Muddymitts said:Yah -- I'm wondering where people get them for under $2.00?? I just bought a small bag of 12 at Michaels -- they were $6.50!!! Not that that's over expensive, but for people who do lots of hybridizing............

On line. Various jewelry supply warehouses have them. I just bought some from Fetpack.com. There was a cheaper one I found but the site had a $50 dollar min order -- the lowest price amounted to 15 cents each, and I'm sure you can't get stockings for that.

I bought a bag of 50 for $20.00 at Michaels. They had white or green at the time and I bought green ones so they blend in. This is the first year I've tried them and the thing I like about the organza bags are:
Place them on the pod to protect the pod and then to save the seed if the pods start to split before I can collect the pods
I place a paper tag in the bag with the cross info written down after removing the pod from the stalk
After removal of the seeds from the pod they can dry in the organza bag without worry of them getting mixed up with any other seed.
And I can reuse them next year.

Lol.... I submitted an article on this (organza bags) several days ago. I was wondering if it got lost , when I finally received a message that it was accepted. The admins didn't give a date for when they will post it, though. (My slant was on daylilies, with the main use listed as protecting daylily pollen from bees, but I also mentioned saving seeds from falling out of the pods. I guess iris pods are subject to the same problem as daylily pods. I give my source for the bags in the article.)

I buy my organza bags on ebay. The sellers in China and Hong Kong sell them dirt cheap with free postage. You can buy 50 for about US$3. I like the bags because they have drawstrings.

Ah. I get mine from Paper Mart http://www.papermart.com/stand... . They are a bit more expensive and you have to pay shipping, but they do have the drawstrings, which are an absolute must (for keeping loose seeds in, or pollen-stealing bees out). I can also get larger bags, which are needed for protecting the pollen on large flowers.

bluegrassmom said:Robin, I opened them because some of the pods seemed misshaped. It also had some black on the outside. I know on dl pods some with start but abort. The iris seeds were still whitish.

Teresa - Did you plant the under developed seeds or toss them? I am curious to see if any of them grow.

Hello everyone,
May I ask what proportion of your own iris hybrids do you keep? I am thinking about my limited space and how many crosses I want to make this spring.

LynNY said:

Thanks for all this info but I'm not sure if this would work for the upstate New York time/season factor. The seeds, say are ready in September. If it sprouts in 8-10 weeks in the fridge, it will be the middle of December - everything will be frozen solid here, and remain so until March/ April. What do I do with the sprouted seeds all winter?

I grow them indoors by a lighted window.

Totally_Amazing said:Hello everyone,
May I ask what proportion of your own iris hybrids do you keep? I am thinking about my limited space and how many crosses I want to make this spring.

Just keep the ones you want and get rid of the rest. If they seem nice but you don't have room or don't want to keep them you can give them to friends who are learning to garden and see how long it takes for your friends to either kill them or prove the seedlings are strong enough to hang in there.

Or donate them to a local church or 4-H club and let the kids play with them. I seem to produce a good amount of seedlings that look like the same thing. I stuck them on a slope by a road about a mile away and let them just grow naturally. They are pretty and still there.

Hi All: I have a question. Does anyone have pictures of SDB and MDB seed pods? Do they look just like TB pods? I have tried to cross an SDB and MDB but have only so far had success with TB's producing pods. I wonder if I would recognize a seed pod on the little guys.

Also, I have only planted one set of 20 seeds last fall. I let them winterize outside. But out of 20 seeds I got one plant. So I am thinking I may have to try something different this next time. I have two more sets of seeds from crosses ready to plant this fall. I am considering maybe at least soaking the seeds before planting.

Totally_Amazing said:Hello everyone,
May I ask what proportion of your own iris hybrids do you keep? I am thinking about my limited space and how many crosses I want to make this spring.

On average, within 4 or 5 years of making a given set of crosses, I'll have kept about 5% of the resulting seedlings. The rest of them would have been tossed. Either because they weren't very good or (more likely) simply because, although they were pretty, there just wasn't anything special about them.

People are free to do as they wish, of course, but it's generally not a good idea to give away unwanted seedlings. If you are hybridizing, you likely have named irises producing plenty of increases in your garden. If you want to give away irises, why not give people those.

I posted this on the no id thread.
From reading Kent's post, I could be wasting your time and my time trying to identify an un-named seedling.
... Now that I took the opportunity to get this picture out there again anybody recognize it?

iciris said:Since we have so many new members I thought I'd give this No ID (Tag 01) another try get some possible leads for a ID. It's a TB, and blooms early to midseason.

Sorry, I don't know it, but we don't grow too many TBs.

We compost the seedlings. If we don't like them, they should not be given to other people. As Kent says, we could do extra introduced plants. Our club has sales every other year & most of our extra plants to there to support the club. Plus we are right there to answer peoples' questions.

Questions asked at the show only a few wanted to know how the judging worked. Otherwise it was 'why don't my irises grow?'

Thankyou so much Kent. That information gives me a rough guide to work with.

Just to add a bit more detail, I generally figure on seeing around 50% seedlings bloom the first year after planting (two years after making the crosses). Of the bloomers, roughly two thirds will get tossed. Almost all of the seedlings will bloom the second year after planting. More than 90% get discarded by the end of the second bloom season. That's also the point when I dig the survivors and move them to a more permanent location where they can be evaluated more thoroughly and the numbers gradually get whittled down after that.

Keep in mind, though, I'm just an amateur. From what I've seen, professional hybridizers do it quite a bit differently. Partly, that's because I have really limited space so have to be ruthless (I often wish I had been even more ruthless the first year, first year clumps are a lot easier to dig and toss than second year clumps ). Due to limited space, and doing too many crosses most years , the seedling beds basically have to be in a three year rotation. For me, finding a "permanent" spot for the survivors is starting to become the biggest challenge.

Thanks again Kent.

@GreenIris
Hi Elsa,
The buds on an IB look the same as a TB and I expect it would be the same for SDBs and MDBs. I have only ever created one IB seed pod and I think it was a bit smaller than the TB pods.

GreenIris said:Hi All: I have a question. Does anyone have pictures of SDB and MDB seed pods? Do they look just like TB pods? I have tried to cross an SDB and MDB but have only so far had success with TB's producing pods. I wonder if I would recognize a seed pod on the little guys.

Also, I have only planted one set of 20 seeds last fall. I let them winterize outside. But out of 20 seeds I got one plant. So I am thinking I may have to try something different this next time. I have two more sets of seeds from crosses ready to plant this fall. I am considering maybe at least soaking the seeds before planting.

I somehow missed this earlier, sorry. Couldn't find a picture of the pods, but yes, SDB and MDB pods do look different than TB pods. SDB pods have pointy(ish) ends, they often resemble footballs. They also usually have thinner walls and more air space inside so, while TB pods are hard when green, SDB pods have more of a balloon-like look and feel. SDB pods are roughly the same size as an average TB pod, though, so they are fairly easy to spot.

I never had much luck getting seeds to germinate by leaving them outside over the winter. It seems to be a very common practice for hybridizers on the West Coast to plant their seeds in pots in the fall and just leave them outside. But, they tend to have cool, wet winters which create perfect conditions for stratification. Our winters are cold and dry so pots left outside tend to end up being frozen solid most of the time. When the seeds are frozen, the stratification process actually stops. That means most of the time spent in pots here during the winter is, in effect, wasted. For me, stratifying the seeds in a refrigerator works way better, but a lot depends on where you live and what kind of winter weather you experience.

KentPfeiffer said:

I somehow missed this earlier, sorry. Couldn't find a picture of the pods, but yes, SDB and MDB pods do look different than TB pods. SDB pods have pointy(ish) ends, they often resemble footballs. They also usually have thinner walls and more air space inside so, while TB pods are hard when green, SDB pods have more of a balloon-like look and feel. SDB pods are roughly the same size as an average TB pod, though, so they are fairly easy to spot.

I never had much luck getting seeds to germinate by leaving them outside over the winter. It seems to be a very common practice for hybridizers on the West Coast to plant their seeds in pots in the fall and just leave them outside. But, they tend to have cool, wet winters which create perfect conditions for stratification. Our winters are cold and dry so pots left outside tend to end up being frozen solid most of the time. When the seeds are frozen, the stratification process actually stops. That means most of the time spent in pots here during the winter is, in effect, wasted. For me, stratifying the seeds in a refrigerator works way better, but a lot depends on where you live and what kind of winter weather you experience.

Thank you for this, so much. The info that stratification stops during freeze was an eye opener/