Ok amigos. Pulled out one tube of 10year old and one tube from 2014. Gonna test it today to see if it is still viable.
The metal tube has a silica type desecante lid that keeps things dry.
Pot of gold from the flying Dutchman.
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Extremely interested to see this! Only once i collected pollen and used later. It produced seed yet they grew like garbage! Couldnât keep any full term. I didnât pollinate much so only had 25 seeds. Wasnât sure exactly the cause.
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Ouu best of luck to you @Viva_Mexico
Fingers crossed for ya, ten years is alot of time laying around, I woulda lost it haha
What are u pollinating btw?
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i too am very interesting in see this one out !
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i remember learning of 'Pot of Gold" on an MTV special around '97/'98âŚpseudo documentary about growers(somewhere westcoast us)⌠anyone else remember that?
around '07 i had some pollen-chucked âPot-of-Gold X Trainwreck X Dead Bodiesâ
âŚnever could figure out âdead bodiesâ. sounds fucked. like RKS but bad.
buds came out hawaiian, floral. weird.
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i remember getting pot of gold in high school, it was verse dense nugs with lots of gold/yellow hairs
interested to see if the pollen is still viable! where did you pull it out from? a freezer?
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7 hours in the street and I didnât even make it to where the plants are. So, tomorrow I will do the first test.
King Kong and my GCxQ cross
Top shelf of the closet. Always cool, never cold or hot. There should be About a gram in there. Donât know how many grains of pollen in a gram, but as long as .00001% is viable I should get a few beans. We will see. I am not expecting it to be like it was the day I put it in there.
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I canât wait to see how this turns out but it will be a long time before you can grow the beans. I am more interested in the offspring, not so much about how potent is the pollen.
ÂĄvamos!
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if I pollinate today, the seeds will be ready in 4 weeks. I always wait another month after harvesting seeds to let them âcure.â this is a pollen test not seed run. If the pollen is viable I will go full pollination in 3 weeks on a fresh plant just for seeds, which, will be ready in 7 weeks. these will be gifted to overgrow witch in turn will be gifted to the members. I promised to donate 1000 seeds (I will send more) just that I am behind.
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I would say the true test of the pollen is not that it makes things in the shape of a seed on the mother, more that it produces a healthy plant.
I wait in anticipation of that test, which from the look of things will be at least 10 weeks, most likely more.
If you get any pollination at all I will be impressed with 10 year old pollen.
Just noticed I am not the first to say about the offspring being the true test, hehe.
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Agreed. I havenât had much luck past a couple of years max.
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why would the age of the pollen have a effect on the vigor of the offspring? I could understand the pollen not being viable but, If it is viable how would the age effect the genetics? This is the oldest pollen I have ever used so I donât know.
yea, I think the oldest I have ever used was maybe a year. What are your thoughts on the the old pollen = weak plants. Have your heard or seen this before?
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My thoughts are along the same line as clones and that they do not degrade over time. You can not change the genes and unless a virus takes hold it is what it is. I have cuts older than some of the members here and they are same as it ever was.
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As do I but recently I had to give one back to the person I got it from as, through environmental stress, their cutting had lost itâs vigour. So I agree that it should work the same as clones but that does not guarantee the pollen will produce plants as good as it would have ten years ago.
If nothing else, background radiation might have affected the DNA of the pollen. Pollen cells, because of their haploid status, are particularly susceptible to loss of genetic integrity in a radio-contaminated environment. DNA damage arising from accumulated radiation doses can cause genetic deficiencies in future offspring.
Not saying your freezer is a nuclear radiation chamber but over ten years, background radiation builds up. Also not saying this has happened for sure, more that it might and I am very interested to see the results.
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These were kept in the closet next to the plutonium. I wonder if thatâs why it glows in the dark now
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This seems to be a widespread belief in the canna-community, as Iâve heard that older pollen increases chances of issues in the offspring a couple times.
The degradation scenario @MicroDoser proposed seems fair.
(Edit â It looks to me that the variations in offspring caused by pollen degradation is more often due to things like, pollinators prefer fresh pollen, and old pollen moves through the environment differently as it degrades. Literally could not find a single peer reviewed study on the possibility of phenotypes of offspring changing due to long-term storage of pollen.)
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Itâs a nice copy and paste and quite a generic statement adding too many variables. Itâs also quite old and outdated information. There may be some old HPS ballast running around in gardens still, but no one has âbackground radiationâ or a âradio-contaminated environmentâ.
Assuming the pollen was properly kept I stand by my statement.
As for the cut you had to give why did it loose, or should I say what type of bug was introduced in to the room? In a good not even perfect environment you will not and can not change the DNA. Add a virus sure.
If their were any validity to a fridge effecting DNA, seeds would also be effected and I just donât see it. I realize as well that you did say you were not saying this would for sure happen over time. Iâm simple saying if the pollen works it will work as good and be the same as the day it was collected and does not change. It does have a shelf life though, and I have not had any success personally keeping it very long and it does not freeze. Not even a week.
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OK, firstly background radiation is unavoidable, the clue is in the word âbackgroundâ. There is nowhere that does not have a background level of radiation, some have more than others. This level is higher now than it was before 1944 or so due to the tests that have been done since. EVERYBODY has background radiation, nowhere has none. There is a profitable market recovering ship hulls that sank before WW2 because they have significantly less radiation than steel made after that date. If you are in an area with radon gas seepage you may well be in an area with background radiation levels high enough to worry about.
Secondly, you mean âaffectingâ not âeffectingâ.
As for the plant I had to replace, there was no bug or virus introduced. The guy I know is obsessive with cleanliness beyond reasonable levels and has a similar obsession with keeping the environment and nutrients correct. Had it been an infection he would have just said that anyway. From what I was told it simply had over 20,000 cuttings taken from it in less than 2 years and the cuttings success rate had gone down to less than 50%. I am sure you know there are more things that can affect a plant than a DNA change, epigenetic changes which happen when a plant undergoes stress for example, or enters flowering. This can permanently change the expression of the DNA without changing the DNA itself. That seems very likely to be the cause of this particular plant losing vigour.
I am saying that pollen is not digital. It is not something that either works 100% perfectly or does not work at all. I was responding to the people who said there were no possible changes. I am also not saying that refrigeration or freezing affects seed or pollen, not sure where you got that from. Seeds have combined DNA, which is not the same as the uncombined DNA of pollen. It is completely possible for there to be environmental factors that could affect pollen but not a seed. Seeds are packaged to protect the contents, pollen is not. I also never mentioned HPS.
There are possible changes. Time makes them more possible. Like I said, any pollination after this amount of time will be impressive. I personally think it is possible (note possible, not likely) that even if the 10 year old pollen germinates the flower and produces a seed that the plants might not be as good as the same cross done 10 years ago. If there were no possible changes, pollen would last forever, and always germinate flowers. This is not the case therefore pollen changes over time.
I will repeat that I look forward to a report on the vigour of any plants that come from this experiment to see if this is the case. That is the test, shall we wait to see the result?
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