Hi again it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm and I wonder if you ever considered hybridizing
your own rose? This selective cross-pollination has been done for centuries by humans
and basically it's just taking the pollen from one plant moving it over to the flower of another and
then ending up with ripe fruit like these (these are rose hips) that contain seeds with a unique
genetic combination in them that only you have ever seen not every one of them will be special
but i think it's a pretty interesting hobby now lots of science can go into the modern art of
hybridization but on the amateur level you don't need to get that complex and i bet you i can teach
you how to do it within about five minutes of lessons here starting with a quick look at rose
biology itself and then four basic steps that it takes to get going with hybridization well i can't
go much further into this topic without talking about sex a little bit happily it is only plant
sex so i don't think i'll pull out any kind of content violations from youtube this is 'Robusta' with a
flower that is so wide open that you'll be able to easily see the difference between the male parts
and the female parts the male parts are in this ring around the outside i'm going to get you a
close-up here there are sort of filaments with a pollen sack (anther) on the top that's where you get the
male pollen from the flower in the center however you're going to see a different part that's the
landing pad it's called the stigma and it's the top of the female part of the rose it accepts
the pollen and then carries that genetic material down to the ovule of the rose to develop the seeds
now roses of course have pollen and the female parts the male and female parts of their flower on
the same flower that's just the way they roll and if you look at the wide open like this actually
you're a little bit too late to the party the pollen is already ready to release the stigma is
already ready to accept that pollen and the flower is wide open so as far as you know a bee could
already have visited that flower so you need to get to it a little bit sooner let me show you the
stage you need to collect it at here and we'll go into the first step which is collecting the pollen
step one: collecting the pollen and you can see that this one here is already too wide open the
bees can get in there and contaminate that flower already so what we're looking for are
roses more along the stage of the ones on the left here that are well developed and opening
but not quite wide open enough for bees to get in there with so let me show you how to deal with
those at this stage of opening the pollen may not be quite ready to release but that's why you're
grabbing it now putting it into a little glass bowl like this i just stole mine from upstairs
don't tell lisa and what you do is you strip off the petals now you can strip it off by hand
like this just being careful not to disturb the central uh pollen sacs or you can pull out
a little pair of trimming shears like this and then just cut them around from the
outside edges so what you're left with is just this central thing here the the central flower
with all of the pollen socks intact i'm going to do the same thing to the other one here
so once i've collected a number of these flowers for pollen of the same variety into this dish i
put them into a cool dry place and usually i wait about a day and by that point if you give them a
little tap like this you'll see the little greens of pollen dropping off into the bottom of the bowl
some people will actually remove the pollen sacks entirely and collect a whole big batch of pollen
i think on an amateur level the guy who taught me how to do it said just leave it on this
it's easier and then you can use this as a little brush to put the pollen on to the female
step two preparing the female flower is just about the same as preparing the male flower with two
small differences one difference is that you need to leave the flower on the plant if you want the
seed hips to ripen you need to leave it on the plant so it could be supplied with energy and
ripen over the course of the next two or three or four months into the fall
the second thing that you're going to do this this part is the same you need to remove those
petals i'll do that part right here but there's one additional step you have to do
after you've removed the petals and this step is called emasculation now go around the outside edge
and just pull off all of that immature pollen trying not to contaminate things as i go don't
think that it's quite ready to release now anyway but it is nice to get it off of there
now the question that some people may have is now that i've pulled off those petals
and left this female part all exposed like that isn't there a chance that the bees come
and pollinate that and the answer is that the bees aren't very interested in these
flowers once you've removed the petals so this is a female flower currently with all the male
parts removed but the bees have no interest in it step three is a little bit time sensitive this is
when you're actually transferring the pollen from the flowers you collected to this female flower
so timeline here might be important day one let's say that's when you removed your male flowers and
collected the pollen let's say in the morning of day two you emasculated this female flower
then later that same day you may come if the pollen is ready and then just dab the pollen onto
that stigma now here's the thing you don't know that that stigma is ready if you looked at it very
closely with a with a with a magnifying glass you might see a change from being kind of dry to being
a little bit sticky now the pollen same thing you'll notice from the bottom of the bowl whether
the pollen is starting to release so if you don't know the safe thing is to continue to retry this
so if you tried as again day one you collected the pollen day two you emasculated the female flower
later that same day you tried to put the pollen on i would go back the following day and maybe even
two days later and tap that pollen on again and by then you should be fairly sure that both the
pollen and the female part that stigma were ready and receptive to go ahead with the process and
very careful at this stage very important at this stage to go ahead and label this stem with a strip
label of what is the male what is the paul and contributor you probably know what the female is
because that's the plant but the male contribution you're going to have to label that one there
well steps one two and three are all relatively quick and time sensitive they can happen within
a few days and that pollen is only good for about three or four days
anyway the stage four is actually characterized by a lot of waiting around what you'll see
is that that where that flower was starts to ripen into the receptacle starts to swell and it becomes
the fruit of the rose progressively over time becoming larger rounder and eventually taking on
a blush of orange that can happen over the course of three or four months and so you can time back
in your own climate and figure out well when do i have to start this this cross and for most winter
climates climates where you get a winter you're going to say that this should happen sometime
early in the flowering season not late summer or fall because you may not have time to ripen
those seeds now i've done a whole video on how to stratify the seeds so that's basically step four
and i'm gonna refer you to that video but what it means is that once those seeds are that seed pod
is ripe you remove the seeds from that and then you start on the process of stratification giving
those seeds a cold treatment usually i do that in sand or vermiculite mix it in put it in the fridge
for again another three months or so and then by january or february i'm ready to take those out
put them into a seed tray and try to germinate them well i said i could do this in five minutes i
might be pretty close on the instructional portion of this but i do have a couple of final pieces of
advice to throw in at the back end of the video here number one don't be afraid to start right
now and by start right now in the fall in the northern hemisphere means you don't have time
to start the hybrids but what you could do is you could start collecting ripe hips from known
good roses around your garden and work on the germination techniques and actually those are
open pollinated so they all have unique genetics within them and that'll give you a chance to try
out starting seedlings and selecting seedlings and frankly i was talking to robin at the brentwood
bay nursery and he introduced a number of roses from exactly this just collecting ripe hips
off of known good mother plants where you don't know where the pollen came from and nature did its
thing and he still ended up with some exceptional roses out of that program second thing i wanted
to say is this can be very complex and there's lots of information out there so one place you
can go for good information on this i'll link below is the rose hybridizers forum where they
talk about all the genetic foibles of mothers and fathers what makes a good pollen parent what makes
a good seed parent which ones are genetically compatible all of that stuff so it's the kind
of hobby or the part of the hobby where you can choose to know as little or as much as you want to
and if you want to do just little just try try a lot out there move a lot of pollen from a lot of
plants to other plants and see what it takes and then you'll figure out what works for yourself
but if you want to take a more scientific approach and share your information with other hybridizers
that forum is out there for you okay thanks so much for watching today and if you have any
questions please drop those down in the comments below the video i'll see what i can do to help