Some of the roses in the garden have ripe hips ... a hip is the fruit of the rose, that contains seeds which will become new varieties of roses if planted. It's been a few years since I planted rose seeds, and I have decided to do it again this year.
This is a spray of hips on 'Kathleen', a Hybrid Musk rose that produces a beautiful show of hips in the fall.
If you would like to try growing rose seeds, here is a lesson to get you started.
1. Cut open the ripe hip and remove the seeds. I usually pry them out of the hip with my thumbnail. The seeds vary in size and are very hard.
2. Make sure to remove any pith from the soft part of the hip that may be clinging to the seeds, because the pith contains an enzyme that inhibits germination. Again, I just do this with my thumbnail.
3. I lay the seeds out on a folded, damp paper towel.
4. Place the paper towel into a zipper sandwich bag. I use a Sharpie to mark the baggie with the name of the rose that the hips came from.
5. Put the baggie into the crisper of your refrigerator and leave it there for at least 60 days.
Also in this crisper drawer, you can see a gallon-sized bag of cuttings in newspaper burritos, a package of corn tortillas, and a cantalope.
Stay tuned for the next part of this lesson, in two months when I take the baggies out of the fridge.
These hips are called 'open pollinated' because the bees and the wind fertilize the flowers, instead of a human placing pollen to combine two specific roses in the cross. It is rare to get a rose worth keeping from open-pollinated hips, but I still like to grow them just to see what happens. I have one keeper in my garden, that I grew from a hip I took from 'Peace'. In my next post, I will show it to you.
