I am glad that works for you, Tina. You must have more time and patience than I do.

Cutting tape, putting it around the bloom, lining the ends of the tape up and sticking it together would drive me to finding a faster, easier method. Especially now that my hands no longer function very well.

It's bad enough trying to put the string tags on. Even after doing many thousands of them, it's still kind of a pain... But it does go pretty quick when your just going along hanging tags one after the other and not pollenating in between.

I really like the paper clip idea. I might try that with pollen I use the most.

When I pollenate, I try to get it done quickly while the flowers are at their peek for setting. This might only be one hour.

Since I no longer do hundreds of blooms a day... I do write all the tags as I go. I stack them up in my hand, write on one, flip it back, write the next, flip it back...etc. Then I lay them inside the pollenated blooms. This allows me to get the pollenating done quicker... And lets me see right away which blooms have been covered and which are still available. Then when I am all done, I go back and "hang tags" ... sometimes even waiting to do it in the cool of the evening. In a larger operation where they will cover all the flowers on a clump with the same pollen, they will write one tag, stick it in the top of the most prominent flower, showing easily from several feet away that the clump has been covered. Then, a garden helper can come along behind them, helping to write additional tags and hanging them after the day warms and your no longer pollenating.

I have used masking tape to mark scapes or foliage of plants for sale, before digging, or to discard. If you get the tape pushed together well, it works ok.

My hands are pretty old and unsteady now, too. So, I don't cut tape at all (too hard to lug scissors, I just carry tape roll and pen). I simply tear the tape off; 1/4-inch comes easily off the roll. Oh, and you're right, I forgot something, I also have longish tweezers in my shirt pocket for grasping pollen heads to hybridize with, so any fine-handling is a very quick snap ... just use the tweezer point to gently push the tape between stems and, if needed in a really tight spot, to hold one end for pushing the sides of the tape together. Thanks, I knew there was one other item I'd forgotten to mention ... so it does up the cost to about $8 a year.

If I'm only going to use one specific pollen on one specific cultivar then I will just put the wire or clip on the plant name tag. And if for some reason I use a different pollen on a few blooms I will put the clip/wire on those.

Another thing I have done this year is the pods I set for me I used paper clips and then the ones I started pollinating to possibly sell I use the wires. That way I know when I'm done harvesting my keeper seeds.

Michele that's why one of your pics had both. That makes sense. I think I am going to try the paper clips some and see how it works for me. I will not be pollinating a lot this year so I'll give it a try and see how I like it.

Hemlady, thanks for the comment re Staples and colored paper clips. Last season I went to Office Max where I picked up metallic clips and also some mixed-color batches which gave me some odd colors like grey. The striped ones I had to buy on eBay, and they came from China.

The reds and the orange-reds fade here, so that in the end it is hard to distinguish them from oranges and pinks, which is why I tend to lump them all together. I have enough different colors (and striped clips) that this season I have been able to manage the color combinations appropriately, and not run out.

The metallic colored clips thus far seem to be holding both their color and their metallic sheen, so that I can easily differentiate, say, metallic blue from the "normal" blue.

I either got mine from Staples or Office Depot (online) last year in the 800 pack; my local one didn't carry them in store. There are a lot of places online that have them and some even have free shipping (may need to order a certain amount though).

There are a few different brands and I listed a couple of links for one brand. But if you Google plastic coated color paper clips or vinyl coated color paper clips (800 pack if you want that one) you will find all sorts of places that sell them.





http://www.walmart.com/ip/3675...

http://www.rakuten.com/prod/sc...

Another thing I use is what Fred has posted before about what he uses at times; I copied him. I did use it as my only tag before I got paper clips and it was time consuming writing each tag out as I went along but now I will use it if I am using a pollen for just a few things.

You can cut the mini blinds any size you want, I think Fred cuts his 2.5" but I cut mine a little smaller. You write on them with a No. 2 pencil and it doesn't fade or wash off. You can reuse them by crossing out the last pollen parent and writing the new one. Now if you are one that writes the pollen parent, date, time, temp, and lots of other info on the tag then you may just have to flip it over to reuse but Fred and I just write the pollen parent on it.

Here is a photo that Fred posted before showing what he used




I started using the clear coated paper clips on mine because the metal ones I used were rusting.

I have enjoyed reading this thread! Lots of great information

I use colored paper clips. I often run out of colors since I make just a few crosses with any one pollen but lots of different crosses ( so my students have a variety of genetic options when they chooses their seeds).

I have dealt with this by Chaining paper clips together

Y- G might be one pollen
Y- R another
Y-B still another
Y-Y yet another

Then repeat with different first color
G-G
G-R
G-B
G-Y

Lol.. I do so many different crosses that I have actually had some pollen represented by 4 paper clips chained together! Like R-Y-G-B. this long a chain hangs down some but since there are not many it has not been a problem.

Keeping a journal list of the codes is extremely important! I also place the paperclip color code on the eon tag of the pollen parent ( actually attach paper clips) so I know it's code when I get the pollen.

I too have problems with Red, Pink and Orange fading. They only last a season or two.

LOL, LOL, I do the same thing Lisa.

Tink, that 8-pack is one of the sets of paper clips that I got from Office Max... I think of it as "the basics", lol. I also got cylindrical containers of mixed colors (which gave me grey, turquoise, magenta) and also a container of mixed color (lime, blue, violet, magenta) metallic sheen colors. (Yes, you really can distinguish the metallic sheen clips from the standard clips.) All of those were from Home Depot. (I had to get my striped clips from China, via eBay ; striped red-white, blue-white, green-white, black-white, red-yellow, black-yellow.)

For those of you who use the paper clips - do you reuse them from season to season? I reuse them during the season (as pods fail to set), but by the time the end of the season rolls around and I have collected all of the pods, it seems like such a hassle to sort out the colors and straighten out the clips. Right now I have a couple of ziploc baggies of clips from last season which I still have not sorted/straightened out. Worst of all are the ones that fall into the dirt (which on our property may not only be dirt (if you know what I mean), given all of the critters), as those have to be washed (and/or sanitized) first. It really tempts me to just throw all of the used ones out and start with fresh clips each season. (At least the faded red, pink, orange clips give me an excuse...)

I think at the end of this season (hybridizing has almost come to an end here) I am going to search online to find single color boxes of clips, as I use some colors more than other. And maybe I can find some more striped combinations?

Polymerous said:

For those of you who use the paper clips - do you reuse them from season to season? I reuse them during the season (as pods fail to set), but by the time the end of the season rolls around and I have collected all of the pods, it seems like such a hassle to sort out the colors and straighten out the clips. Right now I have a couple of ziploc baggies of clips from last season which I still have not sorted/straightened out. Worst of all are the ones that fall into the dirt (which on our property may not only be dirt (if you know what I mean), given all of the critters), as those have to be washed (and/or sanitized) first. It really tempts me to just throw all of the used ones out and start with fresh clips each season. (At least the faded red, pink, orange clips give me an excuse...)

I do reuse them and yes it is a pain to sort them but I usually do it daily so there isn't so many to do at one time. The ones I have that got collected when harvesting the pods I usually just sort sometime during the winter when I have more time on my hands.

Lots of great ideas here. I really need to get by Office Max or Staples this weekend!

Tink said:

"I do reuse them and yes it is a pain to sort them but I usually do it daily so there isn't so many to do at one time. The ones I have that got collected when harvesting the pods I usually just sort sometime during the winter when I have more time on my hands."

Well, as it turns out, I'm going to have to sort out at least the green and white ones from my huge ziploc baggie... I'm out of white clips (and almost out of the med-dark green ones) and I'm going to need them first thing tomorrow morning for pollinating from the last (? I think it's the last) bloom on 'Sacrament of Healing'.



(SoH looks creamier/more yellow in my garden (color-wise it does look like this image in evening shade), but the blooms are big and EMO (and maybe also CMO?). Not a lot of buds, but that's probably partly due to it getting a lot of shade. I love it though - it's pretty and it OPENS! I had a volunteer seedling bloom from it earlier this summer; that one will have LFO tomorrow.)

In case you were still interested, I found a place that sells those color coded wires. It isn't super cheap, but it's very convenient: http://store.cableorganizer.co...

Also, the hybridizer I got most of my plants from uses telephone wires and gets them from somewhere else, but I forget where she said to get them, offhand. If I find out, I will try to remember to post it here.

If you have some extra money laying around AND decent eyesight, you can do what I just did yesterday. I realized that I didn't have enough different colors of twist tie and the white twist ties were so glaring that it made the flowers in my front yard look funny. Paper clips were a little too thick for me to get around the flower securely (we get high winds here, so I can't hang a paperclip loosely), so that wasn't an option for me.

I did two things:
1) I found some old USB cables and stripped them, which gave me 8 colors to choose from (orange on white, orange, brown on white, brown, etc...). These are good, but the white ones were still a little flashy and I needed more colors, so then I went to JoAnne Fabrics and...
2) I purchased colored wire like they use for jewelry-making. Here is a link to it online: http://www.joann.com/26-gauge-... It isn't the cheapest stuff in the world, but a little goes a LONG way. I chose 26 guage because it's so much thinner and more discrete, but they have other guages of wire, too, if you don't want it to be quite that thin. This works great because when you run out of single/solid colors, you can twist two (or three...) colors around each other and use as many combinations as you need. This wire is a little more difficult to see, but I love that about it because it's more discrete so that my neighbors don't see the wires hanging and I still have them 'tagged' and identifiable.

Here is an example of some of the colors I used:

Click the picture below to see the whole thing:

(Sorry for the sideways photo, I tried to rotate it but it keeps appearing sideways when I upload it, regardless of how I edit and save it on my computer.)

It might be hard to tell from the picture, but the first one is combined colors of metallic wire (green on gold), the second one is a single color (purple), the third one is another combination of metallic wire (black on pink), and the fourth is USB wire (brown on white). The white paper behind it was to help you see it against the dark countertop, but it parlays into how I organize them. Since I created a color combo for all (but three) of my daylilies, it's hard to sift through that many looking for the one I want. I was going to use a narrow cardboard box until I found an old Radio Shack cassette tape holder in my basement. Instead of throwing the cassette tape organizer away, I turned it into a handy little hybridizing wire organizer!