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23. Hybridizing and Marketing New Varieties

Hybridizing, or plant breeding, offers many profit-making op­portunities to the new as well as the experienced grower. It is in this field that your greenhouse is most essential—an in­dispensable time- and money-saver for you.

Many of the varieties you originate will appeal to the "des­sert market"—collectors and other gardeners who, unmindful of cost, want to have the latest thing. You will find some of these customers in your vicinity, but you may have to rely mainly on mail-order sales.

Commercial men who stock new and different plants may provide an outlet for your hybrids. Still another possibility is supplying smaller dealers with stock on terms whereby you receive a percentage of sales.

My Greenhouse-Grown Hybrids

Ihave developed a number of unusual hybrids—gloxinias, African violets, and amaryllis—but my most salable plants are my gloxineras. These are intergeneric crosses between rech-steinerias and sinningias. But I don't spend nearly as much time on hybridizing as I'd like to—and that apparently is the case with most other greenhouse growers. Thus the field is wide open—the market for new pot plants has never been bet­ter, and competition here is all but nil. Why not set your hands to hybridizing some of your plants? They can help you get a better profit from your greenhouse if you give them a chance.

Many Plants Can Be Tried

One greenhouse grower in Missouri makes a profit from creat­ing new varieties of ferns. Others in the same area developing and selling hybridized African violets and gloxinias. An Oregon grower has produced a strain of hardy azaleas—all started from seeds in the greenhouse. Amateur as well as professional green­house gardeners have developed new chrysanthemums—some as seedlings, others as mutants.

I can't possibly give the whole story of the "how-to, when-to, what-to-do" of plant hybridizing. But the following ideas should at least give you a start.

TIPS FOR THE HYBRIDIZER

The mechanics of hybridizing are simple, as I have shown in the chapters on special plants. Apply the powdery pollen from one plant (the staminate or male parent) to another, the mother or pistilate parent. The plant receiving the pollen will (if the pollination is successful) be the seed-bearing parent.

For your first work in plant breeding, you will probably select closely related plants, merely crossing them for a change in flower color or foliage form. As you advance, however, you may go a step further and select plants that are not so closely related. Here you must be prepared for meager success at the outset and perhaps for quite a while, but if you do develop intergeneric crosses, you generally have something very new indeed in the plant world.

Some flowers have the ability to self-pollinate. To safeguard against this, prepare your seed-bearing parent by cutting off petals and pollen-bearing anthers—the process known as emas­culation. For success, you should know when the stigma is ready to receive the pollen. In African violets the signal is the appear­ance of a tiny white blob on the tip of the stigma; in gloxinias the stigma spreads to reveal an opening. In rechsteinerias and many other flowers, the pistil elongates, reaching out over the petals and almost invariably showing a white tip. Many flowers have a drop of sticky substance on the stigma when they are ready for pollination. In amaryllis, the pistil elongates and divides into three parts.

If possible, choose a sunny day for pollinating—especially with African violets: you will find that the pollen becomes more powdery and easier to handle.

If you are working on special crosses, bag the pollinated pis­til with cellophane or slip a large soda straw over it and bend the end of it shut. This will avoid introducing foreign pollen carried by insects or brushed on with your hand as you water or handle plants.

With special crosses, it is important to keep records. Tag the pollinated flowers with a slip of paper (or use a stationary tag) on which you have detailed the following information: names of seed and pollen parents, date of pollination. If you plan much plant breeding, enter these data in a record book. Such records are valuable, and you will surely need them if you regis­ter or sell the offspring of a cross.

Delayed Pollination

Here is a situation that you may have to meet. You have a plant you want to cross with another, but the early-flowering one threatens to be devoid of bloom before the second plant comes into flower. You can deal with this by storing pollen for a few days in a cool, dry room. I have kept amaryllis and gloxinia pollen for 5 days in a drugstore vial kept in the refrig­erator.

A surer method is this:

1. Place several grains of calcium chloride in a glass vial.
2. Make a wad of non-waxed paper and stuff it in the vial directly above the calcium chloride.
3. Wrap the pollen in plain, non-waxed paper.
4. Place the pollen packet in the vial on top of the wad of paper, thus preventing direct contact with the chemical.
5. Store in a refrigerator.

Although you need but a few granules of calcium chloride, you may have to purchase it in half-pound lots. The cost how­ever is low, about 75 cents for this amount. Pollen thus stored keeps from 1 to 3 months, depending on type.

One grain of pollen makes but one seed, so whenever possible, give the stigma a thorough coating of pollen to encourage heavy seed bearing.

MARKETING A NEW VARIETY

My first step in marketing a new plant is to write to a firm of my choice asking if they would be interested in handling my plant. I always enclose with my letter a stamped, self-addressed envelope and a picture of the plant. If you have a colored pic­ture, it will show the plant to best advantage, but a black-and-white photo is better than nothing. If the firm's reply expresses interest, I next send them some of the flowers and leaves. These are wrapped carefully, enclosed in a plastic bag, and dispatched via airmail.

If you have commercial dealers in your city, you may not have to look far for a market for your new plants. Why not call on some of them, carrying with you a potted plant or two? These concerns are always on the lookout for good new salable material.

Here are points to consider when you contemplate marketing a new plant.

1. Will the plant be useful over a wide area, or will it be restricted by climate?
2. Is this plant a definite improvement over existing varie­ties?
3. If it is an entirely new plant, is it vigorous? Will it bloom, fruit, or produce a quantity of handsome foliage?
4. If it is a pot plant, can it be adapted to household condi­tions so it will be valuable for window gardens?
5. Is it easily propagated?

Any hybrid plant you consider as a prospect for naming and propagation should, preferably, be positive on all five qualifi­cations—a minimum of four anyhow. Point No. 5, for ex­ample, has a major bearing on the price you can charge for your new plants. Your packing and shipping costs (for mail orders) will also influence your prices.

CHROMOSOMES AND COLCHICINE

All plants bear within their cells microscopic substances called chromosomes. These, along with other elements, deter­mine such characteristics as height, contour, flowers, foliage, fruit, and roots, as well as the degree of hardiness of the variety. (For a detailed report on chromosomes see, Chromosome Atlas of Flowering Plants by C. D. Darlington and A. P. Wylie.)

Through the use of the drug colchicine it is possible to alter chromosome numbers, thereby creating new types of plants.

Apply the colchicine solution directly to the growing tip of the plant. The changes which occur will show as the plant ma­tures. These may be desirable developments such as a change to thicker stems and larger flowers, which we find in the Su­preme types of African violets and in such garden plants as the Tetra snapdragons.

Colchicine can be purchased at drugstores and some seed stores, or directly from Romaine B. Ware, Canby, Oregon. If you procure it from a drugstore, use it as a 0.1 or 0.2 per cent solution (1/5 gram in 100 cubic centimeters of water). Your druggist will help you with these measurements. If you are mathematically inclined, convert cubic centimeters into fluid ounces by multiplying the number of cubic centimeters by 0.03381382.

MUTATIONS

Mutations (or sports) are natural changes in plant structure. They occur with fair regularity, but most of them are not im­provements over the parent plant. Occasionally, however, some definitely desirable mutation may appear on a plant in your greenhouse. You can propagate from this sport by cuttings (and sometimes by seed) and grow the progeny to flowering stage to really determine the value and the permanence of its novel characteristics.

Keep an alert eye on new foliage and flower growths. Some of them may be mutants valuable enough to be of interest to commercial dealers. Such dealers may want to buy the variety outright or, if you have propagated it, they may want to buy all the stock you have.

Mutations in African violets are quite common and many of our best varieties have been discovered as mutants, then propagated, named, and sold.

Daylily and marigold hybridizers are constantly searching for the near-white or pure white flower. Some expert hybridizers feel that the pure white varieties of these two garden plants, if and when they finally appear, will be produced as mutants.

Plant Selection

Plant selection merely entails selection over a period of years of the best plants in any given lot. These are self-pollinated or propagated in other ways, and their offspring grown on. Noth­ing new, other than the possibility of a mutant, is likely to arise, but through conscientious selection—keeping the best and dis­posing of the poorer, weaker ones—you can develop an outstanding collection of best-in-their-class plants.

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