i dont understand... i had been anciously waiting for my fruit to ripen on mammillaria pennispinosa. i started off with 4 fruit, i picked one but there was nothing in it so i ate it it tasted like the runner from kikuyu grass. I thought well must not be ripe yet so i waited... then one broke open so i pulled it off and cut it open...NOTHING. the remaining 2 fruit i left for ages until one started to dry out, then i pulled them both off and cut them open...NOTHING. so i ate them...still tasted bad and still no seed. WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO MY SEEDS!!!

Darren,


Some species are a bit fussy when it comes to producing seeds and Mamms are one of them. I believe in general mamms are not self-fertile but that being said several of them have been found to be self-fertile.

In a perfect world each plant needs to be crossed with the same sp I.E. Mamm Pennispinosa (mother) should be crossed with Mamm Pennispinosa (father). The father plant cannot be a clone (cutting etc) or a plant grown from the same batch of seed because this would be a self-cross.

Now if you have two Mamms of different ssp flowering together cross pollination can occur, if the plant sets seed you will have a nice mamm hybrid BUT on most occasions the flower that is pollinated it will either produce NO seeds like Darrens or the seed will not be viable.

How was it pollinated ? Naturally ?

HN.

i hand polinated it from another pennispinosa grown from seed... i was sure it was going to give me some love! the interesting thing is that only one of the plants gave fruit even though i was dusting flowers between the two plants. i thought i had failed miserably when it took ages for the fruit to appear and then when the fruit arrived i thought all my christmas's hat come at once.unfortunately i did fail miserably

it is early days for me and the only cacti that i have been able to polinate is the mam. pennispinosa and my parodia werneri. (if anyone wants to trade some seeds let me know)

which leads me to another question... how do you collect pollen and save it for another flower and how long does it last?

ragards
Darren

man i have so much to learn about all this genotypic phenotypic ...agamospermy??? atleast i learnt about genotypic & phenotypic when reading the blind watchmaker by richard dawkins

...

let me get this straight... pollen from one unrelated plant can induce the non self fertile plant to produce seed through a process called "agamospermy" which would obviousely weaken the gene pool due to the resurrection of recessive traits in the plant.

is this common?

is it something that happens in all plants?

does it happen naturally?

very interesting thanks lewis, i think thats what i did with echinopsis and rebutia but the seedlings still looks like rebutia ,i wasnt sure what happened

Your a funny man Lewis. Good posts though.