Plant Breeding for Gardeners

Use proper hybridization to preserve the unique traits found in your favorite garden plants.

By Chris Colby
Updated on July 21, 2021
article image
by AdobeStock/Polina Ponomareva

 This article is also available in audio format.  Scroll down just a bit for the link and enjoy listening.

Imagine that it’s harvest time, and you find a tomato that’s a bit larger than the others in your garden. Inspired by this, you decide to try breeding extra-large tomatoes. You begin by collecting the seeds from this large tomato, and the next year, you plant 20 tomato plants from those seeds. At harvest time of that year, you select the largest tomatoes and save their seeds. You then repeat this cycle for 20 years. For two decades, you plant 20 plants every year, each seeded by the biggest tomatoes from the previous year. What do you think would happen to those plants?

If your tomato plant was a commercially available open-pollinated (OP) cultivar — an heirloom variety, for example — then the most likely result would be that your tomatoes would remain the same size for 20 years. On the other hand, if the original tomato plant was a hybrid cultivar, multiple things might happen. In some cases, the seeds might not be viable. Even if they were, the tomatoes you grow might be nothing like the tomatoes that grew from the hybrid seed. In either case, the odds are small that you’d end up with larger tomatoes overall.

At this point, you may be asking, “But isn’t that how plant breeding works?” Yes, but it matters what type of seeds you use at the outset, and what you cross them with. To interpret the results of our hypothetical tomato experiment, let’s think about the material we started with. From there, we can go deeper into what it takes to successfully cross plants in your garden to preserve desirable traits.

flower heads on a table next to a box of seed packets

Generations of Genetics

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