2 Answers
Can Hybrid Seeds Reproduce?
Not always. The crossing of two varieties may produce sterile seeds that do not germinate. The plant may produce a mutated version that isn’t desired or it may not produce any fruit at all.
It takes 6-10 years of selective inbreeding of the new variety (or selecting the best plants for hand-pollinating and saving seeds from these selected plants) to create a stable variety.
Some hybrid tomatoes have been developed specifically for greenhouse growing
This is not a simple process for the amateur gardener. There is a lot of time, experimentation, and a reasonable amount of botany knowledge that goes into developing a new variety. To some advanced gardener’s this might be a challenging project; this is how new open-pollinated varieties are developed!
The biggest drawback of hybrid seeds is not that they are genetically altered or undergo being toyed with in a lab, but that they do not have the ability to reproduce themselves. For the average gardener who wants to practice sustainability by saving seed varieties and replanting them the following year rather than having to buy new seeds each year will want to stick with open-pollinated or heirloom seeds.
Read more here >http://www.onthegreenfarms.com/farmer-browns-journal/what-exactly-is-a-hybrid-seed/
11 years ago. Rating: 5 | |
By definition, a hybrid is a cross-breed. Cross-bred organisms have much genetic diversity. They are still viable to reproduce, however as such, they will "not breed true". This means that you may have offspring with great variation. With purebreds, you always get the same like carbon copies of the parent stock, not with hybrids, however.
11 years ago. Rating: 2 | |