Plant selection may seem like too complicated a task for the average home gardener, but anyone can cross-breed hybrid and open vegetables and flowers if they have the necessary knowledge and patience and put in the necessary effort. Garden writer and plant breeder Joseph Tychonievich joins me on this podcast to discuss the steps aspiring plant breeders need to know. Joseph is the author of “Plant Breeding for the Home Gardener,” “Rock Gardening: Reimagining a Classic Style,” and “The Comic Book Guide to Growing Food,” as well as the host of the podcast “What’s Going on in the Garden? “. He is also a contributor to Fine Gardening and other gardening magazines, and he is the editor of the quarterly journal of the North American Rock Garden Society. Before devoting himself to writing full-time, he earned a bachelor’s degree in horticulture from Ohio State University and worked for rare plant nurseries in Japan and Michigan. He has lived all over the place, recently moving from Virginia to South Bend, Indiana. Joseph Tychonievich is also a garden writer and podcaster as well as a plant breeder. (Courtesy of Joseph Tychonievich) A long-time lover of plants and gardening, Joseph always enjoyed growing plants from seeds and watching them thrive. In fact, he asked for plants and seeds for his fifth birthday. It was while growing violets and pansies from seed that Joseph became interested in plant breeding. “They really tend to reseed themselves and bees like to make hybrids,” he says. He remembers being fascinated by the diverse hybrids that emerged – he had started with only a few varieties, but all sorts of colors and shapes grew over subsequent seasons after self-seeding. Jo seph thinned the flower patch each year, keeping the flowers he liked best and removing the others. After a few years, his violets and pansies had grown into the custom colors, shapes, and sizes he preferred. Raising plants can be as simple as letting flowers self-seed and keeping the ones you like best, Joseph says. He also points out that seed savers are plant breeders, whether they know it or not. The fact is that every time they thin the seedlings until the most vigorous ones are left, they improve the plants. If you’d like to read Joseph’s complete guide to raising plants, check out the show notes from our original conversation. The diversity of colors of self-seeded hybrid violets. (Courtesy of Joseph Tychonievich) While you are here, I want to let you know that my new premium online course, Organic Vegetable Gardening, is open for registration until April 4th. The course is designed as a comprehensive guide to starting, growing, feeding and harvesting your favorite vegetables – no matter what you like to eat, no matter where you live, no matter your level of gardening experience. For 20% off course fees, enter code GROW20 at checkout. I also want to remind you that I have a new book, “The Vegetable Gardening Book: Your complete guide to growing an edible organic garden from seed to harvest”. This book contains the insider tips and new information to help you up your gardening game and meet the challenges. Crossing Plants Plants reproduce through their flowers. The male part of a flower is the anthers, which contain pollen and lie in a circle around the center of a flower. The female part of a flower is app she the pistil, located in the center. The end of the pistil is the stigma, which receives the pollen. Pollen can be collected from a flower by pulling it apart and looking for the anthers. This pollen can be applied to the stigma of another flower, and the recipient flower will produce seeds that are a mixture of both parents. Hand pollination can be fun, but it can also feel like a lot of work. You could simply allow pollinators such as bees to crossbreed for you at random. Joseph says columbines and hollyhocks hybridize easily this way. But if you want to crossbreed deliberately, you’ll have to keep the bees out of the flowers. Large flowers like zucchini flowers can be taped off. Smaller flowers can be protected with nylon mesh bags wrapped around the buds, or you can get some tulle from a fabric store and cut it to size to wrap a flower. “Usually when the flower is open and it looks showy, that’s when it signals the pollinators to come, and so it’s a good time for you, the human pollinator, to come and do your crossings,” explains Joseph. A hybridized flower will produce hybrid seeds, but no hybrid fruit. For example, if you manually pollinate the flowers of a cherry tomato plant with pollen from a beefsteak tomato flower, you will still get cherry tomatoes. It is the seeds inside these cherry tomatoes that will contain a mix of cherry tomato genetics and beefsteak tomato genetics. Grow these seeds for cherry-beefsteak hybrids. Pollination of self-pollinating flowers Flowers with both male and female parts can self-pollinate, so preventing bees is not enough. as. To prevent them from self-fertilizing, you need to remove the male parts by going before it is completely open and cutting off the anthers. Then, to pollinate the flower yourself, apply pollen from the anthers of the father flower you selected for your desired hybrid. Seed Stabilization A new cross of two open seeds is called a first generation hybrid, or F1 hybrid. “The first generation hybrid has exactly half of its genes from one parent and exactly half of its genes from another,” Joseph explains. If you started with two open-pollinated parents that both grow “true to seed”, the F1 hybrids will all look pretty identical. “Then if you save seeds from your first generation hybrids, the next generation is when all hell breaks loose – in a positive way,” Joseph says. “This is when all the characteristics of the two original parents are redistributed in new combinations.” Size, shape and color become unpredictable. “That’s when you really have fun, picking the best ones.” If you’re raising tomatoes, choose the plants you like best – the most vigorous with the ideal size fruits and the best flavor – and raise them for a few more generations to stabilize them. In each subsequent generation, by saving only the seeds of the plants you liked best, you will reduce the variability by half. By the fifth or sixth generation, you’ll get the predictability and consistency that growers and seed sellers desire. In the case of plants propagated by cuttings or grafting,…
