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FAQ: What’s a hybrid?

The word “hybrid” is often a source of confusion for gardeners and seed savers. A large part of the confusion results from the fact that there are many meanings for hybrid. Here are some of the different uses for the word “hybrid”:

• A cross of two homozygous (highly inbred) parents within the same species. This is almost always what you are getting when you buy “F1 hybrid” seed from a seed catalog. The “F1” is breeders’ shorthand for the first generation of offspring after a cross is made. Many people believe that F1 hybrid plants will not produce viable seed. In fact, this type of hybrid is almost always fertile. However, if the parents which produced the cross were very different looking, the seed you save from F1 hybrids will produce a wide array of different looking plants – great if you want to start a breeding project, not so great if you want to grow plants that look the same as they did the year before.

• A cross of two different species. These are known as “interspecific hybrids”. Often, the offspring of these crosses are sterile. The most commonly known example would be a mule, which is a sterile cross of a horse and a donkey. However, many times these crosses can produce fertile offspring, such many hybrids within the Brassica genus. For example, Brassica napus (rutabaga, etc) is derived from a cross of Brassica oleracea (cabbage, etc) and Brassica rapa (turnip, etc).

• In the most general terms, a hybrid is formed whenever two non-identical parents cross. For example, you and I are hybrids of our parents. In a diverse open-pollinated population of plants going to seed, many, many hybrids are formed between all the different plants in the field.

When you see the word “hybrid”, it is worth stopping and asking yourself which of these meanings is being used. Once you know what type of hybrid is being described, you will have a much better idea of what you can do with it in your garden.