Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Growing => Grow Your Own => Topic started by: Mark's Sussex Allotment on June 06, 2013, 18:30
-
Evening all,
I have cucumbers, courgettes, melons, pumpkin, butternut squash and crown prince squash all on my allotment and they are all reasonably close. About 8-10ft away from each other.
What is the worst that could happen?
Have I made a big mistake?
-
Doesn't matter what happens :) - unless you wanted to save seed for next year.
-
If they cross pollinate it will not effect the fruit you get this year, that remains as whatever the plant is.
It is the seed inside the fruit/crop that is crossed. So if you kept some and planted that then next year you would have a mix of crossed plants.
I assume that that is the question ?
-
Yeah, I was hoping to collect seeds from the more expensive to buy ones.
Will I have effectively created my own variety of something then?
-
Yes, but they won't necessarily be nice to eat :ohmy:
Realseeds show you how to save seeds from them, near to the bottom of the page
http://www.realseeds.co.uk/seedsavinginfo.html
-
Fair enough, I'll leave that down to the breeders!
I guess you've no way of knowing if something is cross pollinated either?
It must happen all the time at allotments.
From one plot to the next, insects must be covered in hundreds of different pollen?
-
You can't tell from the seed.
Have a look at my first ever post:
http://chat.allotment-garden.org/index.php?topic=1109.msg8891#msg8891
-
If you really want to save seed you will need to pollinate one of the flowers yourself. Chose a female flower (this is one with an embryo fruit behind and pop a bag over it before it opens so that the insects cannot get to it. When it opens you will need to use a male flower to pollinate and then cover it will the bag again until the flower drops off. Don't forget to mark the fruit so you know which one it is.
-
The Realseeds instructions use rbber bands to do the same job ;)
-
So next year it's pumpumbers, courelons, and squashettes?
-
Yes, could be a bit like this one! lol
sorry if its a bit small!
-
Crikey, what happened there? It looks like a squash trying to spit out a courgette :D
I'm going to have a go at saving some this year, particularly the Thelma Sanders. I think I'll tie the flowers with a bit of string and mark the fruit with something so I know which is the right one.