The thing with bean crosses is that you have to be very observant. I had a row growing of the crossed seed that was somewhat intertwined. Since PI207373 is not a snap type bean, and one of my desired traits is a snap bean, I watched the crossed plants carefully for any beans that showed snap bean traits. That is how I first spotted the red bean plant.
How long it takes to stabilize any cross entirely depends on how many traits you are selecting for and whether they are recessive or not. It is much easier to stabilize recessive traits. Also, with any breeding effort, making a cross of necessity compromises traits such as bean length in the Fortex hybrid. It is nearly guaranteed that I will have to make a backcross to Fortex to get back the bean length that I want. In your cross, the number of compromised traits is limited because the parents are highly similar. You could for example select a bean similar to Uncle Steve's with larger seed and higher productivity with flat pods. That would be far easier to achieve than in my case with a cross involving a small disease tolerant dry bean with a highly selected stringless very long snap bean. I am selecting for any color other than purple, long snap phenotype, excellent flavor, and most important, very high levels of disease resistance. To more directly answer your question, you can probably stabilize something interesting in 5 generations. I will probably have something interesting in 7 or 8 generations and then will have to backcross and do another 5 or 6 generations to get a stable line with the desired traits.
|