Viewing post #726782 by valleylynn

JungleShadows said:I've put in two 15' x 6' raised beds for the seedling crop and I'm glad they're in now so that the soil can settle, With all this rain, there should be no problem in settling the soil!

During the rainy days I'm going to start cleaning out the seed. My garage looks fairly ridiculous right now as there are bags of seed heads of not only Semps (140 and counting!!) but also Helenium, sedums and asters all drying and waiting to be cleaned and stored. (The irises and daylily seeds are already planted and the daylily crop is already germinating!) I'll get all the pot labels ready and record all the successful crosses in my notebook. I code each of these crosses with a number/ letter system. The letter is the season and the number is the cross #. So the C group is all the seed from my third season here in OR (I would run out of letters if I went back to '64!) and C26 would be the 26th cross. If I number any seedlings from that group they are labelled with numbers so the first seedling is C26-1. That allows me to spot any siblings of that plant although at this point I don't remember the numbers although I do remember A2 as 'Killer' X self and A5 as 'Jungle Shadows' X self because they were good crosses and I had fewer crosses back then.

Kevin

valleylynn said:Kevin with the system you use, would bee pollinated seeds be Killer x bee. Oops, sorry I didn't realize what that would come out as until I typed it.
Leaving it that way for both a little humor and to learn what would be correct.

JungleShadows said:Lynn, No that would be listed as either OP (open pollinated) or X ?. "By bee" is sometimes how it is written too. I do plant a few of these, especially from cultivars that don't set seed readily. For instance, this year I'm gathering all the seed heads on 'Greenwich Time' even though it's nearly sterile. I was never able to raise a seedling from it in MA. It is an important plant though as it's from a montanum X calcareum cross, one of the few HYBRIDS from calcareum. It would be hard to make crosses on every flower and get nothing so I thought it would be one to let the bees try their luck. The other one I harvested was from 'Aymon Correvon' as I've never had seedlings from it either. Both of these cultivars were planted next to very fertile cultivars so I may get lucky and obtain a few viable seeds. In other plants, sometimes getting that first hybrid from a wide cross, gives rise to a plant that is MUCH more fertile as they tend to have balanced sets of chromosomes. Hopefully that will be my luck in the progeny from these near sterile plants.

I do a lot of hand self pollinations, especially in hybrids that are from very different parents. For example, 'Stuffed Olive' is from 'Olivette' X 'Malby's #2' (my plant of this did NOT look like the 'Gloriosum', it was a red self colored rosette. See the photo in Helen's book of 'Malby's Hybrid"). I wanted the olive color of 'Olivette' with red leaf bases. 'Stuffed Olive' is more green with red bases and I self pollinated it, hoping to get the full olive color and red bases that may be more persistent and the shape of 'Olivette'. Many genes are segregating there so I planted out ~65 seedlings from that cross. Some of these are showing the olive color and a few are already showing the red leaf bases. Shapes on these is all over the place, some very narrow, some quite wide. They are very crowded so I will have to pick out the favorites and then see which shape they assume with a bit more room.

Kevin