Hybridizing stone fruits

Good question. I’ve never attempted to hybridize fruit or mess with pollen but I have seen a few videos where people use those little beard scissors or some other type of tiny scissors to trim the anthers and leave the stigma behind. That would be a huge amount of tedious work but if you are only doing a few controlled crosses it might not be that bad.

I don’t know the difficult level with removing stone fruit anthers but it is not so bad with apple. Thinking about trying plums and peaches next spring. Looks to me if you want to be sure what is doing the pollination the extra steps are needed to ensure pollen control. I keep both sources bagged during the process. Bill

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In order to assure pollination from Sweet Bagel Flat Peach, I emasculated the Flavor Top Nectarine flowers during the popcorn stage; I’m also 100% certain that the flowers got pollinated by Sweet Bagel Peach because this year, the tree produced a good crop, six nectarines, compared to previous years. In the years prior to this, the tree was covered with flowers, but only one or two nectarines reached maturity.

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Aha, I was wondering about that. If you wrote about it before I must have overlooked it. I hope your effort will be rewarded, cause it really looks like a very time consuming work.

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I’m also going to develop interspecific donut apricots.

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which fruits are you going to use as a basis?

For interspecific Flat Apricots, I will use Sweet Bagel Flat Peach and White apricots; and for my red-flesh flat peacharines I will use Indian Free Peach.

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Isn’t a peach crossed with a nectarine just a peach, unless it has fuzz? I believe there is just a single gene mutation that causes nectarines to not have trichomes on their fruit.

Yes, just a peach.

Yes, you need to cross it again with another nectarine to get nectarines. The gene for fuzziness is dominant.
I emasculate with a utility knife blade hand held. I also use Indian Free which is not self fertile, so that one, no I don’t. I have more interest in crossing brambles at the moment. I will do more stone fruit crosses in the future. I did do some this year. If I come up with anything interesting I will share it. Chances are though I will not!
Right now I’m dealing with young bramble plants, so my hands are full at the moment.

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Here’s again, my peacharine tree.

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I kept about 7 raspberry plants of my cross between Polka and Anne. Looking to have traits of both excellent cultivars. Possibly orange in color is what I’m looking for too. Out of all of them, this one has the best growth habit. I probably have to wait till next year to get fruit, although one never knows this thing is growing 50 times faster than all others. The others are 1 to 2 inches high.

Both Anne and Polka are primocane fruiting raspberries. I may keep this no matter what as growth rate is amazing.

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Try crossing them with strawberries or even pineberries.

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Yeah why not! I heard it can work. Mara des Bois is an everbearing strawberry flowering now. I just had one today, man what a great fantastic strawberry! I could collect pollen for the raspberry fall crop. I will make it so.

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Peacharines are starting to change color.

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How cool if it becomes a peach with a pit that is an almond!

Almonds split open when ripe, well the flesh does, so a combo type fruit is not likely. Hall’s Hardy Is a hybrid of almond and peach. It is grown for the almonds. The flesh is no good.

I want to eat it right now!

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The peachmonds:

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