Re: HYB: testing seedling toughness

That's a good question to chew on, Mary Lou.

A couple of ways I can think of to test the idea.

One way would be to pick some existing crosses to compare.  I'd choose
two groups of crosses (or maybe just two crosses as an exploratory
experiment).  Each cross would have to have fairly high germination - at
least 30 seedlings - so it might take more than one pod.

One group would consist of crosses that had at least a dozen of the
orginal 30 seedlings surviving (thriving) past bloom.  The other group
would only produce one or two seedlings surviving past blooming.

Then I would re-do those same crosses and do everything I could to keep
<all> the seedlings from both types of crosses alive - fungicide,
carefully controlled & optimal humidity, moisture, temperature,
fertility, pH, aeration, light etc etc.

Then I'd plant them out in the garden and compare survival from the two
groups.  If the end result came out the same, then I'd conclude the weak
adults would have died young if I hadn't fussed over them.

Another way would be to split large batches of seeds from one cross,
then treat half the usual 'bad' way, baby the other half, then compare
results.

In my case, I'd prefer to go the former route, where I would have at
least a chance of comparing some really tough babies with known weaker
ones.  With a single cross, not knowing whether or not the survivors
would be 'super tough' or not, results could be skewed so far one way or
the other as to be inconclusive.

I've grown enough seedlings now to satisfy myself that when a high
proportion of seedlings from a particular cross don't survive the
initial lining out, a high proportion of the ones that do survive will
not be among the 'superhealthy' ones that I want.

Of course, I may be totally wrong!  Without doing the controlled
experiments, I have no way of being sure.

All I can say for sure is that some crosses produce a lot of thriving
seedlings; but some crosses produce mostly seedlings that die
immediately, a little bit later, or the next year.

It will be interesting to see the eventual health of the seedlings that
survived in that group that had high mortality.
--
Linda Mann east Tennessee USA zone 7/8
East Tennessee Iris Society <http://www.korrnet.org/etis>
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