MR,
Controlled crossing sounds worse than it is! Here in Salem we rarely have summer rains so I can simply put paper bags on the stalks to prevent insect pollination. It looks a little silly but it works great. About 10 AM each day I go and make all the crosses and slip the bag back on the stalk. I make the same cross over and over and the cross is written on the bag so I don't cross something I'm not supposed to do. This year about 50% of my crosses were controlled self-pollinations, especially on wide crosses like 'Aross'. These sorts of hybrids give segregations for so many different traits that you get all sorts of interesting seedlings.(And of course some not so pretty ones too!)
By the way Bill Nixon started with Park's seed and his first introduction, 'Kismet', is from that seed.
In the early days we raised a lot of bee set seed from the better semps to see which parents were most likely to give good seedlings. That's how we discovered that 'Silverine', 'Cleveland Morgan' and 'Sanford Hybrid' produced nice seedlings consistently.
Kevin
