Is it sensible and possible for a home gardener to attempt to create new cultivars (e.g. of citrus) via manual/controlled pollination in a home garden without specialist equipment?
For instance, if I wanted to cross two different apple cultivars is it easily achievable without using specialist equipment to prevent the flowers from being accidentally fertilised by the wrong pollen?
Yes, it is doable. The more crosses you do, the more likely you will come up with something good. The more cultivars that exist for whatever you are breeding the less likely you will come up with an improvement.
Smaller plants would be amenable to home breeding. Large trees like apples would be difficult to come up with an improvement over other varieties.
When I was young my father had many apple trees, from different cultivars. He kept some seeds from his own apples and grew them into plants. He reserved a stroke of his land, where he planted the young trees, it must have been like 20-30 small trees (packed close to each other like bushes). It took some years before they would finally produce apples, and then he judged which apples were good in taste, pest resistant, and were different to already known cultivars. Finally the one that was best was used for transplantation and grafting and he removed the less successful trees.
It can take years before you have a new cultivar, but you only need space and time for it (pollination is done by insects or wind).
