One of the many choices to make when deciding what annual plants to grow in your garden next spring is, should the plants be hybrid or standard (open pollinated) varieties. What benefits are there to growing hybrid vs. standard varieties? How are hybrids created? An article written by the National Garden Bureau helps answer some of these questions.
Just what is a hybrid? People often think of a hybrid as a blending of two different plants, a little of this and a little of that, something like mixing red and white paint together to get pink. Fortunately, hybridized plants are the result of much more specific mixing or "cross breeding," and the results are much more specific as well.
A hybrid is the result of pollinating one specific variety of a class of plants with the pollen of another genetically different variety of that class. While a hybrid can occur by chance in nature, within the seed industry hybrids result from cross breeding carefully chosen "parent" plants that produce "offspring" (seeds) that will have special characteristics.
To accomplish this very exacting pollination procedure, the parent plants which will produce the seed have the pollen-bearing anthers removed from their flowers. They receive only pollen from those plants that have been selected as their partners. This is done because most plants have both male and female parts and can pollinate themselves. By controlling the pollination process, the offspring have genetic characteristics from both parents. The offspring (seed) of this cross is called an Fl hybrid (Fl stands for "first filial"). The seeds from this cross will produce plants that are very uniform in plant habit, and carry a combination of traits from the parent plants.
Obviously, the removal of anthers and hand pollination is more time-consuming and expensive than just letting plants do their own thing. So why bother? The reason is that hybrids exhibit some very desirable traits that non-hybrids do not, and it could take years for the ideal combination of desired traits to happen by chance. Generally speaking, hybrids exhibit a wider adaptability to environmental stress, more uniform characteristics than non-hybrids. This can mean earlier flowers or fruits, higher yields and resistance to certain pests and diseases. An example is nematode and wilt resistance tomato varieties. Also, hybrids are very uniform in size and appearance, something home gardeners might appreciate when planning a garden.
For the growers who produce the plants you purchase at the nursery, hybrids can have better germination vigor so that more plants survive and grow to maturity, and earliness and uniformity can mean a lot to a grower's production schedule. Improved disease resistance can mean fewer chemicals need to be used to control disease, and more plants will make it to market. Even though hybrid seed costs more than standard seed, a grower has a better chance of producing more saleable plants of higher quality.
Standard or "open pollinated" varieties are varieties that have more or less stabilized in their habits from one generation to the next. These varieties are usually grown in fields where they self and cross-pollinate. Wind and insects carry the pollen from one plant to another, and the seeds that result will produce plants that are fairly similar, but not usually as uniform as hybrids. Because genetic "drift" can occur in open pollination, meaning that plants which are significantly different from the others sometimes crop up, the fields have to be checked and the "off' types have to be pulled out so that they don't pollinate other plants and cause too much variation.
Because standard varieties are easy to reproduce, breeders can "patent" a plant under the Plant Variety Protection Act of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. This allows a seed company or breeder to control the sale of seeds of a protected variety, and encourages the development of new standard varieties. Standard varieties are best for gardeners who enjoy saving seed from year to year, as the plants grown from that seed will likely have characteristics similar to those of the parents.
So the choice is yours - hybrids or standards. There are certain classes of plants that have not been hybridized, and there are also certain classes that are available as both standards and as hybrids. The most intelligent choice is made based on the performance of a variety in your own garden.
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