pollination and keeping seeds true to type

I just had a thought as I was thinking about where I was going to plant all the morning glory seeds I am soaking. How do you keep the seeds from being a product of cross-pollination? Can you manually pollinate and then cover specific flowers? Is this hard to do for morning glories? Also, tomatoes are another one I'd like to harvest seeds from. Do you have to cover these too? Or am I making this too hard?

Thanks, Kim

You can hand pollinate them and cover with a tea bag or brown paper bag but you have to beat the insects to the open flower first. You cannot prevent cross-pollination if the flowers are open to wind (some plants depend on wind borne pollen) and insects (hummingbirds can also pollinate flowers). Some plants are self-pollinated so you need to cut the anthers before the stigma is receptive. A lot of hybridizers (not just professionals) do exactly this.

Hmmm....sounds like more work than I want to get into. So am I to assume that most of the seeds we trade here are open pollinated and therefore more likely not to be true to type? Do all people who trade realize this when they offer seeds? Just curious.... I'm not that picky as I like variety and surprises, but some people might care.

Kim

I have no idea on trades and expectations. It depends on what they are growing in their garden (cross pollination) and to a lesser extent what is growing in their neighbors' yards. For example: I had two different color lunaria (money plant) but I never really got some weird combinations from these two different colors (white and purple). I pretty much got those two colors and maybe a color in between. On the other hand we started out with several trays of impatiens of one color (they were a hybrid) that were a medium pink with a darker pink throat. Over the years of letting these go to seed and self sow, we ended up with orange, red, a little bit of purple, and an occasional white. We still had plenty of pink but the numbers were increasing in orange and red. Did this come about from cross pollination from the neighbors yards or was it some genetic code in the original hybrids that were starting to become dominant?

If you wanted to create your own hybrid, then you would select the color (or best traits) of the plants you wanted to develop and get rid of the rest so they wouldn't have a chance to pollinate your selections. Over the years of doing the selecting and culling you should have a new hybrid that most of the time would come true from seed. It depends on how serious and ambitious you are. Who knows, you might create the next "Plant of the Year".