Hi Phil,

I think that Painted Lady is a self pollinator, so you'd be best to just use Marble Throat as the mother plant. Neo flowers seem to be very sensitive to temperature...if you've had a warm night, then the flowers will open early morning, however, if it's been a bit cold, then the flowers may not really start opening until mid morning.

As far as removing the stamens on Marble Throat, that could be done just before you're ready to pollinate. If you do want to do the cross both ways, then you'll need to removed the stamens on Painted Lady early in the morning to reduce the chance of it self pollinating.

Here are a couple of photos from a series I took a few years ago...the first shows an open flower with stamens still in place, & the second shows the same flower with stamens removed. Good luck with your hybridising.

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Are you removing the anthers because you know that they self? If they aren't known to self then don't bother. I don't usually bother with pollinating anything that selfs as they make unreliable and time consuming seed parents. 3 to 4 hours after sunrise seems to be about the right time to start pollinating.

hey

devo thanks for that info here in australia it is summer and is around 20 degrea c at night what do you consider warm and a bit cold. what are the stralls used for as well.

bromadams i am removing the anthers on the account that every time i have gone to cross neos i nock all the pollon from the anthers on to the stigma.

also how long do the neo flowers last for each.

Phil

We all knock the pollen around, but it just doesn't matter most of the time. You're more than welcome to do it the hard way, but you're plenty likely to pluck off the stigma too. Hopefully you can bring the plants to a work bench and take your time with the emasculations.

You will have a 2 to 4 hour window to do the pollination. The weather conditions can greatly effect the situation. Rain is bad news, unless you bring them inside. But with Neos you should have many chances to do it, they usually flower every day for a month or more.

Phil, with temps around 20 C you'll find that the Neo flowers will be like clock work, opening early morning, closing late afternoon. We still get temps down to 10 C overnight during summer, & this slows the neo flowers down a bit. As bromadams said, neos will have a few flowers up & open each day over their flowering period, so you will have a number of opportunites to make you cross. I try to do at leat 10 flowers of any particular cross, just to give good odds of at least a few working out.

The straws are my markers, telling me which flowers I've pollinated. They are easy to slip over the flower once the petals have closed, & I use straws with the coloured stripes as a code for the cross...e.g yellow stripe straws where used in the photo above...and if I wanted to do a cross with another pollen parent on this mother plant, I could use red stripe straws to mark that cross...and so no. There are a number of ways to mark the pollinated flowers, tags are also good, as detals of the pollen parent can written on them. The main thing is to mark the flowers, & set up a database to keep records of any crosses you make.

Hi Phil - There were also some fantastic posts and really good pictures which Lisa put on this site some time ago.

Those combined with the info. you have here should sort out all of your questions.

The info that comes to mind was posted here on Sun. Dec 3 2006, Mon April 23 2007 and Sun August 5 2007.

All the best, Nev.

Thanks, Nev! Those threads should come up is you do a forum search for "pollination" (use the search engine towards the bottom of the main page, next to "Today's Birthdays").

I can't think of much to add. You've gotten good advice from the others, particularly about Marble Throat being a better choice for seed parent, since Painted Lady is a self-pollinator. Don't worry about removing MT's pollen ahead of time, it won't self. Just pull the stamens off when you're ready to pollinate (between 9:00-10:00 AM usually works best for me) and be careful not to damage the stigma or let it get wet.

Don't get discouraged if a particular cross doesn't take. Some combinations just don't seem to be compatible, and some cvs. are not very receptive no matter what you do. You increase your chances of success by trying lots of combinations. One of them is bound to work!

Hi all happy bromnuts,

Phil - just one more thing to consider from a New South Wales perspective. When Lisa says between 9 and 10 AM, that would equate to between 10 and 11 AM with our Daylight Saving.

Good luck, and have fun :)

K

thanks kerry ill keep that in mind