Shop Products
Houzz Logo Print
organic_wonderful

Which fungicide to mix with polllen?

organic_wonderful
12 years ago

Usually I'm against the use of chemicals but in this situation I don't mind making an exception. I am making a cross between different heirloom tomatoes to create various F1 crosses. I'm planning on storing some of the pollen after dessicating and freezing but am concerned that during storage in the fridge or after thawing some of the frozen pollen or perhaps even during the actual pollination process mould might become an issue, so I would like to use a powdered fungicide to prevent against this since it is unlikely the chemical will be carried through to the harvested fruit from the F1 seeds that have been grown.

Which type of powdered fungicide would you guys recommend to use for this purpose?

Comments (2)

  • organic_wonderful
    Original Author
    12 years ago

    Also I have another question if you guys don't mind. It will save me having to make a new post from scratch. This year I've bought twelve Aegis F1 tomato seeds, which is a rootstock variety resistant against many diseases such as the tobacco mosaic virus for example, amongst many others. I wanted to try and graft the heirloom tomato varieties I have, Purple Ukraine and Costoluto Fiorentino, onto the Aegis F1 rootstocks. However the Aegis F1 seeds are very expensive indeed, so I was wondering if I could just grow out one of them and take axial shoots as cuttings and use them to graft the heirloom tomatoes onto to save money? I'll be using grafting clips since the japanese silicon tubes weren't available and will be placing them inside DIY healing healing chambers to keep the relative humidity high.

  • zen_man
    12 years ago

    Tomatoes propagate rather easily from cuttings, so you should be able to increase your Aegis rootstock asexually.

    I would skip the fungicide on the pollen until you start having fungal problems with the pollen. Getting your pollen mixed in with a bunch of dry powder might cause more problems than it solves. That is just another example of the "don't fix it if it isn't broken" philosophy.

    I breed zinnias as a hobby and unfortunately zinnia pollen is viable for less than a day. I don't think anyone has been able to store it successfully. I think that part of the problem is that zinnia pollen is tri-nucleate. Early on, I had hoped to be able to exchange zinnia pollen with other amateur zinnia breeders by mailing pollen back and forth, but apparently that isn't feasible. I don't have any zinnia-breeding neighbors (no surprise there), so pollen exchange isn't available for me. Oh well. It would have been very effective to have a network of amateur zinnia breeders exchanging pollen by mail.

    ZM