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Growing from Seed FAQ

Sowing Seeds Saved from Hybrids

13 years ago

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Growing plants from hybrid seeds is lots of fun because you can sometimes get variations that are quite wonderful. You NEVER get little "Frankenstein-monster" plants, lol.

Hybrids may or may not come true from seed. The flower colors might be somewhat different, or the shape or count of the petals might be different, or the leaves might be more shiny, or a little less pointed, the height might be different by a few inches, etc. Those are probably all the expected differences you could see....if you notice them at all. You've got a 50/50 chance that the seedlings will be different from the parent plant....either they will be or they won't be different.

Growing the seeds of a hybrid is actually a lot like the children of one couple. Sometimes they are all identical...each child's face has the same features as it's brothers and sisters, or sometimes each child is different and looks like any of the grandparents, or even it's great-grandparents.

Enjoy growing the seeds of a hybrid plant. When the seedlings grow to maturity you may find that you're in love with the whole batch, or some may be more appealing to you than others. Keep your favorites and share or compost the rest.

Enjoy your garden!

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Saved seed from hybrid, Merit corn. I can't tell a differance.
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Comments (7)
Interesting. You have chosen the perfect variety to work with, because although Merit was bred by Asgrow and released in 1961, it is now owned by Monsanto. A re-selected strain will take a few years, but if you start growing a few plants just for seed and select for top characteristics, you can do it. Merit is a Golden Bantam type, most likely hybridized for earliness and rust resistance. Several seed companies sell improved strains of Golden Bantam, so you could even do your own crossing by interplanting the two varieties. Good luck!
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Saving seed from F1 hybrids
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Depending on what it is, you may end up with something very similar to the F1. I'm no expert in this by any means, but I've saved a few seeds here and there from produce and from F1 plants. It doesn't hurt to grow them out and see what you get. I tried growing out F2 pepper seeds a few years ago and I kept getting 3 different types of peppers. Of the 3, the ones I really liked were seedless, so unless I took cuttings, I could never keep growing those. I've saved seed from white marigolds and they would never germinate. I've read that tomatoes grown from Campari F2 seeds are just like or very close to the F1. It is fun to try...I usually have some kind of experimental planting each season, but on a very small scale..
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Sowing Aloe hybrid seeds
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Hi Josiah, I just use a peat seed starting mix and then add some perlite to it, keeping it moist with a sprayer. I sow mine in little plastic to-go food containers. I start to harvest my pods when the first one in a bunch dries. The rest dry and open soon after. Once the pods are a certain size, and don't look like they are growing more in size, they are viable and can be picked before opening. You can quickly get hundreds of seed from a few plants, so once they grow out, you have to be very selective in what you let out, to avoid hordes of similar-looking hybrids.
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Saving seeds from hybrids
Q
Comments (3)
Jay, That was very interesting. Thanks for linking it so we could read it. Every year Black Pearl reseeds (though not necessarily heavily) in my garden and sometimes in my containers, and I dig up the volunteers and move them wherever I want them. I have seen a great amount of variability between self-sown seedlings. At the time I'm digging up volunteers, I keep the ones with darker foliage and rogue out the ones that are sigificantly greener merely because I like the darker foliage better. I've also noticed that the volunteer seedlings with green foliage don't seem as vigorous as those with darker foliage. Helen, When I grew Purple Millet from saved seed, I mostly got the lighter foliage too. Only one plant in about a dozen had the darker foliage, and I didn't save seed from it. (It was a bad fire year and I was away from the garden too much at grassfires that summer to save seed from anything.) I assume the seed is so expensive because of the work involved in crossing the right parents to produce the F-1 hybrid....that, and the law of supply and demand. When the ornamental purple millet first hit the market, I thought the seed prices would come down in a couple of years, but they really haven't. Dawn
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