BaccaChew
Well-Known Member
If you watch a plant flower, you will get a sense for when the seed-bearing plant (I used Monte Calm yellow) will open the next day. So what you need to do is the night before a flower opens, you open it a little carefully with tiny scissors or your fingers. Pull or cut off the anthers that are yet un-dehiscing (not giving powdery pollen). Tweezers are a handy tool. That leaves you with a female part that will be ready for pollination the next day. You can either use a little masking tape to pinch the flower shut, or perhaps a paper clip that has been adjusted for the purpose, or make yourself a little light paper tube to slip over the flower to keep out all stray pollen and insects.I would love to see a thread on the technique you used to make your specific crosses.
bob
Next morning you come along with some of the male anthers (I used freshly opened glauca), shedding pollen, you want to use and touch them all over that little center female part you left the night before. Close the flower back up or use your paper apparatus for a few days, and bobs your uncle!
I have bred squash before too, and it is not very different than breeding tobacco, other than the size of the flowers and resulting fruits! LINK
Not really related to backyard breeding, but interesting to a breeder:
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Where it gets really interesting is the prospect of anther culture or pollen culture to obtain haploid plants that need doubling. Doubled ahploids will breed absolutely true if no random mutations occur and could be used to make super-uniform hybrids.
Another feature of haploid plants is that what you see is what you get. There can be no underlying "crap genes" because all genes are expressed in the haploid plant.