Silly question about hybrid seeds
HotHabaneroLady
10 years ago
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digdirt2
10 years agolast modified: 9 years agoseysonn
10 years agolast modified: 9 years agoRelated Discussions
Is this true about watermelon seed saving?
Comments (13)You can always try saving hybrid seed. It may not come true to the parent, but in some cases it may. After all that is how breeding new varieties is/was done. Cross breeding and then selecting for desired characteristics over several generations. There also are some varieties which are labeled as hybrid but are not. I've always suspected that it was done to keep people from saving seed. Anyway if you have the watermelons growing now, might as well save some seed and give them a try next year. It may or may not work out, but you have little to loose other than some wasted space in next years garden....See MoreSilly question about pumpkin.
Comments (3)Thank you! As a side note, the problem with Google is that certain users get different results. They "guess" what each signed in user is looking for. I've no idea why my results thought I was obviously looking for something else. I love Google and the idea is a good one, but sometimes it's a fail for that very reason. Here is a link that might be useful: More on the Google results subject....See MoreA Question about hybrid vegatable seeds...
Comments (6)Gata, Yes, what The Mohave Kid said. For a specific example, if you were to hand pollinate two heirloom tomatoes, those seeds would produce an F1 hybrid tomato that would be uniform and maybe better than either parent variety, so you might like your F1 hybrid a lot. But if you were to save seed from your new F1 tomato, those seeds would be F2 seeds (second generation seeds) and all sorts of recombinations of characteristics would occur and very few, if any, would be like your F1 hybrid. Some might be very weird and possibly, if you grew a lot of them, you might find one very similar to your original F1 hybrid. You could even conceivably find a recombination that was even somewhat better then your F1 hybrid. If you want to grow more of your F1 hybrid tomato, without recombining vast numbers of different combinations of the two parent's different characteristics, you need only to repeat the cross using the original "pure" heirloom strains. Or, as an alternative, you could simply grow cuttings from your original F1 hybrid cross. If you had a lot of space to grow thousands of tomatoes, you could stabilize a new open pollinated version of your F1 hybrid by growing enough F2s to find a single plant much like the F1, saving as many seed as possible from that plant (you could even multiply it by cuttings to increase that seed yield) and then grow a lot of F3s from that specific selection. Then look through all of your F3 tomatoes for one or two plants very similar to what you are trying to stabilize. The F3s will still be showing a lot of new variations, but they will be more noticeably related to the self pollinated F2 individual that you selected. You will be filling compost piles with tomato plant rejects. You may find only one acceptable plant in a thousand or ten thousand. But each new generation, from F3 to F4 to F5 and so on, will show more convergence toward your desired new tomato, provided you ruthlessly select only the best for the seed of your next generation. By repeating this for several generations you will have stabilized an open pollinated version of your original F1 hybrid tomato. If you were growing lots of plants in each generation and keeping only the very best it is conceivable that your stabilized variety could be even better than your original F1 hybrid variety. (And you will have created a mountain of rejected tomato vine compost as a by-product.) So now you would have a stable superior tomato that you could cross with some other open pollinated variety to create a wholly new F1 hybrid tomato, and the madness could begin again. As you see, it is really much easier simply to repeat making the original cross to produce more F1 hybrid seed than it is to save and grow very many seeds from them in a multi-year effort to stabilize the new tomato as an open-pollinated version. Some F1 hybrid seeds are expensive because hand pollination may be required. Some F1 hybrid seeds cost less because they have found a way to make the cross without hand labor or with much less hand labor (or with cheaper hand labor overseas.) For example, economical F1 hybrid corn is produced by lopping off the tassels of the plants of the "female" variety to prevent self pollination. These female plants are grown in rows alternating with the "male" variety which gets to retain its tassels. The wind just carries the pollen from the tassels of the male variety to the silks of the female variety and F1 hybrid seed between those two varieties is produced on the cobs of the female variety very inexpensively. I hope that explains how F1 hybrid vegetable seed produce uniform plants. They are uniform because each has the same set of pure-strain parents. Incidentally, if you have the space to grow quite a few plants, plant breeding can be an interesting hobby. MM...See MoreNewbie question about Helleborus hybrids
Comments (10)What you can expect to get depends on the type of hybrids you are dealing with. The oriental hybrids - more correctly Helleborus x hybridus - are those that will self-hybridize freely so are typically sold as seed strains. All that means is that the grower has kept like colored plants separate from other colors. These are sometimes sold as named forms but for the named forms to come true they MUST be propagated clonally or by TC. Seed propagated forms of named xhybridus can deviate quite easily from the parent plants depending on how pollination is controlled. These are the hybrids I would suggest you select while in bloom as that is really the only way you can be assured of a specific color/look. Other hybrids like 'Ivory Prince', 'Pink Marble', 'Cinnamon Snow', 'Pink Ice', 'Candy Love', etc. are quite different and highly controlled hybrids. Typically these are all propagated by tissue culture, as a good many do not/cannot occur naturally but are hybridized by hand over many years of trial and error and with a great deal of expense involved as well. These are most often patented plants as a result. These do not offer the range of color the xhybridus.....most of these flower in the whitish-green range with pink/mauve overtones. And Helleborus niger is a species not a hybrid :-) Flowers of these will always be white, so inevitably come true to form. There ARE named forms of niger, but they have more to do with profusion, timing or height of bloom rather than any difference in coloring....See MoreHotHabaneroLady
10 years agolast modified: 9 years agoseysonn
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10 years agolast modified: 9 years agoHotHabaneroLady
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10 years agolast modified: 9 years agoHotHabaneroLady
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10 years agolast modified: 9 years agoJulie Racster
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