Seeing all of Brad's iris and their parentage, and hearing about the thousands (yikes) of seedlings he has planted, strikes me how much of hybridizing is a genetic roulette. Some iris have a long pedigree, so literally decades have gone into the final flower (many of Ghio's are like this) while others are just a simple cross, a great piece of genetic good fortune that arrives in a single season. So in a single cross, there are what - thousands, millions, billions - of possible outcomes?
Sometimes I look at the parents of an iris and it seems that one can get a sense of what they were trying for. Other times, the parents are not at all what one would expect.
So Brad, for example your Smoke and Thunder X Class Ring - you've registered three gorgeous and very different from each other iris. How many seeds did you plant in order to get three you wanted to preserve (or maybe you have even more)? It seems that your efforts with the blues involved thousands of seeds, though Blueberry Shortcake was also the result of 1st generation success.
Which of the various germination methods that people have shared here do you use? I've got no choice but to plant seeds outside in pots. On my first try (22 cross) last year I only had 4 out of 32 seeds come up. People have said hang onto them because sometimes it takes two cycles. What do you think?
I ask because of something I've noticed. The four seeds didn't come up all on the same day, it was one, then another, then another a few days apart. Even though it was only a few days, the first to emerge has remained the biggest and put out the most increases, and the last two are the smallest still. I'm wondering if you've noticed anything like that, and whether one can infer anything about the plant by that - such as it will a vigorous plant? They were literally sown inches from each other in exactly the same soil so the growth differences must be inborn characteristics of each seed, no?
I haven't seen bloom (fingers crossed for spring) so I can't draw any conclusions about that.
