Hybridizers: It can be fun to breed your own zinnias - Part 2, 0 by Zen_Man

Zen_Man wrote:
Hi all,

I have found that it is easier to pollinate zinnias inside in my indoor growing setup, as compared to outside in the garden. That is primarily because the indoor environment has no interference from insects or wind. Up until recently I have been using the old tried-and-true technique of picking a pollen-bearing floret with tweezers, twizzors, twissors, or forceps and rubbing the floret on the stigmas of the female flower. That technique, in effect, uses the floret as a disposable brush to apply the pollen.

I have been noticing that many of my florets, indoors in the absence of wind or insects, produce a relatively heavy pile of pollen in the center of the floret in the morning. As I approached a stigma with such a floret, little piles of pollen would fall out on the petal before I got the floret onto the stigma. In order not to waste that pollen, I used a fine pointed artists brush to pick up the pollen from the petals where it had fallen and gently deposit it on the stigmas.

That got me to thinking, why not pick up the pollen directly from the centers of the florets using the artists brush, and apply it to the stigmas with the brush? I have been doing that for the last several days, with apparent success.

Breeders of other plants have routinely used small brushes to transfer pollen, so this isn't anything new. But zinnia breeders have used the florets directly because they are handy. I won't know for sure how well the brush technique is actually working for my zinnias until a few weeks from now when I am harvesting green seeds to start a new generation of hybrid seedlings. But it appears to be working, because the stigmas are dying, as they do after they have been successfully pollinated. The hairs of the artist brush appear to work as well as the hairs on the bees that pollinate zinnias.

This attached picture shows of the artists brush touching a floret to get some pollen on the tip. Sometimes just touching the pollen in the center of a floret is all that it takes to get a load of pollen on the brush tip. Sometimes, especially when I am returning to a floret for some more pollen, I rotate the brush a little to help pick up pollen from the floret.

ZM