I have a lot of hybrid vitis grapes in my garden. Have mostly crossed American Species with Vinifera Muscats, but also have some really exotic crosses, Like Rupestris x Cordifolia hybrid, crossed with vitis Caribaea, as well as a hybrid of ES 2 4 7 x Vitis Coignetiae. Have a lot of extra seeds I could share from these crosses.

I'll be doing a bucnh of test crosses among about 5 lines of peppers, both hot and sweet, focusing on early maturity and yield. I also plan to cross a couple of snap peas and butternut squash, focusing on gourmet quality.

I am working on a 7-week sweet corn, a squashbug resistant Butternut squash, a day-neutral chiltipine (wild pepper, a mild chiltipine, inbreeding Elberta peach, recurrant selection in strawberries, and hope to get some apple breeding (and eating) stock this year.
Walter

I'm crossing in every combination, 20 varieties of tomatoes this year. Next year, I plan on crossing another 20 different varieties of tomatoes, while I work on selecting and further crossing this year's offspring. My intent is to create incompletely stabilized varieties by making
non-inbred selections, which will then be hand pollinated. Yes, I do have some specific goals in mind. One is to create a series of "Marianna's Peace" hybrids that are early enough to grow in zone 3. (Late varieties do yield fruit here, but we're lucky to get 2 or 3 ripe tomatoes from them before frost hits, and not everyone has cold-frame technology). I am trying several ways to get an early Marianna's Peace. I also want to try to improve that pretty "Basinga" both with and without hybridizing. Multiple single specific character trait selections, at least 8 of them, with strict dual-best-plant selections in each of the 8 lineages, along with trying to remove what looks to me like "inbreeding-depression" by neighbor-plant, same-variety cross pollination just might make this pretty little tomato earlier. (Among all the selections, I intend to have one duo set be the taste-test winner, mainly by being the most similar to the original. Bias on the part of my hedonistic taste testing friends, well... oh well. Would that count as part of regional bias? After all, what I want to do is make some of those late crop varieties available to this fickle part of zone 3, and the local humans here belong as part of zone 3 too!)

I have many more intentions, and am sure some will show themselves to me as I grow them out next year.

Side question about "Hillbilly": Seems like every catalog describes it differently. Can anyone recall what Hillbilly tomato was like years ago?

I also will be crossing 3 kinds of melons this year, again, selecting for what will ripen here, and for flavor. For these, I will be the sole taste tester, unless some two legged varmints get to them first. (Can table salt really be put into shotgun shells? KIDDING!) At any rate, nobody
around here will recognize them because all 3 are foreign looking french melons that have never been seen in these parts. Plus, I don't think anyone has ever succeeded in growing a melon around here before.

I have 3 kinds of watermelon to cross also. I admit it will be an absolute miracle if I can get even one to ripen, but I will use every trick I can think of or discover. Meantime, does anyone know where I can find wild african watermelon seed? Somewhere on the internet I saw a photo of a green and black one shaped kind of like a hubbard or cushaw squash, and it had bumpy skin. Wild African watermelon input just might do the trick.

I also plan on crossing 5 heirloom pole dry beans this year for my own purposes. The descendents of the five I cross this year will all be crossed with some of the larger-plant varieties of bush dry beans next year. I want to create a series of non-runner, very vigorous and large bush dry bean varieties to plant in my 4' by 18' framed raised beds, along the long north lengths of each bed of melon for wind breaks. The vigorous and diverse dry pole beans will, as always, be planted to grow up my tomato cages. Beans are so good for soil!!! Wish I had a hundred pounds of innocculant.

Marshall Smyth

Wow Marshall. I am edibreeding too, dehybridizing 'Winterbor' kale, trying to get my sweetpotato collection to flower:-), and I am getting Sandwich-slice squash to select for adaption down here in GA ;-);-):-). The rest of my garden is going to make the money to sustain such crosses.

Billy

I forgot the Mutant Jerusalem artichoke with large tubers.

I've also crossed some fall bearing Raspberries to the Korean wineberry and have about 7 bearing plants now, five of which are fall bearing as well.
Would love to cross Tayberry to Sylvan or some such hybrid.

Wondered if anyone else has plans to make crosses amongst the blackberries and hybrids. I recently was told that Kotata berry, Sylvan berry and Tayberry are all hexaploid, so I think the chances of a viable cross with them is good. I want to cross tayberry x Kotata this season and welcome any tech. advice as to when is the best time and such.

I don't have any expert advice on brambles to offer, so this may seem elementary. Careful timing of such a cross is more important if you're working with different ploidies or if one parent is better used for pollen or seed only (therefore it probably doesn't apply to a hex x hex hybrid berry cross). Different bloom times may dictate the direction of the cross unless you want to store pollen frozen; if the bloom overlaps you can easily perform the cross both ways. Depending on how much faith you put in the source of your information about ploidy, you might want to try the cross both ways regardless in case they don't actually have the same chromosome number. If one direction takes but the other doesn't, it might indicate that they are in fact different. I'm not exactly sure how it works in the genus Rubus, but with some plants if you end up with a pentaploid (from tet x hex) you could have some fertility problems in the first generation offspring. I like Rubus quite a bit and began experimenting with some crosses last summer, but have done little more than learn from a few of my mistakes so far. It's been fun!