Seedless Sunflowers?
Question:How does a someone or a maunfacture produce seeds for sale to grow seedless sunflowers? If sunflowers that you grow are seedless, then where do seeds come from to grow them? Does a seed producing sunflower produce seedless seeds?
Answers:
There are many "tricks" in plant breeding and hybridization. It is possible to cross two plants and the resulting plant is sterile and therefore produces no seeds. Plant breeders often want to do this when they don't want plants re-seeding themselves for one reason or another.
It's like in animals, for a good example: cross a horse and a donkey and the offspring is a sterile mule. Same applies to plants only plant breeders use this technique much more often than animal breeders.
One of the primary reasons for growing sunflowers is for the seeds. Why even think about a seedless variety. Maybe it has certain soil enriching properties for farmers, but is the market for seedless that great? The sun-choke is grown from it's edible tuber and looks very much like a small sunflower. I don't know if it is seedless. But sunchokes are healthy and good eating.
As far as I know, there is no such thing as a seedless sunflower. I have a great big one in my garden right now. Yes, after they get really really big, the black part of the sunflower contains the seeds.
Move the movie called "The Messengers." They have a sunflower farm in this movie. It is scary but a good movie and a good ending.
Forgot to mention, my sunflower grew from the sunflower seeds I bought toI feed my birds. I suppose it is possible to produce a seedless one but I don't know what the point would be. Most people grow them to make money for food for birds and also people who like to eat the cooked sunflower seeds.
'F1' Hybrid plants are produced by crossing 2 parents with very different characteristics, eg. 1 with perfect height, the 2nd with ideal colour, etc. F1 is a term used in the plant community, essentially they're just hybrids.
To produce a sunflower that doesn't produce seeds, so is sterile, they have crossed 2 parents that are known to result in this condition.
Typically saving seeds from any F1 Hybrid will result in offspring of varied characteristics, long, short, fragrant, non fragrant, and is not worthwhile doing, as uniform qualities of the plants are lost.
If you think about it, producing plants that won't bear seeds is a brilliant way to :
1. Get your customers coming back for seeds each year
2. Getting all of the plants energy focussed on producing flowers, not seeds. This bit is good for us gardeners, except we don't get seeds to feed the birds with, etc.
Hope these thoughts help.
Good luck! Rob
More Related Questions & Answers...