Re: REB: blades/fan/stalk formation

Thanks Chuck. Again, I really appreciate your digging up real research on this stuff and taking the time to share it with us.
Sure explains why there are different "stories" floating around about timing of initiation of the next cycle's stalk formation.
What I get from this is that bud primordia are formed under one (well, I mean <one> for any given genetic makeup/cultivar) set of conditions and then it takes another set of conditions to make each primordium start growing into a bloomstalk.
I'm wondering what's going on in a cultivar that consistently produces lateral bloomstalks on a mother rhizome, always a few days to a week later than on the terminal. A very nice habit for plants growing in late frost prone environments - terminal may get zapped, but the laterals often aren't hurt, or aren't damaged as much.
In the majority of cultivars (TBs), those laterals would go on to produce bloomstalks the <following> bloom cycle. So those cultivars that produce bloom on laterals of the mother during the same bloom season might be less able to keep up with enough bloom suppressing hormones to block bloom in rapidly growing laterals.
And making another speculative leap, those same cultivars might be good ones to work with re: rebloom, but seems like they would be more likely to produce erratic rebloomers, more vulnerable to quirky growing conditions, weird weather.
One thing I'll say for cycle rebloomers - their attempts to rebloom sure seem to be more reliable than summer/ever/repeat/"other" [Betty, how about I call them non-cycle?] rebloomers. They get frozen out here nearly every year, but (assuming they do reasonably well here) at least I can see they <tried> to produce stalks both spring and fall.
Not so for the non-cycle rebloomers here - conditions (whatever they may be) have to be just right to get bloom at all, even in spring.
[there's an nice definition/explanation on Wikipedia about plant primordia: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primordia>] 
--
Linda Mann east Tennessee USA zone 7/8
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