Yes, I’m a newbie! I understand each strand of silk in an ear of corn is separately pollinated, so each kernal potentially has different parents. But is this also true with something like squash or melons where the seeds are all inside the fruit cavity? Or are all the seeds inside a given squash, for example, clones of each other?
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They are not clones, they are siblings.
They will share the genetics of the parent plants but each will have a different combination of genes and will have variable characteristics and traits.
The more genetically/phenotypically distant the parents are, the more noticable this will be.
It is very unlikely each or any seed would be separately pollinated, like in corn.
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To be accurate, corn can have different parents, but this doesn’t matter if those parents are from the same variety, or in the case of F1 varieties, it’s a controlled cross. They will still be clones. It’s that what matters with any seeds. Are parents the same and are they staple varieties or unstaple. If at least one is unstaple, then it will go by Mendelian principles (to oversimplify it). But even selfed unstaple will make diverse offspring. If several staple varieties can freely cross, then you will get F1s of those. In this case it depends how many varieties you have to start with. You will have some that are clones, but with alot of parent varieties there are still many combinations. Still it’s only from F2 forward where you will see the full range of diversity. So it’s not that much about pollination as genetics.
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But they are. Pollination works the same as in corn, it’s only results of the pollination that don’t show visibly in the outside of seeds.
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Ah, thank you. That clears things up!
It made sense to me that a given squash would only have two parents, yet I was aware that people occasionally got that single unusual plant. So the diversity is everything, and to capture it all I will have to plant every seed! It will be fine this first year, I’m not starting with much diversity most likely, but next year, I will need a lot more space to plant, or spend the whole year convinced that seed I threw away because there was no more room was THE One!
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Wait, what? My squash has more than one parent?
Yes, well depends how many you are growing. If you have more than one variety, then changes are high that there are at least 2 parents within set of seeds. More varieties you have, the more likely it is that there are more parent within that set of seeds and less likely that they are selfed.
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Yes, it better waste seeds by oversowing, and then culling, than never give them even the change to outcompete others. I wouldn’t worry too much about wasting seeds by culling because you aren’t really interested about some specific seed, but genes. If some seed has something specific, the changes are that it will outperform the others. And even if not, that compination might arise again from the same population. Just keep the population to a healty size so that you have a good genetic back up. You are also not able to grow all the possible combinations so don’t worry that much what you might miss and be happy with what you find.
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Every bit of pollen contributed is a possible different father. The mother also has a separate line to each possible seed. So seeds will be siblings inside the same squash, will all share the same mother but will have many different possible fathers depending on where the pollen comes from.
They are NOT clones, and you do not need to plant every seed.
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I meant separately pollinated by pollen from multiple different “father” plants.
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So do I. That’s just the thing many here are doing with tomato crossing blocks.
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Yes, and I meant, wait, my squash could have more than two parents? Two.
Everybody knows what we mean when we reply too quickly, right?
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