I did both of those methods. I found when I had a handful or more, the pulling them out and putting them on a plate to dry method was not practical, feasible because of how slow the process was.
I am a newbie to ground cherry, so I am sure someone else could provide better quality methods.
There is a description in the strawberry thread about using a blender to save seeds. The same kind of approach works with ground cherries.
Last year I was at a place without a blender processing seeds so I put some water in a big glass and used utensils to muddle a couple of batches of seeds. It was slower and less effective than a blender, but it still worked on the same principle. Pour off the pieces of flesh and skin, then spread out the tiny seeds to dry.
For personal use, I have also sliced the berries into two or three pieces and let them dry or put them in a dehydrator. It yields a fruit leather that I will warn you can imbue fruity flavor on things around it if it’s not tightly sealed. But I have successfully chunked up this leather to seed ground cherries.
I wouldn’t want to send seeds processed in that matter to the seed exchange though.
I am happy with my results so far on my second planting of ground cherry. The second planting consists of mostly the seeds I harvested from my GTS ground cherries I planted back in the late winter this year. There was one additional variety I had enough seeds to spare a direct seed effort. So what is shown growing in the picture is a second generation GTS ground cherry and some pineapples.
Three of the biggest plants shown in the up close image are the 3 remaining survivors of a transplant effort; 69 of them died. The rest of the plants were all direct seeded. By the way, I had a good success rate germinating these direct seeded ground cherries. Whereas during my first attempt, I had zero success. The difference was higher temperatures, a light grass clipping mulch, and careful watch on moisture (not let dry out for too long).
I’ve aided these baby ground cherry plants by not letting them dry out too long. I also buried a ton of plant matter in this bed and let it rot down for about a month previous to planting. When they get a little bigger, I will cut off the aid completely.
Also, below is one of the original GTS ground cherries. It seems at home in this garden. I now regret culling the other originals. Its productive weeks are long gone now. But I still get the occasional cherry that I notice ripe that hasn’t been sitting out too long. At this point, I am observing to see if production increases when temperatures cool down some.
I can also see how this plant could easily self seed and
proliferate. I hope I will be able to move the genetics in the direction of rot resistance. Sometimes I am not able to check for cherries but once a week. I have lost more cherries to rot than I have collected. My environment is very humid.
Wonderful project! Good work.
I’ve got groundcherries on the go this year. Never found the time for them. But last year i visited a friend who had it all over her greenhouse. She was unhappy it behaved like a weed and covered most of her soil. I saw a very usefull groundcovercrop…The fruits tasted wonderfull of pineapple.
Later i ate a dried fruitmix and found they had added them.
Somehow people kept giving them to me at seedexchanges.
I’ve preseeded them in one big mix and transplanted them into the aubergine grex.
Weird thing is the biggest ones grow elsewhere on a place with fresh manure. So it might be tomatillos… Or ground cherries secretely love fresher manure. Which would be very exciting because i know a maddened dairy farmer who lays out giant heaps of manure in his fields in lines in spring to be composted by nature i could start to colonize next year with an unholy mix of insanely genetically diverse groundcherries.
I wonder if groundcherries are like chenopodium in my environment. They may instead choose their own alternate location somewhere other than where seeded in the garden. I have a large area of around the garden I am learning to keep my eyes out for roving groundcherries. Probably there are as many individual plants out there where I don’t recall seeding as where I did.
I’m curious about these kinds of things. It maybe my not realizing I’ve put seed in those places, but I have to wonder if the seeds are being eaten, or washed or blown around, or something.
There is limit to their undergover possibilities. They do need lots of sun and if they have to compete they will easily get to 1,5m even in my short season. If they have unlimeted sun they barely get to 30cm, but even just 2 plants next to each other are already almost double that. P.angulata also seems to have more upright growth habbit. Definetely could be undercover for something that is well spaced and skinny like corn, but it’s easy to make mistake with spacing and have it outcompete what it supposed to be undercrop to.
It exploded higher this week My eggplants/aubergines are the covercrop now…
My corn/mais has maxima as covercrop. The parsnip or salsify might work.
I’ve really been enjoying the development of the neighbors wild ground cherry population. There are a couple of rows of corn on the edge of the sorghum field where the berries are starting to ripen. I ate one today, which was yellow, a bit smaller than a golf ball, and had a little bit of a muskmelon flavor. I’m starting to save seeds from these as of today, with intention to share to the exchange here 
I’m finding myself more interested in his wild plants than my planted ones. Also in these rows are Palmer amaranth and a chenopodium I’m not completely confident about my id for.
Here’s an update. They are growing well. Some are showing heat stress. Some are asking for a nitrogen hit. Some leaves are turning yellow. I wonder if that is self-cannibalization to convert the stuff in the leaves to recycle to produce fruit?
I’ve also noticed both male and female parts on the flowers. I have also not noticed any pollinators being attracted to the plants. I have a feeling I will need to hand pollinate eventually.
My first year growing Queen of Malinalco, which I am assuming means it is a relatively inbred selection from the Malinalco landrace. It’s out there where it can mix with the other physalis.
Once I’ve increased its seed, knock on wood, I’m hoping that the elongated fruit could be a useful trait in crossing with other species and varieties.
My Going To Seed groundcherry mix grows wonderfully. Many fruits ripened this week and dropped to the ground. Those that look like ground cherries taste fabulous.
About half of the population seem like tomatillos. I don’t like the flavor at all.
There are two species of ground cherry that hang around my neighborhood which I believe are perennial. One I believe to be Physalis virginiana, which I submitted to the seed exchange in fall 2022.
The other I believe to be Physalis heterophylla, and its portrayed in the photos. Last year I gathered a small amount of seed from the neighborhood from a roadside ditch but not enough to submit to the exchange. (That population got destroyed by road maintenance since then.)
This year I have established about a half dozen individual plants, and they seem healthy. However they have not yet even flowered. From my observations of this type feral/wild as well as growing them myself now, I wonder if they may tend to not produce fruit in their first season.
Or maybe they tend to not produce fruit in their first season if they have to focus on a fight for survival. They got no help from me and are in an area with high competition, this is not a garden bed.
Anyone else have have any thoughts on the possibility of of a perennial type not making fruit its first year?
There is some new research on interspecific crosses in Physalis which is pretty encouraging, I don’t think it’s been posted. These folks had a lot of luck setting fruit with viable seeds from interspecific crosses, including with Physalis ixocarpa tomatillo.
Maybe their success was because they seem quite fastidious about pollen collection and pollination.
Reproductive biology and hybridization of Physalis L. species
Vol.:(0123456789)1 3Brazilian Journal of Botany (2022) 45:1037–1045
Original paywall URL: [Reproductive biology and hybridization of Physalis L. species | SpringerLink]
A total of 50 artificial crosses were performed for each hybrid combination and 50 manual self-pollination was performed for each parent from the beginning of flowering, totaling 2450 pollinations.
…
The fruit fixation index of artificial crosses was determined by counting the fruits developed from artificial pollination, expressed as a percentage. In sequence, the number of seeds per fruit was obtained by manual counting. To obtain the germination percentage, four replicates of 25 seeds were used, sown in gearbox boxes containing paper moistened with distilled water at 2.5 times its weight, according to recommendations.Fruit fixation was observed in most inter-specific hybrid combinations. The most noteworthy fruit fixation rates were noted for P. peruviana and P. pubescens. As these are female parents, high rates of fruit fixation in combination with most species were observed, except when they received pollen from P. minima and P. daturifolia.
Concerning the hybridizations, the highest number of seeds were obtained for the following combination: P. pubescens combined with the pollen of P. angulata, P. pruinosa, P. peruviana, and P. ixocarpa, and P. peruviana combined with pollen from P. pruinosa, P. pubescens, P. ixocarpa, and P. angulata, with some seeds per fruit of ≥ 119.00. The other hybrid combinations generated fruits containing less than 60 seeds.
The percentage of seeds germination obtained from inter-specific Physalis species crosses and self-fertilization was higher than 84.25%, with no significant difference between crosses (p < 0.05). All seeds germinated from the fifth day after sowing.
Despite the variation in fruit fixation and the number of seed results, embryos develop normally in most inter-specific crosses, allowing for the germination of hybrid Physalis seeds. This facilitates the development of new Physalis genotypes without the need for embryo rescue techniques.
Mark, wow, physalis seems like a wide open field of possibilities ! I can’t wait to try some crosses next year. I was already planning on crossing peruviana and longifolia. Longifolia is genetically the closest hardy North American ground cherry to peruviana. Physalis are tougher than tomatoes in a lot of ways, so it would be amazing to bring wider possibilities into tomatillo genetics. The paper you uploaded links to a different one about grafting, which is also very interesting.
Thank you for letting me know about the attachment. I was also doing research into the possibility of crossing Thai eggplant with Carolina horsenettle (seems very possible, no grafting probably needed) and I swapped the names on those two PDFs as I was saving them. I should double check these things in the future.
This message should have the intended Physalis breeding paper quoted above.
Reproductive biology and hybridization of Physalis L. species.pdf (1.3 MB)
I have no experience with those species, but I would expect they might be behind because of high competition and I assume no maintenance. Can easily slow down early growth weeks or months even.
I wonder why that paper had different results than others? I feel like there is something left out or I missed something when I scanned it through. If it worked that easily on some of those pairs I would think there is some anecdotal evidence or other studies to support it. I wonder if they had plants denied other pollination and thus encourage interspecies pollination. I have only done some crosses to angulate with pubencens and pruinoisa and they didn’t take very easily. Although that is common with crosses in general for me. I do have couple fruits that might give seeds. if tomatillo can easily cross with angulate then I should have crosses in them, but I doubt it happens just like that.
Jesse,
Did you see this study on Physalis crosses? In Portuguese, but the abstract is in English. Divergence genetic in Physalis species and interspecific hybrids based on morphoagronomic characters | Research, Society and Development
There seems to be a lot of similarity in terms of what hybrids they got with the link Mark posted.
How is angulata by the way? Do you think it could provide any helpful agronomic qualities?
That’s the same study. I don’t doubt they made crosses, but I do wonder how when there seems to be no anecdotal evidence to suggest that it would be easy. Angulata for me seemed lot more productive, but it has too long ripening cycle which was a bit unexpected after they started flowering about same time as pruinoisa and pubencens. I think it might be some delay in fruit development, maybe to compensate setting of the fruit. Which itself isn’t bad trait if it wouldn’t carry on making more and more fruits. I would need more determinate growth and fruiting. I just opened 2 interspecies crosses I still had and got total of 1 seed. Atleast it looks like fully developed ripe seed. Some crosses between 2 angulata accesions had full seedload so it seems it’s not that easy to me to make interspecies crosses. Small samplesize though, but next year if I feel like I need to make more I know to make bunch of them. Maybe using angulata as pollen donor would have been easier. Might also get some volunteer crosses although most likely gonna be in a bad spot.
Ah yes it does look like the it was a different paper done on the same hybrids. I would like to play around with some more physalis species myself including angulata and floridana. Does pubescens have hairier leaves compared to pruinosa? I see Aunt Molly’s listed as pruinosa but sometimes see Pineapple listed as pubescens. I’ve grown Aunt Molly’s but not sure I’ve grown pubescens. Regarding the success rate for hybrids, one thing I considered, because the study was done in Sao Paolo–very often interspecific hybrids have greater fruit set at higher temperatures.
