Home made Hybrid seed ? ? ?

[Biggkidd]

Have any of you considered trying to grow your own hybrid seed? I've been trying to figure out what two types of corn they use to make silver queen so I might try my own. I don't believe it wouldn't be all that hard to make F1 stuff at home. Some maybe even most hybrids are fairly simple crosses of standard seed to my understanding.

I recently bought some seed for next year and the price was insane. So considering many hybrids are much better tasting than OP yet are often made from crossing 2 or more types of OP seed I'm trying to learn how it's done and what the starting seeds are for certain hybrids.

 

[Biggkidd]

Good video here on how hybrid corn seed is made.

 

[Neb]

Good video here on how hybrid corn seed is made.

I will try to watch that video but...

Country Gentleman

Is the OP variety I have settled on.

It is good in all qualities save one. The rows of kernels is not always straight and regular.

Growing the OP stuff makes it easy to same my own seed.

For what it is worth.

Ben

 

[Biggkidd]

Much better video shows in detail how to properly do it by hand.

 

[joel]

Everyone should do what they think is best.
But after a few thousand years of selective breeding & four or 500 year of hybridizing seeds there is little left for me to do.
However if I was going to do it, I would start with:
Hybrid: The History & Science of Plant Breeding

This was an eye opener for me, I meet people who say they hate Hybrid seed, that they are unfit to plant.
I learned in this book that all the seed for the last four hundred, have been hybridized, so all seeds used today, not found in a tomb are hybrids.

 

[SheepDog]

Heirloom seeds are stabilized over many generations and are no longer hybrid seeds as they always produce seeds that grow the same plant.
Hybrid seeds that are not stabilized produce plants that were used to make the hybrid.
Wew use only heirloom seeds and we keep the seeds for next year.

 

[joel]

The Science disagrees with you:

1 : an offspring of two animals or plants of different subspecies, breeds, varieties, species, or genera a hybrid of two roses. 2 : a person whose background is a blend of two diverse cultures or traditions.

Hybrid, offspring of parents that differ in genetically determined traits. ... The term hybrid, therefore, has a wider application than the terms mongrel or crossbreed, which usually refer to animals or plants resulting from a cross between two races, breeds, strains, or varieties of the same species.
https://www.westcoastseeds.com/blogs/garden-wisdom/hybrid-seeds-exactly

 

[SheepDog]

Joel,
The problem isn't in making a hybrid, it is in reproducing the same plant from seeds of the hybrid.
If you collect the seeds from hybrid plants you will get different plants than you start with. You have to breed the hybrid for generations before you get only the same plant as you started with.

 

[joel]

You are wrong, but even if it take generations it is still a hybrid, time does not change that, only F1 seeds are different plants.
F2 is more stable & F3 is true & what everyone calls heritage.
The seed people save were hybrid in Europe, before we came to what is now the USA.
Corn was a 34 inch high grass, so different from what we call maze or corn that DNA was used to find it, it does not look like corn at all.
Selective breeding then later hybridization change the corn, beans, banana, peaches, watermelons & Avocados.
You cross a yellow daylily with a red daylily, 90% of the seeds will be ugly browns, then you pick from the 10% & breed again, a few plant generations not human generations* you get yellow & red bi-color. I know a breeder of the Hemerocallis.
*A human generation is 15 years, a plant generation is 12 months or less in some cases.
That all I have to say about that dead horse.

 

[SheepDog]

I was talking about plant generations. Time can be used to stabilize the hybrid so it only produces the one offspring that was the hybrid. Once it is stabilized for a period of time it is considered a heritage plant. It will only produce the same plant it came from.