Re: HYB: Save & Storing Pollen - pill boxes

At this time of year, iris blooms here are much more likely to be under
heavy attack from insects, so I usually pick individual blooms before
they are fully open and bring them indoors to let them mature to protect
the anthers.  I put them in water in narrow mouthed glass 'juice'
glasses (the kind cheese spread mixtures are sold in).  The falls prop
the flower up on the rim of the glass keeping the whole thing from going
into the water.  Anthers usually are slower to open this way, but are at
least intact.  I missed picking a bloom from FEEDBACK a few days ago and
some critter neatly clipped off all three entire anthers.  Looked like a
hybridizer had visited<g>

In the spring, when I was collecting a lot of pollen as I made crosses
and didn't want it to 'cook' in a closed container in the sun, I used
several round sticky tags like those sold to put prices on yard sale
items to save pollen.  I wrote the name of the papa on the round
sticker, then attached the lower half of the sticker to a 3 x 5 card.
Each anther was stuck to the upper half of the sticker, one at a time,
then the upper half of the sticker was stuck to the card, anchoring the
anther in place (usually it stuck pretty well).

I propped up the cards in a nice dry location under bright lights
indoors until the anthers were dry (usually by evening), then put them
into little pill dispenser compartments.

They make a lot of different designs of weekly/monthly pill
storage/dispenser boxes now, but I found that some were prone to pop
open the lids to the compartments at inopportune times dumping the
contents.  The kind I like best have 7 removable boxes with 4 separate
compartments in each box.  These are really handy if I am storing a lot
of different sources of pollen, but only want to use a few on a
particular day, plus the individual lids stay securely latched shut,
even when dropped.  I put a little piece of paper in the bottom of the
individual compartment with the name of the cultivar, then add a stick
on label to the side and top, using colored temporary stickies each day
to make finding the pollen source cultivar I want a bit faster.

When I'm only collecting pollen from a few blooms, I may use little
gelatin capsules sold in health food stores.  Punch a few pin holes to
let the pollen dry out, clip the anthers and stick them directly in the
capsule, which can be labeled with a fine tip Sharpie type marker pen.
I like to leave them open to the air to dry a bit first, then the
capsules can go into envelopes for more permanent (bigger!) labels or
into the pill boxes.

The pill boxes stack conveniently inside a larger plastic box and go
right into the freezer.

Caveat - I'm new at pollen storing & don't know what kind of stored
pollen viability I will have using my techniques.  Fresh pollen
viability has been so bad here, I'm not expecting much, but I figure
poor pollen will be better than none.

--
Linda Mann east Tennessee USA zone 7/8

Tennessee Whooping Crane Walkathon:
<http://www.whoopingcranesovertn.org>
American Iris Society web site <http://www.irises.org>
iris-talk/Mallorn archives: <http://www.hort.net/lists/iris-talk/>
iris-photos/Mallorn archives: <http://www.hort.net/lists/iris-photos/>




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