Hi, I'm Martin with Baker Creek Seeds and we're out here in our corn patch doing
some hand pollination. We're bagging the silks and the tassels, getting ready to
do some crossing. This is a variety called,
I think I'm pronouncing this correctly, Dobranoe. It's an early purple developed
by Dr. Frank Kutka. The corn is a plant that's got a unique flowering system.
It's got what can be considered the male flowers is among the tassel here, which
is will grow the anthers that emit the pollen, and then it's got the female part
of the flower is on the silk, which you can see some tiny silks starting to
emerge right in here. That's the tip of the ear that's actually coming out
between the, at this node between the leaf blade and the stalk of the plant.
They're shoot bags. They're specifically designed for bagging silks, and the
technique we use for putting these over the tips of the shoots when we see the
tips of the shoots start to emerge, we will on a daily basis come through and
scout the field for that, and we take the leaf blade off. I like to take off a
little bit of the tips of those shoot tips there, those leaves, so that they
don't push the bag up off of the plant. And we just slip this down and wedge it
between the stalk and the ear. Now that shoot will develop inside of this bag
and the shoots will grow inside of that, protected from getting pollinated.
We will take what's called a tassel bag, and we will find of the same variety, or
whichever variety we want to cross with. If it's a different variety that we want
to cross to this variety, or what have you, we will find a tassel that's got
active anthers on it that are actively shedding pollen. And we will bag that. And
the way we do that is we carefully take off that top leaf blade, place the
specially developed bag over the entire tassel, and fold it in to us, wrapping it
around the stalk here really tightly. And then I like to neatly fold it at
approximately a 45 degree angle to the stalk, sealing it off nice right there.
The pollen will be shed inside this bag tomorrow morning. And so if I have silks
out here I will be able to take the pollen from this tassel and I'll be able
to swap it out with one of these shoot bags that has silks in it.
And what we have here is a tassel bag that was placed on the
pollinating corn tassel yesterday afternoon. This morning these anthers
that are inside this bag should be shedding pollen. This bag should have a bunch
of pollen in it, and we're going to actually take this off of here and we're
going to transfer it to one of the little shoot bags that we've placed on
the the silks yesterday to protect them from getting pollinated. And so yesterday
we identified some of the shoot bags that had silks in them. We went about
bagging up some tassels for an equal number of tassels and we're going to
perform the crosses this morning. So what I like to do, and there's a lot of
different ways to do this - there's not necessarily one right way - I like to
use aseptic techniques for this. Today is a terrible day for it; you can see the
breeze is blowing, there's pollen in the air moving around, so it's really tough
to keep it clean, but I have to make this cross. I'm going to do it very quickly or
as quickly as I possibly can and try to mitigate the possibility of stray pollen
falling onto my my silks. So I like to take it and hold it horizontal to the
ground and I just kind of tap it a little bit. These pollen bags are
designed such that you then pull up straight on those two inner flaps and
you can actually see the pollen in there. So I'm going to try to keep that pollen
in there, and
and now I'm going to take it to one of these silks which is just up this way.
And you can see the silk in here, Izzie, if you want to get around with the camera
from the opposite side, you can actually see these silks in here. You can see them
through that bag. So I'm going to very quickly try to remove this bag and get
the other bag on there quickly, dumping some pollen on there and putting it
right down on there, covering it quickly so no other pollen gets on it. And then
this bag remains on the shoot, the developing shoot, which in a few hours
should be fertilized. To secure it here, we wrap those two inner flaps around the
backside of the stalk, and I put a couple staples in it that will stay there until
this ear is fully formed.