(Iris-talk)HYB:STARTING SEEDS

I'll bet you farmers out there know what a 'bulk tank' is, but you city slickers might not.  It is a stainless steel, refrigerated vat with a thermostat on it.  A bulk tank is used on a dairy farm to keep the fresh milk very cold, just above freezing, until it can be shipped to the processor.
 
I live on a farm, and until September 1995 we milked a herd of about 30 Holsteins-- quite a small herd-- and stored the milk in a 300 gallon bulk tank.  No cows, no milk, empty tank.  Hmmm....
 
I put my bearded iris seeds in the bulk tank for the winter.  I planted the seeds in plastic pots, using a 50:50 perlite:peat moss mixture, set the pots on a board in the bottom of the tank, and watered them every third day or so.  The temperature inside the tank stayed at 32-38 degrees F all winter, and with the frequent watering the pots stayed almost sopping wet the entire winter.  I figured that the seeds needed cold and leaching to break dormancy.
 
Next spring, around the first of April, seedlings began to sprout in several of the pots while they were still in the cold and the dark.  The most precocious ones were tall bearded amoenas, for some reason.  Once the first seedlings were an inch tall or so, I pulled the pot from the bulk tank and set it outside in the sun.  If frost threatened, I put the pot back in the bulk tank for the night.  Germination was quite good:  some pots showed almost 100% germination, and about two-thirds of the crosses I planted yielded a least a few seedlings.  I've grown TBs, IBs, SDBs, and diploid MTBs this way.  No experience with beardless iris.
 
It worked so well I've done the same ever since, and will do so again this winter, potting up the seeds around Thanksgiving.  With a minimum of time and effort I can keep twenty or so pots all winter in a controlled environment, and, best of all, my little darlings start life untouched by late freezes, dogs, cats, deer, thousand-pound Holsteins, John Deere tractors, you name it!
 
-Bill Kuykendall, eastern panhandle of West Virginia, Region 4, Zone 5b or 6a, depending on which map you're looking at, AIS, MIS, and a few other acronyms.  Mild and dry here, fall foliage just past peak.
This works for me.  While most of you probably don't have a vacant milk cooler in your back yard, an old refrigerator or laboratory growth chamber could serve the same purpose. 
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