All plants produce seeds.  Well, they all used to.

Well, they all used to back where they originated.

Thousands of years of mankind “messing” with plants to make them more useful and growing them far from their homelands has rendered some plants nearly seedless or their seeds nearly sterile.

But under the right conditions, even the ones that barely and rarely have good seeds can be coaxed into generating viable seeds.

And that is a good thing since cross pollinating plants for desirable genetic traits is how we get most of our new plant varieties.

And the resulting seeds continue our headway with higher yields, disease resistance, new colors, better taste and on and on with plant genetics.

I remember as a kid going out to LSU and seeing the rolling carts on mini-railroads that were actually giant flower pots growing sugarcane.

At the time I didn’t know or care, but there was a reason for the sugarcane trains. Sugarcane grows well in south Louisiana, but the tropical plant does not have enough time to produce seeds before temperate wintertime.

So the carts of growing sugarcane are pushed in and out of greenhouses to provide the tropical climate needed to make seeds for plant breeding.

Similarly, soybean researchers reduce the time to create new varieties by growing two crops in one year; one in the Mississippi Delta and one in South America where growing seasons are about opposite ours.

Some plant species and varieties within species have the advantage of retaining new genetic combinations within their seed and pass the traits on from one generation to the next.  We say these plants “breed true.”

The big acreage crops of soybeans and wheat do this.  Corn does not.

Every seed planted for the 75 million acres of U.S. corn has to be produced every year by cross-pollination between the two varieties selected years prior to create a hybrid plant.

I bet there are at least a couple of local residents who were raised in the Corn Belt, i.e., the Midwestern states, who had a teenage job detasseling corn.

To generate the hybrid seed corn every year, two varieties of corn are planted close by in block patterns in large fields. The plants that are to produce the ears for harvest as hybrid seed are the “female” plants.

Their tassels, the pollen-bearing structures at the top, must be removed to keep these plants from pollinating themselves.

Nearby “male” plants of the different variety are allowed to tassel and provide the pollen. Thus the very laborious task of hand removing tassels from the females was once a right-of-passage for tens of thousands of young people every year.

There is still some hand detasseling done, but machinery takes off about 70 percent of the tassels before the kids move in. Sugarcane, potatoes and asparagus are not grown from seed on farms or in gardens. But they will produce seeds in greenhouse conditions under the care of professional plant geneticists and their staffs.

 

Terry Rector is spokesman for the Warren County Soil and Water Conservation District.