Informed by experience, contemplation and communication with other breeders, my pollination method for breeding apples has changed a lot over 11 years. This blog post will cover what I used to do and what I do now and why. The new method is much easier and more efficient, though it has it’s potential pitfalls.

I’ve been at this project for over a decade, and have now observed enough in the way of results to matter. I feel like I have a much better idea of what I want to pursue in apple breeding, and what crosses are most promising. I also have a lot more genetic material to work with, because the number of apples that I have collected and fruited is much higher than when I started. Maybe most exciting, I’m now using a lot of my own seedling apples as parents. It won’t be too long before some of those fruit and I can enter a third generation of breeding. I spent some time this spring starting to lay out this and other projects under a new webpage, PROJECTS. It goes through the different classes of apples I’m most interested in pursuing and some of the parents I use for each.

When I first started pollinating apple blossoms for breeding, I would delicately pluck the petals from a few unopened clusters, then remove the pollen bearing male parts with tiny scissors before pollinating what was left of the blossom. I could see a lot better back then, but it was still ridiculously finicky and time consuming. I guess I figured bees would not visit blossoms with no petals so I just tagged the branches and left them uncovered.

***Early efforts involved delicate emasculation of blossoms. I’m so glad I quit doing that!***

***Flowers were left just like this, unprotected.***

Then I found out that some breeders bag a whole tree or branch and pollinate any flowers that are opened once every day or two. Obviously they were not worried about self pollination. I also knew that apples were generally not self pollinating, so I stopped removing the male parts, which saved a huge amount of time.

Last year, I was pollinating some Cherub blossoms and saw a bee visit the petal-less flowers I had just finished pollinating. I thought maybe it was a fluke. But, then instead of going to another open flower, she went to another petal-less cluster I had just pollinated! Okay, so I started bagging everything. That was easy, because I had bought some organza bags to experiment with for fruit protection. Organza bags are sheer nylon mesh bags commonly used for gifts, wedding favors and stuff like that.

I ordered a bunch of new bag sizes up to 16 x 24 inches and determined to bag all pollinated blossoms henceforth. This year, I went around before trees were really blooming out, and bagged many branch tips and flower clusters before they opened. If a few flowers are already opened, I removed them. With good bagging, I have full control over who applies the pollen, me or the bees. I am also now relieved of the time consuming task of plucking away the flower petals. Once the flowers begin to open, I take off the bag once every couple of days and apply pollen to any open flowers. As the season progresses, it is obvious that some flowers have been open for a while and I stop pollinating those. I am not sure how long the fertile window of apple blossoms are, but some are obviously much fresher than others. I like to pollinate each flower more than once, although twice is probably completely adequate.

***The main branches being pollinated on this tree are William’s Pride, Chestnut Crab and Sunrise.***

With this method, it is fairly efficient to pollinate a lot of blossoms, but not without potential faults. For one thing, I had to buy a lot of bags. They are not reallly expensive, but eventually it adds up. The bags are fortunately very reusable and reasonably durable. Another issue is that since I’m leaving the pollen bearing anthers on, and I used the same pollen on a lot of different varieties, I’m getting some cross contamination from tree to tree. The flowers are insect pollinated. With no insects visiting the flowers, the pollen just sits there. So I’m collecting pollen with my brush while I’m dispensing it.

This contamination issue could be rectified simply enough by using separate brushes for each variety I’m pollinating. But with varieties I use a lot, like Appleoosa or Whitwick Pippin, I would have to keep track of a lot of different brushes. I can’t afford to throw brushes away, because a lot of pollen goes with them. I just ordered some microfiber makeup applicators, which are much smaller. Maybe those will allow me to use multiple brushes for a single pollen variety.

Perhaps I will come up with an elegant solution to avoiding cross contamination, but I’m not very motivated to. I actually kind of like the random factor thrown in the mix. Since I would only be contaminating the brush with other apples I use in breeding, the element of chaos that is thrown in is a focused chaos. I like having these wild card crosses. I think it is a good idea to contemplate what might cross well with what and to choose both parents, but it is not at all possible to predict exactly what the result will be. For instance, late in the season here I was just putting Wickson pollen onto Rubaiyat. But I’ve already pollinated Chestnut Crab, William’s Pride, Sunrise, Whitwick Pippin, Pink Parfait, King Wickson, Cherry Crush, Appleoosa, Golden Russet and several unnamed seedlings with the same Wickson brush. None of those accidental crosses sound so bad. And one apple can make seeds from multiple seed parents, so it would most likely be a seed here and there, not a whole apple with the wrong pollen.

In a couple of weeks I’ll have a very good idea of how pollinations went this year and how the old pollen that I used early in the season performed.