Breed your own plant varieties.
Without a lab.
Crossing two plants is the easy part. Knowing whether it worked is not. Pollen Ledger keeps the record that makes your answer trustworthy: which flower, which pollen, what the weather did, and whether anything got in that should not have.
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The problem it exists for
You find out a year late
Almost every mistake in breeding is invisible at the time. A cross that never took, a seedling that is not what you think it is, a bag of seed you cannot now account for. The fruit tells you, and the fruit arrives in August.
Some of it was never going to work
Not every two plants will give you anything, and the ones that will not can still give you a fat pod full of seed that never germinates. That is knowable in advance, and it is written down in papers most growers have no reason to have read.
And it stops fitting in your head
Four years in, you have bags, labels and a plant you cannot quite explain the parents of. The work only turns into a variety if the record survives, and notebooks are where breeding programmes usually go to die.
See the journey
Breeding is a loop, not a line. You cross two plants (or self-pollinate one), save the seed, grow it out, and the best of what comes up becomes a parent for next year.
Keep a plant at step 4 and it becomes an accession, which makes it a parent. That is the loop closing, and each turn round it narrows what you are working with.
Do that for a few years and it stops being something you can hold in your head.
Every row is a generation. Read downwards and you are following seed from the plants somebody started with to the ones they have now.
What it actually does
Says how many plants you actually need
Two things decide the number: which generation you are growing, and how often what you want actually shows up in it. Breeders count generations out from the first cross, F1, F2 and so on.
Not everybody goes all the way to a stable variety. Plenty of people cross for the F1 and stop there, because that first cross is the plant they wanted. Others grow F2s by the hundred, hunting for a combination nobody has put together before. And some carry one plant on to F6, so that the seed can be saved and sown again and come up the same. The table is the full route; where you get off it is up to you.
| Generation | What you are doing | Grow | Grown so far |
|---|---|---|---|
| F1 | The cross itself. Every seedling the same, so a few is plenty. | 4 | 4 |
| F2 | Everything changes here. Seedlings from the same packet look nothing alike, and that is the only time it happens: the one generation you grow in numbers, and the one you pick your keeper out of. | 24 | 28 |
| F3 | Sow your keeper's seed. Half of what was unsettled settles. Eleven plants is not about finding anything now: it is what it takes to tell whether the row is uniform yet. | 12 | 40 |
| F4 | Again, and again after that. | 12 | 52 |
| F5 | Again. About 6% of the plant still varying. | 12 | 64 |
| F6 | About 3% left. It breeds true, and you can name it. | 12 | 76 |
Assuming a trait that turns up in one seedling in four, and growing enough to be reasonably sure of three of them.
Reads the weather backwards from the day you pollinated
Pollen is made days or weeks before the flower ever opens. A hot spell back then has already ruined it, and nothing you do on the morning will help. A hot spell in the last few days damages the flower instead and leaves the pollen fine, so pollen that looks right is not reassurance.
Two windows, two different pieces of advice, and neither the timing nor the temperature is the same from one crop to the next. Where the windows fall differs, and so does what counts as too hot inside them: a tomato will take a couple of degrees more than a pepper while its pollen is being made, and a couple of degrees less on the day the flower opens.
The app carries the researched numbers for the crop you are growing and checks both windows against the weather you actually had. A crop nobody has read the papers for yet gets no check at all, rather than being handed another plant's numbers.
Keeps the pedigree
Every cross holds which plant gave the pollen and which held the flower, the day you did it, where the plant was standing and what the weather was doing. Every bag of seed knows the cross it came from; every plant you keep knows the bag. So any plant in the programme traces back through all of it to the ones you started with, however many years ago that was.
That chain is the picture further up this page, drawn from your own records. Follow one plant back to its founders or forward to everything descended from it, and a line that has quietly become the parent of half your programme is visible instead of being something you half remember.
And it answers "can I name this yet?" Twice over, because the two answers disagree. Theory says how much of the plant should still be unsettled after this many years of saving seed. Observation says whether your plants actually look alike, which is the one you can see and the weaker of the two: a uniform row of eight is very ordinary even when the line is not finished. The app gives you both and tells you when they part company.