Agaveville

I have four agave shooting up stalks right now:
Agave Parrasana
Agave Vilmoriniana 'Stained Glass'
Agave 'Blue Glow'
Agave 'Sharkskin Shoes'

I would love to hybridize these if possible as I'm sure any of them crossed would look gorgeous, but I have absolutely no personal experience in doing this and I'm struggling to find information regarding it online. After many years of lurking I finally made an account here just to ask about this, so if anyone has any suggestions on how I should go about attempting to cross these, please let me know. Thank you for your time.

Congrats on your opportunity to do some pollination.

It's pretty easy. Here's an image of a Manfreda 'Silver Leopard' that flowered for me last year. Idea is the same and flowers are similar enough. Pollen goes from anther (A), to stigma (S) as marked in image. I usually use a paintbrush, but with the manfreda cross I made, I also removed anthers by hand and rubbed them on the stigma.

Agave vilmoriniana is a bulbil producer, so leave that out of any hybridization schemes.

I'm worried about self pollination as well as these stalks potentially pushing out flowers at different times (heck the Parrasana has been pushing its stem for over a year now), is there anything I should do to combat this? Can I freeze pollen? Can I pollinate the stigmas early? Or pull off the anthers so I can get acquire the pollen without self pollinating? Thank you so much for your response!!

Gee.S wrote:Agave vilmoriniana is a bulbil producer, so leave that out of any hybridization schemes.

ah I actually forgot about that, the stained glass bulbils actually revert back to the non-variegated form, thank you for the reminder!

IMHO, you're wading in too deep. I would just cross to the best of my ability and see what turns up.

If you air dry the pollen it should keep in the fridge for a week. If dried to 30% RH, 2 years in the freezer is possible.

To avoid 'selfing' I remove anthers at the first sign of them opening to avoid spillage onto the stigmas below. Sometimes, I take about a 2 inch length of a drinking straw with a cotton wool plug at one end and cover the stigmas.

Most of the ones that I have hand pollenated, the stigmas were quite sticky when receptive and that occured 18-24 hours after the anthers opened. In this situation a paint brush can get a bit gummed up so I just put some pollen on my finger and wipe it on.

If you have trouble reaching the flowers , a long cane with some cotton wool wrapped around the end sometimes works.

Best regards
Dave

Dave thank you very very much for your advice, if I succeed and get any interesting crosses you will be certainly receiving some goodies from me.