I am currently getting the seeds out of a lot of my Blue For You hips. I had part-pruned the Blue For You last autumn, and yesterday I gave it a bigger pruning which meant sacrificing its beautiful red hips, as there was a gale force wind predicted for today which I have read is less damaging to a pruned rose bush.
Anyway the Blue For You seems none the worse for the storm.
I am noticing that the hips contain a lot of fairly big seeds and also a few much smaller feathery-looking seeds nearer the edges. Do I discard the very small feathery seeds or could they too be viable?
I’ve seen many of those “feathery” looking seeds in Blue for You and a number of others. My impression are they are “also ran” unfertilized, undeveloped or defective seeds. If I have room, and if it’s a cross I am particularly interested in, I will plant everything. I figure there is no harm and if they aren’t really “seeds”, they will eventually become “compost”. If those criteria aren’t met, I dump them. They don’t appear thick enough to contain viable embryos.
Thanks, I will do that. I think they probably are just unfertilized, undeveloped seeds, but it is just possible that they might be viable and might have an evolutionary purpose.
Anything from the hip that isn’t obvious as definite viable seed is put into compost by me. Any type of small fritter can easily fuel soil-born infections, infecting the newly germinated roots that no amount of Captan/more modern chemicals can alleviate. Even with great drainage and appropriate amount of nutrients that help reduce said infections, the best prevention is to remove any debris that can facilitate the pathogens.
The good pollen are marked in red, the bad in blue.
So it looks like you stained the pollen, photographed it through a microscope and ran the image through some very sophisticated image analysis software. Can you tell us the details?
I have one from Amazon that was not very expensive. It works on a lot of things and makes measuring very easy.
Pollen is more fragile that I had expected. I found some varieties more easily damaged than others. Not something I previously considered ever running into, but it is quite apparent when using a PC microscope.
Never the less, I still apply pollen by fingertip. Using tools gets tedious.
