You and me both! I grafted quite a few plums, pluots and nectarines this year so if I have a good percentage of takes, I’ll be on my way.
No but have on raspberry flowers which are also self fertile, and the flowers are a lot tougher, and smaller than any fruit tree. And as stated saw incomplete pollination, so it worked for sure. It won’t work with everything, well it will, but timing is important. Many tomato flower pollen is viable before the flower opens, and can pollinate flower before it even opens.
If you try on peaches, cut flower at the base of the pedals. It’s a little tricky getting the right pressure to cut through the pedals and filaments. The pollen is usually really wet and won’t spread at this stage on most plant types, except tomatoes.
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Thanks for the tips Drew. I’d like to try my hand at crossing some nectarines down the road and I believe all of the ones I have at the moment are self fertile. I’ll try cutting open a few this year to get a feel for it.
I also like to watch the stages, observe how long they stay closed, etc. As early as possible emasculate and bag. As stated I have just done this with raspberries. I collected pollen from the summer flowers, and pollinated the fall flowers. So when I emasculated, I pollinated and bagged. By the end of the year I have seeds, and start the stratification and the scarification process. A lot longer than stone fruit. It takes all winter. Blackberries are worse, the seed coating is thicker. I have to experiment to find the proper amount of scarification with sulfuric acid. I know with raspberries, it’s 15 to 20 minutes. I will do 15, 20 and 25 minutes this year to see which has the highest germination rate. If using bleach instead times are double. 30 to 40 minutes for raspberries in pure bleach. Oh btw with raspberries at least, the ovaries are ready even before flower opens. So you can pollinate right away. Probably true with stone fruit too.But I cannot confirm.
My next goal is to create a peach x cherry hybrid, so today, I hand pollinated my Rainier cherry flowers with Indian Free Peach pollen. In a rare case that the hybridization becomes successful, I will name the hybrid: Peacherry, for now. Then I will guess of a trade mark.
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And here it is again! My proprietary peachmond, an Interspecific hybrid between Elberta Peach, pollen parent, x F1 Nonpareil Almond, seed parent.
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Hope this post is close enough to your topic. I’m pretty sure pollen from plum to apricot is workable based on reading your many post but I’m not so sure about nectarine and plums/pluots. My small number of plums/pluots have finished blooming but my nectarines are about to start. Any thoughts on these crosses will be appreciated. I plan to save pollen from the Sunred nectarine this year and pollinate some plums/pluots next season. Assuming I have enough plum/pluots pollen I will hold and use it on my nectarines when they bloom. What say you?
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It’s possible, in fact, the Zaigers already have a couple of Peach x Nectarine x Plums hybrids called Dapple Fire and Sunset Delight, to name a few. The trick is which Nectarines will pollinate Plums and produce fertile offspring.
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Thanks
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Sunset Delight parentage is ( Dapple Fire X Nectarine) x ( Plum x Nectarine).
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Yes, it’s hard to tell what would work. I don’t much about it. It’s interesting how it all works. i would love to read more on the subject. I know certain cherries that are not self fertile reject pollen that is like itself. So some cherry trees will not cross pollinate. I guess too closely related. Also the self fertile gene was brought in from tart cherry trees. It’s so different that most self fertile cherry trees are universal pollinators. So at times the very different pollen is welcome!
It’s worth trying for sure
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Speaking about hybridizing stone fruits, if the plum is hybridized with other stone fruit, the plum’s genes will be dominant over the other parent. Take for example Nadia cherryplum and Citation rootstock. The foliage resembles more like a plum than the other parent.
Nadia cherryplum.
Citation rootstock.
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I wonder if that is because cherry and peach’s are far more inbred with lower genetic diversity.
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It could be.
Nectarcots in the making?
I hand-pollinated this Flavor Top Nectarines with F1 Moorpark Apricot pollen, and the fruit has now developed. .
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But Flavortop is self fertile,so hmm? Brady
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To be honest with you, Brady, I don’t think this is a Flavor Top Nectarine because most of the flowers do not even develop into fruit. Only the very last flowers produce fruit— and that’s only when my neighbor’s peach starts flowering.
Should i be saving some pollen from my apricots? Do i just shove an unopened flower in a baggie? I’d like to cross moniqui that is just flowering now (white apricot with something)?
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Go for it. I want to see your very first hybrid this late-Summer.