientists in different countries had to work hard to penetrate at least to the threshold of the storeroom where the secret of the mechanism of inheritance and change is keptWe can name only a few of them: hybridization, mutagenesis, inbreeding, etc.

Hybridization is the crossing of heterogeneous in the hereditary relation of organisms, it remains the main method for now. It is distinguished by intraspecies, distant( interspecific, intergeneric) hybridization,repeated crosses using geographically and ecologically remote pairs, etc.

As you probably remember at the school biology course, the species is a set of individuals related toorigin and having a qualitative difference from other species. Each species is adapted to certain environmental conditions, has a certain area, the plants within the species cross well and give fertile offspring.

Intraspecific hybridization has been and remains the main breeding method. It is used to obtain a combination of specific positive traits of crossed varieties or hybrid forms. By the way, in gardening, a variety is called a variety of plants vegetatively propagated from one originally selected plant and possessing identical morphological, biological and economic characteristics and properties.

Intraspecific hybridization often uses varieties of folk selection, local varieties;which are commonly referred to as plants identified in a specific locality with specific advantages on some economic trait. Thus, all breeders of the Non-Black Earth region used in the hybridization variety of folk selection Cinnamon striped, superior to many others in winter hardiness. With his participation, for example, a variety of Mayak( Cinnamon Striped x Rosemary White) was obtained in the NIISINP.

In the same institute in recent years, a very hardy local variety Ivanovskoe is widely used for hybridization. The history of this variety is interesting. To set up a collection garden in a fruit nursery, its organizer, Vladimir Fedorovich Efimov( we will talk about it on another occasion) collected hundreds of varieties not only from various scientific institutions, but also from the local population. So, in one of the places of the then Moscow suburbs, in the village of Zyuzino( nowadays it is a microdistrict of the city of Moscow), they found trees of a summer type, externally unremarkable, remotely reminiscent of Papyrovka. One could pass by, but the owner of the garden( his surname, unfortunately, did not survive) noted that according to a family legend this cultivar "has been conducted" since the time of Ivan the Terrible and reproduced it with the help of a stem from the root. For the ability to reproduce well by vegetative means and high winter hardiness, which allowed the plants to survive to this day, this local variety Ivanovskoe was included in the scientific collection. With the help of the method of artificial freezing of varieties developed in the following years, its high resistance to all components of winter hardiness was confirmed. But the main test was the extreme winter of 1978/79, after which only a few of the 540 varieties of apple trees in the collection garden and among them Ivanov. Now it is the main donor of winter hardiness in the hybridization of apple trees.

Breeders-fruit growers widely use the method of remote interspecific hybridization to create varieties with complex resistance to the most dangerous diseases. In particular, in the Scientific Research Institute of Selection and Sorption of Fruit Crops( the former Orel Zonal Fruit Berry Experimental Station), breeders EN Sedov and V. V. Zhdanov derived several apple varieties immune to scab, due to the inclusion in the hybridization of the immune species of apple trees.

In our country, the priority of the use of geologically-geodetic

in physically and ecologically remote pairs belongs to Ivan Vladimirovich Michurin. He, according to NI Vavilov, was the first to initiate a broad mobilization from all over the globe of species and varieties for crossing.

The fruitful practical use of the method of geographically and ecologically remote pairs is also associated with the name of Professor Sergei Ivanovich Isaev, disciple and follower of IV Michurin.

For more than ten years( 1932-1942) SI Isaev worked in the city of Michurinsk, where the air itself seemed to be imbued with the ideas of IV Michurin, the memory of him, peculiar traditions, the mood for work. Then, until 1949, he headed the Department of Selection of Fruit and Vegetable Crops in the Saratov Agricultural Institute, and since 1949 he worked at the MV Lomonosov Moscow State University. A great scientific work was crowned with the creation of 33 new varieties of apple trees. Having selected the old Russian variety as the parental varieties of the old Russian variety, Welsey's cinnamon and Canadian variety, Isayev from the obtained hybrid family distinguished such famous varieties as Cinnamon, Desert Isaeva, Medunitsa, Young Naturalist, Koreinka, Autumn Joy. SI Isaev is the author of such regionalized varieties as Michurin's Memory, Northern Synapse, Garden's Beauty, People's, Winner. The work of the laureate of the State Prize, the Honored Scientist of the RSFSR SI Isayeva was awarded the Order of Lenin, the gold medal named after IV Michurin.

Successfully applied the method of geographically and environmentally remote pairs at the Research Institute of Selection and Variety of Fruit Crops( the city of Orel), where he used such varieties as Mezenskoye, Orel Winter, Autumn Aloe, Orlik, Orel Striped.

For more than thirty-five years, he has been conducting selection work on apple and pear, corresponding member of the Academy of Agricultural Sciences and academician of the Russian Academy of Agricultural Sciences Evgeny Nikolayevich Sedov, and the design of new varieties is being dealt with by a group of associates-specialists of various profiles, each of whom strictly implements his maneuver,breeding program. They are actively using methods not only for hybridization, but also for mutagenesis, inbreeding. Every year more than 100,000 flowers pass through the hands of EN Sedov and his assistants, they estimate up to 40 thousand shoots. Before his eyes passed more than 120 thousand hybrid seedlings. Of these, 26 apple hybrids and 8 hybrids of the pear were given varietal names and transferred to state testing. Theoretical and practical work of E. N. Sedov was awarded two Orders of the Red Banner of Labor and a gold medal named after I. Michurin. High organizational skills allow him not to restrict his work only to the walls of the station - he is a member of the Expert Council of the Higher Attestation Commission, a member of the editorial board of the magazine "Gardening and Viticulture", a member of the European Association of Breeders and many more sections, commissions, societies.

Requirements for new varieties become higher and tougher. We need varieties not just with beautiful, tasty, large, lean fruits, but also adapted to specific multifactorial natural conditions, winter-hardy, resistant to dangerous pests and diseases, finally suitable for mechanized cultivation until harvesting.

Probably without hesitation, each of you will agree that with

evaluation of hybrid plants should be given priority to those that have the ability not to become infected with diseases, to resist pests, to resist the effects of unfavorable environmental factors, for example drought, frost, frost, etc. To be able to find out earlier whether a plant possesses these properties,methods for early diagnosis have been developed. It is noted, for example, that there is a certain correlation between this or that property and some morphological sign. Knowing this, as a rule, purely accidental, and not conditioned interrelation, it is possible to reject unnecessary plants while they are still young. A more reliable method of selection for resistance is the method of artificial infection: seedlings are infected, for example, with a specific strain of scab and rejects all diseased. For most regions of our country, winter hardiness is a very important index of the variety, not just resistance to low temperatures, but the ability to acquire hardening early and quickly, not to lose it, or to restore quickly after thawing. The concept of winter hardiness includes the ability of plants to withstand other adversities of the winter period: low snowfall, strong winds( leading to winter drying of tissues and death of plants), excessive snow abundance( which may serve as a reason for damping), etc. But such conditions do not develop in natureevery year: in the middle belt of ten years in a row the conditions for wintering can develop successfully. For the breeder, the orientation for these years can turn into a tragedy - the hybrids selected at this time are, as a rule, not resistant to attack, and with a negative confluence of weather conditions they die. To avoid this, methods for the early diagnosis of winter hardiness - direct artificial freezing - are developed.

Many scientists abroad have devoted their research to this problem in our country. To the generation of continuing theoretical research and practical application of the method of artificial freezing in fruit growing belong to the doctor of biological sciences Margarita Mihailovna Tyurina and candidate of biological sciences Galina Alexeyevna Gogoleva. Based on the results of their research, regimes for freezing individual parts and whole plants and, most importantly, methods for assessing damage were developed. Thousands of samples have to be viewed by them, but the breeder saves years, continuing to work with the material already tested for resistance to low temperatures.

There are other ways to determine the frost resistance of plants - on the electrical conductivity of tissues, measuring the water content in them, etc. And yet, a reliable, simple, express method has not yet been developed. The thought and hand of future physicists, chemists, and cybernetics is also required.

And how do you assess the choice of color when evaluating hybrid offspring? Will your opinion on the emerald of non-green, golden-amber, bright red fruits be unanimous? And what should be the fruit for machine cleaning? In the early 60-ies from domestic breeders required intensely( dark) colored fruits, as, for example, in the varieties Spartan or Jonathan. Why?

It's very simple: under the dark skin is not so noticeable traces of strokes received by the apple during collection. Take almost any apple of the variety Jonathan, which is sold in December - January. Indeed, externally normal apple, under the skin almost entirely in brown spots of rough tissue - the consequence of strokes. There are such fruits do not really want. So what color is the fruit? Light, so you immediately notice its quality at the moment? And maybe, any, but neatly removed, not killed, with a dense elastic skin, taking a mechanical effect on yourself?

How do you decide which is better: one mighty tree or several small ones? With a sprawling( broad), but low crown or with a compact pyramidal, looking up? Trees, in which the branches grow from the trunk at a height of up to 50 centimeters( with a low stem) or much higher? The answers to these and many other similar questions are associated with any specific methods of agricultural technology and with a whole technological complex. Most recently in industrial gardens, and now in many homesteads, varieties with a mighty crown and a very or very high stem were preferred. In recent years, we have been betting on varieties with a compact crown, since they can be placed more on a unit of area, it is more convenient to take care of them, harvesting. The manifestation of an extreme desire is the creation of varieties with a columnar crown, when the whole tree is one trunk up to 2-3 meters high, without noticeably developed branches.

In Canada, an unusual branch was noted on the old Mekintosh tree. The graft on the stock made it possible to obtain seedlings of a peculiar form - the trees grew in the form of a column. The variety was called Vajik. Apples do not have a good taste. As a result of hybridization, plants with the same type of crown are obtained: the trunk and small branches are entirely covered with rings. Plants with this type of fruiting are called spurs. They are very fruitful. Imagine a fantastic garden of trunk-columns, laced with beautiful fruits of fine taste. In addition, trees are resistant to diseases and pests, winter hardiness. Neither pruning, nor fighting with infection!

Which of the varieties is better: the one whose fruit ripens almost simultaneously and is prone to shattering, or with extended maturation, with fruits that are firmly and permanently hanging on the tree? Probably, in a small garden near the garden the second type is better, as the gradual maturation prolongs the period of consumption. In the industrial garden with mechanized harvesting the first type is preferable, in this case it is necessary to strictly follow the course of ripening in order to remove the harvest from the tree, and not to pick up the crumbled fruits from the ground.

Which is more preferable: the stalk is short, but thick enough or, conversely, thin and long? Which is better: shoot a plum, cherry, cherry with a stem or without? If not, then what should be the mandatory requirement? Could you answer? Let's try together. Apples on a long peduncle are somewhat more difficult to clean, and already in a container they are mutually damaged by the sharp ends of the fruit of the

legs. If the fruits of cherries, plums, cherries are removed without peduncles, it is very important that at the same time the integrity of the skin and tissues in the place of attachment of the fetus to the peduncle is preserved. Otherwise, the fruits will lose both keeping and transportability.

These and many more "trifles" should be remembered by the breeder when selecting hybrid seedlings.

As we see, that the work of a breeder should be productive, he must have the basics of genetics, be able to select parents pairs reasonably, know the whole arsenal of selection methods and be able to choose the most suitable for solving a specific problem, own methods for evaluating a hybrid material, for example, by early diagnostics of resistance to diseasesand pests, winter hardiness at different stages of rest, physical and mechanical properties of fruits and vegetative parts of plants, reactions to herbicides, retardants, fertilizers, pesticides. The work on the creation of new varieties requires the participation of a whole group of specialists: the breeder-pomologist, the physiologist, the agrochemist, the defender of pests and diseases, the engineer, the nurseryman. A breeder is a kind of constructor who first develops a program for creating a variety with the help of his knowledge, and then subsequently implements it in kind. To achieve significant success, the breeder must be single-minded, collected, persevering, enthusiastic at times to self-denial, a harmoniously developed, highly skilled professional, physically strong and. .. lucky.

Such a person in domestic gardening was Professor Khasan Karimovich Enikeev. His life path was, as it were, predetermined already at the very beginning - he graduated from high school at the Biological Station of Young Naturalists in Moscow. He worked directly with Michurin. He received his special education at the Fruit and Vegetable Institute in the city of Michurinsk. Candidate work carried out in the All-Union Institute of Plant Industry under the leadership of Academician NI Vavilov. Scientific activity is connected with the selection and propagation of stone fruit crops: cherries, plums, cherries, apricots, and in recent years, sea buckthorns. Repeatedly represented our country's interests at congresses in Holland, Britain, Canada, Italy, France, Yugoslavia, Germany. Thanks to his connections with foreign colleagues, he replenished the existing collections in the country with modern varieties, many of which were further used in breeding. I trained cadres of Russian breeders. Together with his pupils and assistants he created 20 varieties of cherries and plums, of which 7 are already zoned, and 12 are considered promising. Author of 160 publications. Honored Scientist of the RSFSR, laureate of the State Prize of the USSR, holder of the IV Michurin gold medal.

Of course, not everyone succeeds in leaving behind a long-term variety, expressing an undeniable idea for the ages, creating a school. But every successive generation of breeders remembers that the path to its success is prepared by the work of famous, and more often forgotten or unknown in life people who have devoted themselves to their favorite business.

The highest official domestic achievement, according to the state zoning for 1988, for various areas of

of the Non-chernozem zone, apple varieties are now recognized -Mischurinumlessbesseme, Zhigulevskoe, Orlovsky striped, Bogatyr, Veteran, Orlik, Sinap Orlovsky, Northern Synapse, Cinnamon, Tellisaare, Pears - Cosmic, Lyubimitsa Yakovleva, Elegant Efimova, Marble, Lada, Chizhevskaya, Cherry - Zhukovskaya, Octave, Turgenevka, Crimson, Griot Moskovsky, plum - Red ball, Skoroplodnaya, Memory of Timiryazev, Volga beauty, Hungarian Pulkovo. More interesting varieties and in large numbers are still listed in the prospective. A much richer assortment in regions where the conditions more fully satisfy the requirements of the breeds. In Siberia, the Altai set of cultures is more diverse. But everywhere the assortment, unfortunately, is far from perfect, and young, hardworking, knowledgeable enthusiasts who would pick up the cause of famous Russian and Soviet plant breeders are needed.

However, maybe in the near future the main burden of creating new varieties will be taken over by the computer? And the scientist will only have to press the small buttons, thereby entering into the memory of the intelligent machine the necessary information. As a result, a series of consecutive crossings will be displayed on the screen, which must be performed in order to obtain the desired, and with minimal effort and time. And probably, only one flower will have to be pollinated - after all the machine will calculate all the variants. Hardly. Nature always makes its own adjustments. But it is not terrible, if the amount of crosses does not decrease. It can even be increased, since all work on seed preparation and germination, and most importantly, according to the estimation of the seedlings, will help to execute the robots.

Why, for example, can not assess the resistance to the pathogen as follows: insert a drop of juice into the analyzer of a stable plant, and then inject in parallel drops of juice from other seedlings. The machine will select the juice to be served, and the rest will reject. Moreover, this correspondence is established not by a single parameter, but, for example, by the biochemical composition, electrical conductivity, radiation background, coagulation with the addition of specific sera, glow, polarization, etc. It is also possible to evaluate seedlings for winter hardiness, fruit quality,not having them, on the suitability of future plants and their fruits for mechanized cultivation and harvesting. By the way, you can go the other way: to put data into the computer and get a recommendation for the construction of a fruit harvester.

The computerization of the selection process allows an unlimited amount of sample analysis, and most importantly, to quickly evaluate the data. You can even dream of a fundamentally new plant, combining the dignity of apples, pears, chokeberry aronia - imagine apples hanging on a tree, gathered in an umbrella, like a mountain ash, or peaches hanging from branches like a grapes. So why did it happen?