TACF’s Maryland Chapter is making great strides in its backcross breeding program, and has established two seed orchards with two excellent partner organizations. One orchard is on land belonging to the Washington Suburban Sanitation Commission (WSSC), which is the water and sewer utility for Montgomery and Prince Georges counties. The seed orchard site is on the south side of the Triadelphia reservoir (first set of pictures). The other partner is the Central Maryland Research and Education Center (CMREC), a University of Maryland research farm in Clarksville. Both partners have provided excellent support, both in maintaining the orchards, and in integrating MD-TACF into their public outreach events.
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- Bruce Levine hauling seed mix soil.
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- Ron “Clem” Clements gets help from some young volunteers.
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- This large group of members and volunteers made the project possible.
MD-TACF planted 1500 seeds at the WSSC orchard with a crew of about 30 chapter members and volunteers on March 25, and another 1500 seeds at CMREC. Here, we had an especially large number of new volunteers, thanks in large part to an article about our work at CMREC that appeared in the Baltimore Sun in March.
In total, MD-TACF now has one to four duplications of 12 family lines from the Clapper source of resistance in its seed orchards. The oldest plots have been begun to be evaluated for resistance, but large scale plantings this year and last mean that we will be doing much larger numbers of inoculations and evaluations in 2018 and 2019. The chapter is also breeding trees from the Musick source of resistance, and planted the first Musick B3 orchard last year. Since seed orchards from different sources of resistance should not be co-located, MD-TACF is putting out the word that we are interested in new partners interested in hosting Musick seed orchards in about five years from now. (CMREC pictures below.)
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- Happy volunteers doing great work.
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- Volunteers planted nearly 1,500 seeds.
