I recently found our that you can cross breed (or cross pollinate) flowers at home by matching two types of flowers together to create a new flower or even two colors of the same flower species for a different color of flower.

Pollinate Flowers

By Amore Mio (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons

You can only breed flowers within the same species.

This can provide fun experiments. Experimenting with cross breeding flowers is also an excellent project for your children—not to mention a good way to teach them about gardening and plant types.

Choose the flower species that you would like to cross breed. You will likely want to use a good flower reference book or site. For example, if you are crossing different types of tulips, you would want to find a good tulips page for colors and species information. Remember, you want to blend the flowers to get optimal traits from the species.

Find the “peak pollination time” for your chosen flower species. Find diagrams of different color mixtures. You will also want to find out how that particular flower pollinates. A self-pollinating flower does not require another flower to produce fruit or buds. If this is the case, you may need to remove the actual flower in order to prevent “accidental” pollination.

Remove Pollen

Remove the pollen from one flower’s stamen and place it in the carpel of the other flower. You can use cotton swabs or Q-tips to gently move the pollen from one flower to the next. Other useful tools include a magnifying glass, tweezers and a vial or sterile cup. Again, a chart regarding your particular flower species will provide help as to where these parts are.

Repeat this process a few times throughout the flower’s season to ensure success. Take notes as to what you did exactly so you can chart your success, or note things you may need to do differently in the future.

Collect the seeds once the new flower has bloomed fully, even to the point of wilting or drying up. Store these seeds in a container or packet for future planting.

Tips

First of all, hybrid flowers can have unreliable results.

Secondarily, please don’t re-use cotton swabs or q-tips. If you are using tweezers or another tool, clean it with rubbing alcohol between uses. This will prevent accidental contamination.

Make sure you clean your hands before working with the flowers, or use latex gloves.

Self-Pollinate

Some flowers self-pollinate. You want to know this ahead of time, as the process may differ. Check your chart and references.

Perfect Flowers

Some flowers are “perfect flowers”, or flowers that already contain male and female parts. Other flowers contain only male or only female parts.