How to Choose Flower Seeds? Practical Selection Methods Shared

Many people like to grow some flowers and plants in their spare time, and this became the topic during planting, so here it is shared with everyone.

I. Several Principles to Follow When Choosing Flower Seeds

First, the varieties chosen should suit local aesthetic habits. Because different places have different views on the aesthetics of flowers, including flower color, flower size, and some special custom requirements. Second, the varieties chosen should correspond to the season. Some varieties are strongly seasonal, such as ornamental kale, daisy, pot marigold, and pansy, which are suitable for sowing in autumn; wishbone flower, cockscomb, Madagascar periwinkle, and globe amaranth are suitable for sowing in spring and summer; while scarlet sage, wax begonia, marigold, zinnia, and petunia can be sown in all four seasons as long as conditions are suitable. Third, seeds should be chosen according to one's own production conditions and technical level. For example, hybrid F1 generation herbaceous flower seedlings have relatively high requirements for seedling-raising conditions and generally need to be raised in protected cultivation. Especially when carrying out off-season cultivation, even more attention should be paid to the control of temperature, humidity, and light conditions. Wax begonia, petunia, and others have tiny seeds, and without skilled sowing techniques and suitable seedling-raising conditions, it is very difficult to achieve ideal results.

II. When Choosing Flower Seeds, First Determine the Selection Period

In flower cultivation, combining different types of flowers and the actual needs of cultivation, selection can be carried out in the following periods to discard the inferior and select the superior. First is selection at the seedling stage. When transplanting or planting out, carry out one selection according to the correlation of plant traits, retaining plants with excellent typical traits and eliminating those whose excellent traits are not obvious or that have segregation variation. Second is selection at the early flowering stage. In the seed propagation of herbaceous flower varieties, this period should be seized to remove impurities and eliminate the inferior, which can effectively maintain their excellent early-flowering traits. Third is selection at the full flowering stage. The full flowering stage is the selection period for determining the typical traits of flowers. Generally, the method of mass selection is adopted, that is, according to the ornamental and economic traits of the cultivated flowers, select plants with high-quality flower color or excellent traits from an original mixed population or variety, plant them, and the next year compare and identify them with standard varieties. In this way, after one or more selections, plants with excellent traits whose descendants no longer segregate can be selected.

However, some herbaceous flowers, such as cockscomb, snapdragon, cineraria, pansy, and Dianthus species, are very prone to natural hybridization among varieties, causing mixing and degeneration among varieties. When selecting seeds from such flowers, special attention should be paid to taking isolation measures between varieties to prevent cross-pollination and cause variation in the offspring. For certain chrysanthemum-type herbaceous flowers, such as cosmos and cineraria, their flowers are composed of two parts, ray florets and tubular florets. When selecting seed-bearing individual plants of such flowers, special attention should be paid to the color of the inconspicuous tubular florets. If seed-bearing individual plants are retained solely based on the color of the conspicuous ray florets, it will often cause the gradual degeneration of excellent flower colors.

III. The Parts That Should Be Selected When Choosing Flower Seeds

From the perspective of seed selection, the seeds produced by inflorescences or florets in different parts of the same individual plant also differ in the degree to which they retain the typicality of the variety. The general rule is that flowers that open early on the seed plant can produce better seed offspring than flowers that open late, such as earlier flowering, larger flowers, and more vivid flower color. Take cockscomb as an example: seeds produced in the middle and lower part of the central inflorescence are better. In snapdragon, seeds in the middle and lower part of the raceme have a high seed-setting rate. The same is true for zinnia, globe amaranth, Scutellaria indica, and four-o'clock.

For some flower varieties whose flowers are borne on the main branch and side branches, such as cosmos, petunia, and snapdragon, the weight of seeds in each fruit generally decreases from bottom to top, and the germination rate also decreases from bottom to top. The offspring they produce also show significant differences in growth vigor. Therefore, in this case, seeds produced by the lower flowers should be selected. Even for seeds at different positions in the same inflorescence, their offspring differ in the degree to which they retain the typicality of the variety. For example, in chrysanthemum-type flowers such as China aster, marigold, and cornflower, seeds borne at the edge of the flower disk can maintain their excellent traits. Seeds set in the center of the flower disk are not plump, and their excellent traits are not ideal, so they are not suitable for seed saving.