Re: Species Iris

The following exchange is interesting and leads to more questions:

<< 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 >>

In collecting seeds for SIGNA distribution this fall could we have some
guidelines?

I have sanguinea that I plan to submit, I will collect the setosas as well if
they form pods.  I would like to do this correctly.

What descriptive material is wanted?   I have been a member of SIGNA for only
two years and may have missed directions for seed collecting.  Someone
mentioned recently that his seed was mis-labeled.  We all would like the
distributed seed to be as accurately labelled as possible, I am sure.

Then, for species and for species with special characteristics, how shall we
collect and what description shall we provide?

Claire Peplowski
East Nassau, NY Zone 4 in the mountains still watching for rain clouds.
Other Mailing lists | Author Index | Date Index | Subject Index | Thread Index