And also does it matter which plant I choose to be the Female like if I choose moon and stars to be female is it going to make the melons different from if I chose to make the Congo the female?

This post was edited by nu2hydro on Mon, Aug 19, 13 at 13:46

anyone have any kind of input on this?

No it will all be different. think of it like people. the kids of parents rarely end up closely alike even twins. maybe once in a while like my friend him and his brother look almost completely alike but most likely its a combination of the plants. if you think about it in colors, lets say mom is yellow and dad is blue. the kids are not going to be 50% each. its gonna be more like kid A is 42% yellow and 58% blue while kid B is more like 48% yellow and 52% blue. same can be way more closely related to others than that and be 80% yellow or taking after their mom. thats why you have to stabilize the hybrid to be more uniform but it takes a long time. it dosent matter which melon is the mom unless we decode the genome and find out something crazy. so no just make the hybrid and plant the seeds in different areas and see the different combinations in the gens that you have, and pick out the good combinations and take their seeds, and the ones that melons that turned out ugly, or whatever pick out. if you think about it, its good not all the melon hybrids will be exactly the same becuase you can pick and chose through all the variety that you will have which is awesome! maybe you want (assuming congo melon is red on inside) melons with dark orange on the inside instead of dark yellow. let me know how it goes good luck!!!!

Alright thank you I will keep you posted on the outcomes of the hybrids

awsome. Ill defintely trade you for some for sure.

Both 'Moon and Stars' (MS) and 'Congo' (C) are open-pollinated (not F1 hybrid) cultivars. Watermelon are self-fertile and since seed producers will grow each cultivar in isolation from other watermelon cultivars the plants will be self-pollinated successfully by insects [cultivars are typically distinct, uniform and stable]. They will inbreed generation after generation and become fixed or homozygous for all the characteristics that are specific to the cultivar and important to the seed producer and growers.

The F1 seedlings from the cross of MS X C (or its reciprocal) will be relatively genetically uniform [F1 hybrids]. How uniform depends on how much inbreeding has actually occurred within each cultivar. For example, Congo was introduced in 1949. There will have been a number of generations of inbreeding to make the cultivar phenotypically uniform for its distinct characteristics (and as a consequence genetically uniform for those characteristics) before it was introduced - often five or six. There are likely to have been a further 60 generations of inbreeding since then.

As an example, if the cross is MS x C with MS being the seed parent and C being the pollen parent then the watermelons that are produced by the pollination will contain the F1 seeds. When those seeds are planted the plants are the F1 generation. Those plants will be more or less genetically uniform and their watermelons will be relatively similar in appearance. If you self-pollinate the flowers or grow no other watermelons nearby and allow insects to do the pollination then the seeds in those watermelons will be the F2 generation. The plants that grow from the F2 generation seeds will be genetically variable and the watermelons those plants produce will be relatively different in appearance..

The seedlings/plants of the F2 generation will be genetically variable.

Most of the time the offspring from reciprocal crosses (MS x C) versus (C x MS) are not distinguishable. Sometimes they are. Sometimes any such differences are due to genetics and other times they are caused by non-genetic effects (eg non-genetic maternal effects). Some maternal effects are caused by seed size differences (which can be genetic or not) and others by seed provisioning differences (other causes are possible).

This post was edited by admmad on Fri, Sep 27, 13 at 12:28