Re: Pollen Strike Rates

I do strip the stalk and the spathes when I make the cross.
 
The smell of the rot is the same odor of rhizome rot, whatever that is worth.  Whether it is Erwinia or not, it does produce the same odor, probably more an aspect of iris tissue than of the pathogen.
 
In near-desert SW Idaho I stripped the stalk also because we were using overhead watering-- Rainbird sprinklers either from aluminum portable lines or 'birds on stands attached to long hoses.  The gardens at both my home and at my parents had taps from buried PVC lines available for hose attachement.  Irrigation was used weekly or bi-weekly and always occured at least once during bloom, giving a day's break in pollenizing possibilities.
 
I normally had between two and three hundred crosses per year with up to 50% takes, rarely less than 30%.  Heat, like Francelle and some of the southern CA folk describe would end my chances of takes.  Not every year had temps that would climb to near 100 by the end of May but many did.
 
More than once, however, I saw 105 degree weather at the end of the late bloom in early June.  Usually iris season was over by then--more due to heat than due to exhaustion of bloom stalks.  In equally unusual years on the cool side I might have occasional stalks producing bloom almost to the beginning of July.  Peak of bloom was usually about Memorial Day or the week prior.
 
Here in the NC mountains peak of bloom is about mid May or slightly earlier.  Right now I have a few stragglers with bloom--on May 26.  The season this year was quite compressed.
 
Neil Mogensen  z 7  western NC mountains

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