Video on pollinating brassicas

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I did a quick search here on crossing brassicas and couldn’t see anything, so searched YouTube. I found this video so am sharing it in case it’s useful for others:

Here’s part 2:

And part 3:

Also, I wonder 2 things about this.

  1. I wonder if it’s necessary to cut off all the other branches and flowers? I heard this advice for tomatoes too, but I didn’t remove even a single flower from all the plants I crossed with, since I wanted to use as many for crossing as possible and also wanted to eat the others, or save their non-crossed seed. I had no apparent problems with that. I sometimes did several different crosses on a single bunch of flowers. Though I don’t have the adult crosses grown out yet to prove it all went ok yet.
  2. I wonder if instead of a huge specialist plastic bag, we could just get some muslin and make a small bag around the flower bunch we cross?

I like the idea of not using plastic where we can avoid it, and also allowing the plant to spend its energy naturally and give us plenty of crossed and non-crossed seeds from the same plant. Though if people have bad experiences with that, I would appreciate hearing about it.

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I use small gauze drawstring bags. Yarn and waste fabric scraps.

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Is the bagging more to prevent any further pollination or to protect the seed head from damage?

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Prevent bees from getting to it. If I’m doing a specific cross I don’t want additional pollen to mess things up.

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