hi all, i’ve been reading the dvd collection of the rha newsletters and theres so
many ways , techniques of pollenation. my main concern is how many times
i need to put pollen on the bud?. i have done one time and i’m not sure if its
enough. please give me so input. thanks all. patrick-pat
Hi Patrick,
I really don’t think it’s actually necessary to pollinate any rose more than once - but if you have plenty of pollen and time, and limited numbers of blooms to work with, then additional pollinations could bring about a marginal increase in the number of seeds you get in return. There are some other thoughts to this end on the thread linked below.
Sometimes I repeat pollinations, especially if I’m not sure I’ve got pollen shedding the first time round. It depends on how much time and energy you have to spare.
Patrick, I only pollinate once and get good results doing it that way. I’d rather pollinate a second bloom than repeat the pollination on the same bloom - two blooms pollinated produce more seeds for me than one bloom pollinated twice. You might want to set up a small experiment though to see if you get any difference with repeated pollinations vs. once.
Jim Sproul
It depends on the female parent. If it is picky, but I REALLY want to get seeds from it, I will try more than once. If not, I don’t care.
A variation on what Jadae said is to pollinate the second time with a different pollen (which would give offspring that would be easy to distinguish from the first pollen’s offspring. I do this sometimes in my own hybridizing. My thinking is that the first pollen may not set enough seeds/hip (if any) so that the hip aborts.
Hi Henry. I adapted something similar to this from some of your ramblings. For example, I will use things like “mixed tetraploid pollen” onto one seed parent. I do this because A)it is a difficult parent or B) I cannot decide on what to use but wish to have some control over pollen selection. (Or C) Im feeling in a random mood, which can happen, and wanna see what happens lol).
It would be great to know for sure whether multiple pollen parents help or hurt the chances of embryos from a less robust pollen parent. An argument could be made that more seeds or stronger seeds might draw more of the plant’s resources into a particular hip for the benefit of all, but on the other hand, perhaps the extra nutrients all go to the more “fit” seeds at the expense of the weaker ones (sort of like sibling rivalry). That’s assuming that there isn’t already some form of sperm warfare going on before fertilization even has a chance to occur, since sperm in other organisms is far from passive.
thanks all! i’m going to post another question