Joshua, you can set several pods of several different crosses on the same plant. I've done 5 or 6 pods quite a few times. Most of the time I've made each cross with a single pollen per pod, but there have been times I've used as many as 4 or 5 different pollens as a mix on the same flower. Growing all these seed pods does not harm the plant. When the plant senses it's carrying a good amount of seed, it responds by taking up extra nutrients and it keeps growing longer in the season to compensate, often staying green until frozen late in the season. About the only difference I notice with the plant is there won't be any increase in bulb size with little or no stem bulblets and offsets being formed and sometimes a couple less buds the next spring.

No, lilies don't need to take a rest every other year when seeded. I have one with a 20 plus bud count and a nice inflorescence and I work the heck out of that one every year as a pod parent.

Besides hardiness and a pretty flower, some of the things that are important in breeding is obtaining good overall balance and proportion of the plant. Every feature must not only compliment each and every other feature but compliment the entire plant as a whole. And to carry all that it must have a stiff stem. We can discuss individual features like bud count and pedicel placement, inflorescence form and height, leaf styles, lengths and distribution can all be discussed later as well as some things I may have forgot to mention, I'm sure. You ask good questions, Joshua.

Thanks Lorn. That's useful to know. No doubt I will have more questions soon!

Yes, and I know you didn't ask for more on hardiness, but I can't stress enough how important it is. Because under that topic comes a whole lot of things like a plants resistance and tolerance to diseases and pathogens, both below and above ground, how adaptable a plant is to a variety of climate, weather and soil conditions and so on. In other words, you want a plant that not only looks good, but will grow just about anywhere and live a long time with minimum care. Selecting good strong hardy parents in breeding is very important because when a low resistance to something like botrytis is allowed into a bloodline, it is next to impossible to breed back out.

I agree wholeheartedly that hardiness is important. It's not always easy to find out what's hardy before buying it, unfortunately, but I will definitely be looking at how well the cultivars I have/am getting will perform and see which ones appear to be weaker. Apart from disease symptoms, what would you suggest are good indicators? Obviously one way would be to compare cultivars under the same conditions (i.e. water, light, pH, etc.) and see which ones perform better (although "better" probably has caveats such as different cultivars having different heights, number of blooms, etc.).

In the beginning, I wondered how I would ever toss anything out. You think, you finally get to the point of blooming and then you dump it? It actually gets easier. The more you have, the more you see what you are looking for and what traits you don't want to see. Saving a few is good and inspiring. I do enjoy the process, from parent selection to bloom. It extends my gardening season to all year in a lot of ways. I enjoy it.

In my climate, quite a few are lost along the way. Even some introduced cultivars have bit the dust so to speak before blooming or in the first couple of years, far too early in my opinion. Testing garden lily possibilities here has to be a great place, the weak won't survive. They can't.

Has anyone tried OT x LO or LO x OT crosses? I'd like to know if anyone has succeeded without intervention/embryo rescue, since apparently L x T or T x L crosses don't require many special techniques to do. I plan on trying such a cross this year.

LO's in general are not very fertile. I have Pink Heaven which is listed as a tetra and have tried tetra trumpets,asiatics, and others as well as its pollen on others with no luck so far.

If anyone has any lily seeds they are willing to sell or trade for other plant material please shoot me a treemail I'd love to try some the crosses you all are doing. My pods are not swelling from the crosses I did some have actually shrunk

Well one of my attempts at pollenating took. Now to wait and see if the seed will be viable

Good for you!

But you didn't tag it, even with just a piece of string. I hope that's the right one, and I hope you remember it 2 months from now......

Believe me, no one's mind is like a steel trap.

I had it marked. I cut the other pods off and took the tag off because it was in the front walkway and wife didn't like it

Nice work maintaining peace..

My daylilies are covered in tags but the yard has stacks of pots, compost piles, and things I someday plan on using all throughout it. No wonder my wife is not a fan of gardening .

A couple years ago, Della, Rick and I were discussing all the good signs of fertilization, skyward stigmas, skyward pods, etc. Rick pointed out: 'what about pods that stay horizontal and appear to fill out good like upright pods?'. Something one doesn't see much of. Well, here's one cross I made last summer where the stigma went skyward overnight but the pod grew straight without turning skyward. It was nice and solid and looked very normal, otherwise. When I cracked the pod open, it was full of chaff--all chaff; normal size but no embryo.

So, by association, we can now say we have observed one good looking horizontal growing pod which did not produce good seed. If anyone sees a horizontal pod growing nest summer, make note of what the seed looks like. Let's see if we can build a correlation.

Oh yes, I had mentioned this in passing elsewhere on the forum, that you were correct when you guessed I would get nothing from these three pods. In the end, none had not even one possibly viable seed. And no funny stuff: just simple 2n x 2n.

Such good-looking pods and yet no viable seed; very interesting! I have a horizontal pod developing this year so I must go take a picture for reference.

Here's my horizontal seed pod, on a 1c plant. It's the most determinedly pendant seedling I have, the pedicel hasn't moved at all but the pod has. What's the prognosis?


While we're looking at differences in pods, here are some from 'Tiger Babies'. I try every year to get viable seed. It's very happy to set pods but almost always they are all chaff. I had a couple seeds germinate one year but the seedlings were weak and died very young. Well this year I smothered a bunch of plants with different tetra asiatic pollens and have quite a few pods. Many look good and fat (ha - they usually look good and fat!) like this:



Never occurred to me before but now I realise they are basically horizontal... well, banana-zontal. Except these few. They are fatter and ...near vertical! Could there finally be some good seeds inside?

'Tiger Babies' is one I try every year. I have it from s few different sources and one group in particular seems to get good seed. Since Tiger Babies it said to be a strain, I have focused on this group. I also have the same experience on the seedlings, often weak and lost early on. I will also add.. slow growing. But I do have one growing from a cross with Bruno. We'll see. Good luck Della.

I'm also a pod presser. The chaff pods, though looking full, seem to be softer with some give to them.

Tracy,
I wonder does Bruno happen to be a seedling of Bold Knight? I say this because Bruno was the nick name of Herb Sunley who had registered Bold Knight. I could be mistaken, but did Terrry Willoughby register Bruno. The reason I ask is that all of this seems to come together for me in that I got a number of seedlings from Tiger Babies using Bold Knight as the pollen parent. I also remember that when I showed Ed McRae these seedlings when he happened to be here in Saskatoon for an NALS show, he got quite interested and immediately whipped out his notebook. I never did hear if he did any work with this information. I don't recall now just what became of these seedlings, but it seems to me that they resembled a combination of the two parents with maybe a slight leaning toward Tiger Babies.
Jim

Yes, Jim, 'Bruno' is Terry Willoughby's lily that was registered in 2006. It was purchased through Valley K Lily Ranch. The story is correct about the naming of it after Herbert Sunley. It seems to be a sturdy tetraploid.