Allotment Gardening Advice Help Chat
Growing => Grow Your Own => Topic started by: slugtrap on November 17, 2008, 11:02
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I've just collected the bean seed from some climbing french beans that went to seed. What will happen next year if I try to grow them? Nothing? Abnormal plants? Poor croppers? I remember reading something somewhere that you can't re-crop F1 hybrids - help please...
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Hope this helps - courtesy of www.growveg.com
F1 hybrid varieties are commercially produced seeds that combine certain traits of two parent plants such as resistance to disease, pests or bolting and a tendency to produce heavy yields. Beetroot ‘Boltardy’ and carrot ‘Resistafly’ are examples of F1 hybrid varieties. F1 varieties can usually be identified by the variety name or by a close reading of the seed packet. Saving seed from F1 hybrids will not produce seeds that ‘come true’ when they produce vegetables. F1 seeds can be infertile and some will produce different traits from the original parents that are less favourable to the ones for which the hybrids were initially developed.
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you can if you want but no guaranteeing what you'll end up with, that's the thing with F1's you see. I personally wouldn't bother, but if you have an enquiring mind then have a go, but don't try and make it your main crop or you could end up beanless :D
If you look at Real Seeds web site as they only sell non-F1 seed so that any crops can have seed saved for growing on in subsequent years.
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F1 varieties will not breed true.
F1 is just what it says, the first generation.
A monk called Mendal first established how plants behave when they cross. You may remember learning about his experiments with sweet peas in your GCSEs, or in my case 'O' levels.
Cross two plants and the first generation all look the same. The second generation are varied and may show features of either parent and also recessive genes not seen in either parent become apparent.
F1 plants are very useful to large scale growers because they are all even and usually all ripen at the same time.
Often one of the parents is only brought in just to give disease resistance or a feature such as dwarfness or tallness but is itself poor quality. If you sow your saved seed you may get some of these.
The plant breeders trial thousands of crosses but only a very few ever make the grade.
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Thanks guys (& girls!), I don't think I'll waste the time or compost! I'll just grow a fresh packet. In fact looking at the seed catalogue I appear to have got a little confused and it's not an F1 bean anyway - muppet!! It was my greenhouse tomato I was thinking of!! Maybe I'll have a go after all?? It would be great to be self-sustaining in seeds? - Thx.