Mike, I had to cull seedlings from 2016 before I saw the results from this, so as luck would have it, I culled Seedling A and kept Seedling C, which looked the nicest to me, but clearly isn't as good of a parent as Seedling A was.
Dennis, one of the things that brought that test on was I noticed a number of hybridizers listing two to three generations when they registered their parentage. I was thinking that wasn't helpful because, are people really buying a plant because they are enamored with one of the "grandparents"? But I did actually notice some of the siblings passing on characteristics of one of the grandparents. Cross Adorable Curls (Pod) x Seedling B (Pollen) seems to be passing on more of the Margaret's Spirit genes than the other Seedlings. I really like Margarets Spirit, and I really, really like that ivory kid with some of PLP's green radiating through it. If I were a real hybridizer, I would probably want to plant 50 seeds from a cross between Adorable Curls (Pod) x Seedling B (Pollen) looking for more kids that lean toward Margaret's Spirit that I would like.
The other thing I learned is, you can't judge the parent by the cover. Seedling A produced some of the prettiest blooms. Some of the other crosses struggled a bit. But I didn't even keep Seedling A because I don't have a lot of room, and chose to keep Seedling C instead, which so far has not been a great parent at all. Unfortunately, I don't have room to cross everything to find a magic parent, so I have to live with the fact that I'm probably going to compost a bunch of great parents because they have better looking siblings. But if I were a real hybridizer, I might try harder to cross more "uglier" seedlings to make sure they aren't a super parent.
I do save some odd looking seedlings if they have a trait I like, tons of blooms, bud building, excellent branching, a special watermark, or they bloom VL or EE. But if I were going to be serious about hybridizing, based on what I've seen in my experiments, I would probably have to find room to keep all my seedlings an extra two years to judge them as parents and not just by their looks.
