Morning Glories: hand pollinating morning glories - Selfing bagging and tying, 0 by gardener2005

gardener2005 wrote:
Hi all! I`m going to show a quick picture thread on how to pollinate morning glories to self or pollinating within the same variety. This is useful if you want the same type of flower and vine to occur again and want to greatly increase your chances of getting the same vine and flower from seeds off your parent plant. You want to greatly decrease the chances of bees mixing pollen with other flowers and altering the genetic make up of your seeds resulting in flowers and vines that if not right away looking different the next generation will show most likely unwanted changes if bees are mixing the pollen on your flowers.

Why not hand pollinate a few pods so you can enjoy that variety again without having to go hunt for seeds? It saves money and time. Still, buying new seeds every few years and pollinating the new vines in with your older vines will keep the genetic diversity and help your vines stay healthy and vigorous.

Anyone, feel free to add to anything I have written here since it is for everyone I am contributing this.

I`m using the Gypsy Bride to show the bagging method. I recommend this because of all the frilly petals makng it impossible to tie very affectively. There are multiple blooms on the end of each stem so I found a lightweight water resistant cloth bag to try out on these. I have found this can be left on for days while all the blooms take place over several days and it does not collect moisture or harm the pods.

The first step to pollinating to self or within the same variety of vines is taking a walk in the afternoon hunting for about to open blooms. They look puffy yet still kind of wadded up at the end. You tie a yarn around the stem to identify it at the beginning.




This message was edited Jun 8, 2007 2:27 PM