Thank you so much for the tip about looking up Brad's "A Record Year" thread, Leslie. I've been drooling over all the lovely irises. I was telling myself that this year is the only year I'll try hybridizing, but after a look at all those, I can see that it is guaranteed to be addicting. You want to buy more irises just so you can experiment. Then I think about our hillside rock farm and realize how much work it would be to make decent iris beds.
I posted earlier about meeting up with a caterpillar when I was about to pluck a stamen with my tweezers. I had pollinated one stigma, and the meetup with the caterpillar shocked me into forgetting about my project until the next day, when I went back and did all three stigmas on that iris again, just to be sure. BUT I realized later, when I went to document my work, that I had used two different cultivars for pollinating (that blankety blank caterpillar!). I know I've read you don't need to pollinate all three stigmas, but since none of them took last year, this year I did all three stigmas on five irises, and three made nice, fat pods.
I'm wondering what happens when you have two widely-different pollen parents on the same receiver plant. It will be interesting to see!
