Looking for Suggestions to Speed Up Pollination Procedure

General Discussion
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21

Hi Andre,

There are a ton of good pointers mentioned above.

I agree that efficiency is key, especially when you have more important competing commitments for your time: family and work. Every year, I have tried to make things easier (for example, I have learned this year that seeds can be placed directly into ziplock bags bare, with a spritz of a very small amount of water. No more paper towel, and I gave up Captan years ago).

The pre-requisites for me are:

  1. Try to define and limit specific goals.

  2. Use highly fertile parents. I find these by testing OP seeds first.

  3. Concentrate efforts, making more pollinations of a given cross.

  4. Streamline procedure.

My pollination procedure is as follows.

  1. Emasculate all the blooms that I am going to pollinate today, leaving 1-2 petals (I grab the whole bloom, minus the 1 or 2 petals and give a rocking turn like Joe mentioned above).

The 1-2 petals that are left on the blooms to be pollinated help me to find them when I am ready to do the pollinations.

I emasculate blooms starting at the top of the plant and work down (the idea being that as pollen falls on the lower blooms, it will be removed while I am emasculating them too, so as to limit self pollination).

  1. After all the blooms have been emasculated, I then apply pollen, using one pollen at a time and hitting all the emasculated blooms that I want to cross with that pollen (counting the pollinations as I am doing them).

  2. On a scratch pad of paper, I then write the number of pollinations where that pollen was used. For example, if I made 24 pollinations with pollen “PH2”, I write PH2 with a 24 next to it, then I circle the 24.

Then I use the second pollen of the day, counting and writing that number down, etc.

  1. When all of the pollinations have been accomplished for the day, I prepare and place tags, doing one pollen group at a time. As the tags are placed, the 1-2 petals that were left on the blooms are removed, indicating that the deed has been done.

After placing tags for the “PH2” pollen, I then cross through the circled number 24 (tomorrow, I will jot down and circle the number of pollinations where “PH2” was used next to the crossed out number). Over time, it is easy to look at the scratch pad to see how often a particular pollen parent was used.

Then, I prepare and place tags for the second pollen that was used, etc.

  1. When all of the emasculated blooms have been pollinated and tagged, I collect blooms for tomorrows pollen (I will generally not use a pollen if the pollen cup has not been recharged with fresh pollen the day before). I usually use a 5 inch empty square pot for collecting blooms, and go from plant to plant collecting blooms that will open today, or tomorrow.

The collected blooms of each particular pollen parent have the petals stripped, and the pollen removed and collected into the proper pollen cup.

I rarely collect pollen off of blooms that I am going to use for pollinating, unless the cross is very important and there are few blooms - it takes too much time.

Stuff that I use:

A simple “workbench” loosely constructed with cement blocks and plywood (gravity holds it together). My scratch pad is kept there along with my tags and pencils, and this is where I write out my tags.

Short plastic solo cups for pollen. They are reusable for 10-15 years. I use masking tape to stick onto the cups, marking the pollen code on the tape. They are stackable and easy to carry.

Curved tweezers to remove pollen/anthers - it is a very fast procedure and the curved tips allow you to easily see what you are doing and remove buried anthers with ease.

Animal friendly snail bait around seed parents.

Like Adam suggested, during peak bloom, I’ll take several 1/2 vacation days so that I can get the bulk of the hybridizing done in a short time (during those days it is possible to pollinate 200 blooms or more on a single day).

Sometimes, if the mornings are short, I will do all of the pollinations in the morning and place the tags in the afternoon/evening when I come home from work (the scratch pad info is essential to remember how many pollinations were made).

For tedious plants like ‘Darlow’s Enigma’, I don’t do many pollinations until most of the other more productive work is done. And now, I am using one tag per spray. Trying to tag each tiny peduncle will drive you crazy!

Keeping this hobby as simple and efficient as possible is one of the keys to keeping it fun. :slight_smile:

Best wishes!

22

I appreciate people who like to make pollinating a time-in-motion study… but for me the whole process of pollinating is more therapeutic.

I can’t pollinate in the mornings on week-days because of work… and I can’t spend large amounts of time doing it to pollinate thousands of flowers (though I always seem to end up with thousands of seeds). So… the pollinating schedule for me is something I look forward to at the end of each day after spending hours in a classroom teaching 12-16 year-olds. I look forward to grabbing my pollinating coolers and heading out into the garden to just sit down and pollinate. I have two small foam coolers that have everything I need: a pair of secateurs, two pairs of small curved pointy scissors for emasculating flowers and collecting pollen, pointy tweezers, tags to ID the crosses, pencils, garden markers, water-proof tape to protect the tags ( though won’t need this any more as I think I have finally found a tag solution that will work for me), small draw string bags to protect the pollinated flowers, and small beading jars that contain the pollens or the freshly picked anthers. I use foam coolers because they insulate the pollens against the sun when they are plonked down in the garden while I do the bee-thing.

I don’t bother emasculating flowers and pollinating them on separate days… it gets done all at once. I don’t pollinate in a greenhouse or in pots… pretty much all mine are in the ground spread out over about an acre. I figure that enough viable pollen ends up making through regardless of when I do it and there is a good chance that if I left it till the next day that I would get called away to do something and I would never get back to doing it. At the time of pollinating I will choose all the flowers I want to pollinate that will open the next day (sometimes earlier for things like hybrid multiflora, hybrid musks, or some species because they shed their pollen almost before you can see any colour in the bud) and then will pollinate with pollen collected the day or two before. I rarely keep pollen for longer than two days. I tend to prefer to pollinate the top flowers only because it keeps therm further from the ground where the critters often get them. Then I’ll sit down in the afternoon sun in the warm straw around the plants and do as many as I can. Then I’ll walk around and select the appropriate flowers for the next lot of pollen and cut their anthers off into the small beading jars and take them inside to release their pollen. I write on the lid of the beading jar what it is in waterproof ink (like a sharpie) and after pollinating wipe it off with methylated spirits and wash the jar to reuse them.

I don’t record details like numbers, crosses, dates etc, etc… I figure I’ve already done that on my tags and when I collect the hips I’ll put them all into envelopes marked with the cross on the tags and I’ve got everything I need… I also don’t care about a lot of the details like number of hips that work per plant, etc because I see them as irrelevant and I get a feel for the maternal qualities of a plant from the op hips I collect and the OP seeds I germinate to test-run a new Mum from the previous season and from how many hips I collect at the end of the season and how may seeds per hip there are (ball-park… like there was a lot or there wasn’t many… does it need to be more complicated than this???).

I have about 200 beading jars to collect pollen in so I can keep going without stopping to wash them all the time when work gets busy (they cost me about $2 for 20). To wash them I just undo them all and put them into a mesh bag and run them through the dishwasher all at once. I’m lucky where I am that during the spring and summer we have very long days (I’m just 2000km north of Antarctica) and I can sit outside and pollinate for three or four hours after I get home from work and be totally chilled out by the time I’ve finished :slight_smile: This is good for my mental state and that of my family :wink: The little beading jars are ideal pollinating tools as well. Originally I would just use my fingers but now I don’t even do that. A good shake of the beading jar coats the glass lid with a load of pollen and then I just use the lid as the applicator and give the anthers a good swirl in the pollen and go to the next one to do the same… it gets very fast doing it this way and I never have to touch the pollen or the anthers which is a plus too. For roses such as rugosa that have flatter stigma this doesn’t work… so the finger applicator and tongue cleaner again gets called into action.

So… I like to look at the whole thing as an opportunity for me to stop and smell my roses… if the pollinations don’t get done… they don’t get done. There is nothing I enjoy more than some one-on-one time with my roses at the end of the day to relax. I can handle a maximum of about 2000 seedlings a year (because I cull like a mad-thing), but I would rather do fewer, smarter crosses than a bazillion crosses anyway. I’ve also decided to stagger my crossing schedule. One year I’ll do heaps (like this year) and have a truck-load of seed and the next year, because the seedlings will be everywhere, I will focus on just one or two things and might only do a handful of crosses. Next season I’ll do very few. They will primarily be hulthemia crosses next year and only a few because my stock plants are just first year seedlings themselves. If any of my tet. species are ready I’ll do them too.

It’s a personal work-flow thing… you gotta suck-it-and-see to work out something that works for you.

1 Like
23

OK !! I’m finally sold on that idea, if it works for you its good 'nuff for me, as it is too easy !!!

I have just redone all my seeds in zip lock baggies with nothin’ but a sprinkle of water in 'em !! Thank you for sharing the result.

ANYTHING to save time and expense … I’m all for it !!

24

Kim I will have to try those tweezers. With my big hands I find regular tweezers difficult to work. These look like they will work better. Probably can get some at hobby lobby or something like that.

25

I resisted them for the longest time because I was so used to the small, curved blade type I’ve used forever. A friend gave these to me. I had misplaced the usual ones so had to try these. Now I’m hooked! They are SO easy to maneuver, light weight and just easy to deal with, I can’t believe I resisted so long. You can easily find them in larger sewing stores as they are quite popular for needlework, I understand. Perhaps hobby shops may have them, too. Or, just buy them on line. They usually come carded and can easily be mailed in a small, padded envelope so postage shouldn’t be outrageous. What’s particularly nice is you don’t have to insert fingers IN to anything, so you can quickly, easily pick them up, use them, then drop them if needed.

26

Oh…that reminds me, I use a small box cutter knife (plus thumb in a sort of catching + scraping motion) to help catch and cut/remove anthers-stamens, believe it or not.

27

I use the fingers and a nail if digging is required but seldom remove petals, it seems so uncaring and is not necessary most of the time. Neil