As you will see, these crosses run the gamut from Dips to Tets and full forms to SPUFs. There are only three colors I breed for, near white, lavenders and red, but I am also beginning top work with miniatures so there is pretty much a full range of colors there. The miniatures I am most interested in are SPUF forms and most of the crosses lead in that direction.
I'm also dabbling with doubles, which is difficult when you only have three registered cultivars and they don't bloom at the same time! So I use seedlings that were either from bee pods or "experiments"! I was able to add one double flowered cultivar to my collection this summer, 'Land of Cotton', but it will be another year or more before I can use it for breeding.
I still need to figure out where I am going to plant the seeds of the crosses I am keeping and unless I can talk my neighbor into tilling up more space for me, that may be a serious problem!
I still seem to have more yellow flowered cultivars than I would like to have, but I keep because they are such great performers in the garden. The same thing goes for a lot of the older cultivars I have, oh wait, most of the older ones ARE yellows! I' not really knocking yellows or older cultivars, but space is at such a premium here I can't keep everything I would like to. There are some of the golden oldiesI use for breeding. I like using the older ones as there is such a great wealth of un-tapped genetic information there and crossed with the more moder ones something really great is very likely to show up. Older 'spider forms' are really loaded with good genetic material, especially when you take into consideration nearly 3 decades when no one was working with them.
I do concentrate most of my breeding to working with the Diploids, SPUFs and full forms, and I really don't have a lot of Tetraploids to begin with. The few I have, that are registered cultivars are reds or near whites, plus I believe I have one that is purple and one that supposed to be peach. I do have quite a few Tet seedlings though and continue to work with them.
I also have a soft spot for bi-tones and bi-colors and have several of them, both registered cultivars and seedlings. I just started to breed with them this season and have several I would still like to use. . . . maybe next season I will be able to.
One of the Tet SPUFs I have is 'Harbor Blue' and am just itching to begin working with it.
I have a couple of open form Tet seedlings I'd like to use it with I'd also like to use it with one of my full form Tets, but will wait and see how that one develops over the next couple of years. It had a lot of pinching and twisting this year but may settle down and take on a more "traditional" form as it matures. It also needs to decide exactly what color it's going to be! It has bloomed this lovely raspberry as couple of times, but it has also been much lighter and nearly red! I prefer this color though. Hard to believe it's pod parent is 'Arctic Snow' isn't it. The pollen parent is one of my very first seedlings to ever bloom, a very nice red out of 'Chicago Sunrise' by 'Chicago Apache'. This seedling "AS2F" was showing a hint of an edge this season and I am really hoping it comes out as the seedling matures. I also love the "old fashioned" look of it; very traditional daylily form, "rounded triangle". It also has since to it and branching and bud count. Sure do hope it continues to improve!I will be readdressing the images of the crosses made this year and try to give some insight into what I am looking from from each cross, or at least what I had in mind when making the cross.
