The harvest has started, how close is everyone else to their harvest, is it going well?. Once again it looks like I am having an unbelievably good year. I guess we shall have to wait for germinations. But my indigo is on a mission this year. Way over 100 seeds so far, with about 7 hips to go! If I get one germination from my own plant " Goliath" which I have quite a few hips to go and over 30 seeds then I will spend next season throwing the kitchen sink at it. Very excited for the next seasons germinations to start and to hopefully have the winners of this season flowering to show me it’s all worth it!
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Indeed, @James_D !
Congratulations on your successful year!
Here too, the season is finally here. I harvested the last hips from my crosses yesterday. Still have some OP hips remaining, I’ll get them this weekend.
It’s been a small harvest this year, I had to spend a lot of time away from home and didn’t get as much done as I would have liked, but it’s better than nothing!
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The last 2 seasons I have gone as hard as my roses would allow really. Not sure I will be able to keep up that level of crossing in the future. But saying that I have got a lot of pollen frozen for next year!
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Uh oh!
I..um…I actually…just started hand-pollinating 2 weeks ago.
I know most of you start hybridizing right away, but for me, the blooms from the main flush in June are cut off so that I can use the stems for propagation, since my goal is to hybridize AND to propagate the rose varieties that I already love.
My genius idea this year was to plant all of my parent roses in pots so that I could bring them indoors in an unheated space under growlights to finish ripening the rose hips, so the hips that are forming will hopefully be kept frost-free while the rose slows down and eventually enters dormancy.
I’ll probably fail again like I did last year, but so far, having roses in pots has been very convenient. I move them around the yard regularly so that they can get the most sun, since the sun has already shifted so much since the summer solstice and their previous locations are somewhat shaded now during the day.
I don’t mind. I only have 1 cross that I’m very interested in, and even if I fail, my priority for this year is to keep the roses alive and to successfully get my rooted cuttings through the winter, since many of my roses had extensive dieback last year due to our stupid Midwest winters.
I wish you all luck with your efforts!
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I got tons of OP seeds off Roi des Pourpres and Capitaine Basroger. The latter grows in close proximity to a bunch of other mosses so I’m excited to see if I’ll get some good mossy seedlings from it.
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Interesting, I only have one bush even close to ripe so far and it’s an early blooming species rose. I’m in New York z7a. @James_D what zone are you in out of curiosity?
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My use of nutkana-pollen onto Rosa glauca has made a nice red hip, but nothing else is colouring up yet. I’ll be watching and collecting hips til December, I think. The deer and elk (Both! Not even kidding.) did a number on my breeding plants OVER AND OVER this season, so the number of crosses made is substantially reduced. Many fits were thrown, curses cursed, and depressive episodes survived.
I’ll be sowing more OPs than crosses next year.
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This summer we’ve had 29 days of 100+ degree temps, and six days over 105, peaking at 109. So I’ve had a lot of early harvests around the 90 day mark or just when the hips have showed any color. There is only so much watering I am willing to keep up with.
Despite this, it’s been a banner year. Lots of successful crosses on roses that I’ve been waiting for a year or two to finally bloom. I’ve got hundreds of seeds from my white prairie rose crosses, which is my main focus as a breeder. And I discovered this year that it actually makes for a very receptive seed parent.
I have no idea where I’m going to find the space, but that’s a problem for future me. Right now my main focus is on chromosome doubling and deciding which potted roses to use as parents in the winter grow tent.
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This year we had six weeks of very hot and dry weather in Minneapolis, and I ended up losing a lot of hips. It looks like I will be supplementing with OP hips again this year to reach my goal of 2,000 seeds on the bench. I believe I will be taking cuttings of a few plants and moving them to shadier areas next year, to see if that eventually improves my success rate. I established a new bed in an area that gets only afternoon sun, and the plants seem to be happier than the established roses that get baked all day long.
With that said, I was forced to harvest a few hips early. I grabbed ‘Polstjarnan’ x ‘Above and Beyond’, because although it had been probably only 80 days since pollination the hip was ripe and red, and it is the only ripe hip I have managed to get in about three years of pollinating it. Same for ‘Marianne’ x ‘Above and Beyond’, because the cross was so tempting.
Yesterday I grabbed my hips of ‘Gallicandy’ x ‘Cherry Frost’, because the stems had begun to blacken and the hips were red. Those got about 90 days. The seeds look good though.
Most of my modern seed parents are not ready to be harvested yet. One of my major pollination efforts this year was (Austins) x ‘Isabella Skinner’ and, although I have lost many of those hips, plenty of plants are still hanging onto two or three. My other possible success is ‘Isabella Skinner’ x ‘Above and Beyond’. I have two huge specimens of each plant, and repeated this pollination on at least fifty roses. This year I was working on a theory that repeated pollination of the same cross might cause it to be more receptive and I believe this may be the case. It appears I am going to bring quite a few of them to term, and we will see how the germinations go. Other hips I have in small quantity but are of interest to me are ‘Allegra’ x (Austins), ‘Rose de Rescht’ x (Austins), ‘Botzaris’ x ‘Abraham Darby’, ‘Duchesse du Montebello’ x ‘Wollerton Old Hall’, and ‘Charles de Mills’ x ‘Cherry Frost’.
I am happy to hear that Indigo is a good seed parent. I am most interested in working with OGRs, and have planted one this year that is establishing itself well.