Re: Species Iris

Claire Peplowski wrote:

:  In collecting seed for SIGNA I would think you would keep the lots
:  to pods from the same plant or group of very stable plants. 

I don't know that there's a standard way of doing this, but for drying the seeds
I've always used a separate plate for each hand-pollinated cross and for each
pod parent of open-pollinated crosses. 

For the packets of open-pollinated seeds, that does mean there may be seeds
having different pollen parents.   There are a couple of important advantages to
this:

1.	Some species produce a high percentage of seeds that have endosperm but
no embryo when only a few of the ova are fertilized.  This is more likely to
happen in open-pollinated than hand-pollinated crosses.  Unlike "chaffy" seeds
with no endosperm, this is hard to detect short of dissection.  Mixing seeds
from multiple pods distributes any undetectably  "bad" seed through the lot so
that no one person is apt to get a completely bad lot.

2.	It provides greater diversity among the seedlings from each packet.  Not
only more fun for the grower, but a wider gene pool if the goal is development
of a breeding colony.

Sharon McAllister
73372.1745@compuserve.com
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