Recently I went to Martin Haberer's site in Nuertingen Raidwangen (Baden Wuerttemberg, Germany) to visit his collection and expand my own. According to himself and his catalogue he has close to 3000 different semps, rollers and heuffs in his collection. He named a whole lot of semp and heuff crosses (about all made by bees).
I spent a total of 4 hours with him talking about semps and came back with 42 new semps for my collection, all named except for 1 noid.
Before going I had printed his catalogue and marked the ones I absolutely wanted (dark green), those I would take if some of the first group were not available (light green), those of minor interest(yellow) and those of no interest to me (red). Fortunately not all the ones I'd marked in dark green and light green were available otherwise I would have needed a second car to get everything home
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I selected a lot of smaller velvety types like 'Andre Smits', some brownish ones like 'Kelpone' and 'Bronze Pastel' and some I just because I liked their colour and/or shape like 'Dr. Fritz Koehlein', 'Sunburst', 'Goldmarie', 'Pacific Knight', 'Pacific Green Rose', 'Space Dog', 'Devils Touch', ....
Below some fotos of the collection...
...and the propagated ones I selected my new semps from...
I actually also wanted 'Cmirals Yellow' or "Goldsterchen' for my collection, but Martin did not recommend both as they grow slowly and make very few offspring. Maybe I will ask him for an offspring or two in autumn or next spring - this yellow spring colour is really unique for a semp.
too much of a selection can be exausting and I didn't want to keep Martin longer than necessary in the light spring rain that was starting.
