BCSS - Forum

Great story and pics Dave, but can you fill in some of the gaps between flowering and the next generation?

I am curious to know what species you used to pollinate your plant, and if all those pollinations were successful. Are those the seedlings we see?
Also, did you self pollinate any of the flowers and if so, did these produce seed?
Cheers

For this plant there was quite a bit of experimentation with pollination.

I used pollen from,

1).polycantha that was a mix of pollen stored in the fridge and some that had been frozen a month earlier
2). sobria that had been stored in the fridge for a month
3). fresh pollen from vic reg. This was given to me by a friend on a screwed up tissue < 24h between collection and use.
4). wasps crawling all over a one point so maybe own pollen as well. It was moved back in the GH afterwards.

Quite a bit of pollen was harvested, dried and frozen for future use, so anthers were removed before the stigmas became receptive.

The few that received the vic reg pollen didn't take and dropped off about a week after the stigma collapsed.

The pods that had sobria pollen, the first to come into flower took a lot longer to ripen than the rest and the yield of black seed was much lower.

Late evening was the best time to apply pollen when the stigmas became sticky, by the next morning they had dried out a bit but still received pollen.

Seed was harvested through the winter as the pods turned brown and crispy, The pods were stored in a home made dessicator at ~30% relative humidity until the pods started to split open. Seeds were then sorted and placed in vials back in the dessicator. After a couple of days the vials were capped and placed in a kilner jar. The pods were labelled at the time of pollination through to seed cleaning and stored seperately.

The seedlings are still quite small so it's hard to tell if I am going to end up with a heap of parrasana or some hybrids.

Best Regards
Dave

Dave I would be really interested to have something from the Parrasana x with Sobria if the seeds do turn out to be viable. The spination is going to be terrific on them!

Yes please for seedlings , Thanks for sharing this

November Update.

Attached are some pictures of the seedlings so far.

There seems to be two distinct variants so far but there are a few oddities as well.

Also there's a picture of my grow lights. A couple of spare aluminium shelves, and aluminium angle. It just sits in the window ledge and the grow lights are on a timer for an hour in the morning and 4 hours at night just to extend the day.


Regards
Dave

Beautiful , do we get first dibs if you don't want some of them

The kind gentleman that allowed me to harvest some of his sobria pollen gets first dibs. I'm going to hand over a batch soon just in case I have a disaster and loose the lot.

I'm sure that there will be plenty to spread around next summer once we can see how they grow in full sun. I have a couple of trays in the greenhouse as well just for comparison to see if these grow lights do get them a bit further on by next spring. First impression is that some are a bit leggy but hoping that they still build up some energy and gain an advantage once they go back in the GH next spring.

I still have some seed saved so once I know which pods yielded the more desireable seedling, I'll sow some more next spring.

The x-sobria cross will be limited, probably about 50 seeds. the x-polycantha cross there's 100's of 'em.


Regards
Dave

Well done, they are looking good. What a nice achievement to produce your own hybrid seedlings, there are some very pretty hybrids.

Still have some parrasana x polycantha seeds left if anyone wants to have a go. Send me a PM if interested. Germination was still very good a couple of months ago.

All of the parrasana x sobria have gone. Germination of the few remaining was <20%, even though black many were still empty.

Best Regards
Dave

Still not sure what we have here,the parrasana x sobria are obvious but the parrasana x polycantha are quite variable.

Regards
Dave