Hi, I'm Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm well
I'm doing some work on my seeds tonight
And so I thought it might be a good time to make a video on how to grow roses from seed both how to do it and what
You can expect if you grow roses from seed so
Getting right to it
This I harvested from my garden today, and it is a ripe
Rose hip from Rosa rugosa Alba
You can see the orange color there
this indicates both by timing and by the color and look of the and feel of the rose hip so that's that it's a
Ripe rose hip also in the garden. You can have different types of rose hips and
From earlier I also got this one here, which is from a Scots rose variety
Then it darkens to black color doesn't make a difference
It's really about timing and softness when you harvest it and that the seeds inside are
ready, so
I'm going to show you on this one here how to get the seeds out and
This one you can just very easily break it apart you can see there's a whole ton of
different seeds in there and
These ones are a pale tan color
These ones here were harvested a while back and actually the hips I dried
It doesn't matter
I just pulled them off the bush and put them on a counter somewhere and they dried out between the time
I harvested them and now so what I did so just threw them in a glass of water and see the tannins from the
From the rose hips bleeding into the water
but that softens them up to the point where then I can break these open quite easily and see what's inside and
See on this one here. Let's see what we found. Yeah. There's a nice beautiful seed in the center and on this one here
It's got a dark brown seed covering same thing both or will should be perfectly viable seeds just these ones are tan and these ones
Were dark brown now once you have the seeds the next step you have to do is you have to fool them
So roses are smart
They have this idea that if they ripen by their fruit in one season that if those fruits drop to the ground and by some
circumstance got buried or
favorable conditions in that first year they do not want their seeds to germinate the reason for that is because
By that time by the time the the hips are ripe the seeds is so late in the season that if the seeds germinated
They'd be going right into the winter season
and they wouldn't survive so they
Build in inhibitors to the seeds that stop them from germinating right away in fact what they need is they need to feel
moisture and cold for a period of two to three months
Before they will go ahead and let those seedlings germinate so for my purposes what I do is I want to
Fool them I take the seeds like this
Take off a bunch of the ripe ones here
And you can clean them, or wash them, and that's fine what I'll do is. I'll get myself a little
Tupperware container or sealing container here and
inside of it is
moist vermiculite
vermiculite, it's just a material that holds moisture and air and isn't likely to get waterlogged so that's why I use that and
What I'll do with that it'll take it into that container there
And put a layer of seeds into the container cover them up
in some vermiculite you can do that in something like this or even in just a ziplock bag like that and
Then put them into the fridge and the average temperatures in your fridge are appropriate you know approximately
To show those seeds that they've gone through a winter period and the timing you can expect as mentioned is about three months
so coming from right around now end of October that means my
Stratification step to putting them in the fridge step
Will be done at the end of January which is a bit early for me in my greenhouse conditions
I usually do this work somewhere mid November late November so that mid February or late February
that's when I can expect the seeds to be ready and
towards the end of the vernalization period in the fridge you may look in here and
Find that the seeds have started to actually sprout which isn't great in the fridge because they don't get the light they don't get heat
They'll actually suffer quite a lot on and they'll stretch out and by the time you put them into the ground
They probably won't be viable so you want to catch that quickly if you start to notice
Any number of seeds in that in that container starting to
Sprout that's probably time to get them out of the fridge get them into the greenhouse and and start
growing them into healthy seedlings, so now the next part of the question is and this is actually the more difficult
But maybe the more interesting part is
What can you expect when you germinate these seeds from the garden in the case of this one here?
That's the Rosa rugosa Alba
I mentioned what you're probably going to expect is something similar to the parent now
I can't say that safely because the bees do their work, and they move the pollen from plant to plant
But this plant here is slightly
Genetically incompatible with most of the garden roses I grow
so it's more likely to
Self-fertilize the pollen from its own flowers gets transferred to its own flowers
that's viable and it and it and it fertilizes it and so now you have a seed where this plant is both parents or
It's likely to if it's in the garden with my other plants
Crossbreed with another plant that's similar enough to it that it can still make viable offspring last year I did
approximately ten of these
from Rosa rugosa Alba what I found was that seven of the ten were white just like the parent and
Looked just like the parent and acted just like the parent and three of them were very very similar
But they had pink flowers instead, just like Rosa rugosa
the straight species or rubra and
So that's what you can kind of expect out of this plant now you go to
Complex garden roses the bred
garden roses
And it's a different story with those ones there
They have really really complex parentage 'as you can't expect that it was just a straight species any time
recent up into the say the
Grandparents or great-grandparents as that rose, so let's say you took a rose like Wild Blue Yonder
Which was a great rose I grow it in my garden
love it a lot and I
had it alone and let the bees do their thing and
they
only pollinated it with itself, and I knew that I
Still wouldn't expect that the offspring would be very much like the parent you might have some similar characteristics
But out of a hundred seedlings you might not find one. That's very close to wild blue yonder
and
left alone in the garden
With other roses that could easily crossbreed with it because most of them the modern bred roses will crossbreed with each other fairly easily
You know it's like playing the lottery
except that with a lottery ticket
You don't have to feed and water and prune and take care of the ticket for three years before you know
Whether you have one or not so it's a bit of a commitment
It's bit of a hobby
and
You can see why Rose breeders
When it's a pretty serious thing what they do is they improve their chances by choosing the parents and actually
Taking and transferring pollen from one to another so they'll they'll know the parentage and they also have a trained
Eye
So they can figure out what they're looking for very quickly and look for cues and the health and and growth habits of the seedlings
As they progress they it's quite a quite a serious art and science that the breeders do
For a guy like me who hasn't done a lot of breeding or any breeding at all
Or for most gardeners probably, it's just a matter of fun hobby, and then of course
There's the chance that if you get an eye for it and a knack for it and you like doing it
Then you can proceed into the hobby and start making
Determined crosses of your own for for specific characteristics, and that's kind of a neat hobby, and there's actually a really
cool tradition of amateur rose breeders
Contributing quite a lot to the to the advancement of modern roses
so you know I definitely wouldn't rule it out that you're gonna find something cool or that you're gonna work towards something cool and
This is the way you would do it
But for me in practical terms what I can do is I can use the species roses like this
Ragosa and rubrifolia and the scots rose that aren't
Genetically compatible with each other I can plant seedlings
And I can have some fair confidence that the seedlings will be a lot like the parents
And it's a good way for me to increase my roses
And and have some fun doing it
So thank you so much for watching the video to make and if you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below. Thanks