Hello Larry,
I've spent a lot of time not only thinking about your question, but implementing what I thought would work for me. Here are the things that I used for planning purposes:
1. To give the seedlings adequate time for evaluation, I felt that I needed three years of blooming.
2. First year culling would deal with sickly, deformed or unusually small plants as well as plants that had continuously deformed or ugly blooms.
3. Second year culling would be severe, dealing with poor branching, poor bloom quality as well as quantity, short scapes, etc.
4. Third year culling would leave only the best seedlings having the sought after properties.
My belief was that after the second blooming year I would need to transplant what I considered my "keepers" to a new bed, thereby having the bed space be used more economically. The result would be a much smaller footprint for the new bed and the ability to re-use the original bed for new seedlings in the fourth year. The second-bloom year beds would be empty by mid-fall and they could be amended during late fall and/or early spring so they would be ready for new seedlings as soon as they were ready for transplanting the following spring.
The result of all of this was that I needed a minimum of three beds for my annual planting of seedlings, another bed for the keepers after the second-year culling and very likely used the following year for the second set of second year keepers. Then there would be a fifth bed for the keepers after the third year of blooming. Obviously there might be the need for an additional bed or two as time went forward and as this process continued, but that should leave the total number of beds at 7 or less.
All of the planning turned out to be pretty good for a couple of years, and then life happened. There was a very late freeze one year followed by a very hot, dry summer causing water restrictions (the reason for poor growth and/or blooming.). Then there was an extraordinary second-bloom season for a particular set of seedlings after which I "needed" to keep far more seedlings than my well thought out program allowed. Then there was open heart surgery in early September just as I was about to start culling and transplanting. It took my program far longer to recover that it did for me. In fact, the program will likely never recover, or at least I will know better than trying to control things I can't such as the weather or the "excessive" success or failure of a particular year's crop of seedlings. I can work at keeping my health at as high a level as I can, but I can't stop the aging process.
This year I will be planting about half the number of seedlings that I use to normally plant. I also chose to give away about 30 cultivars and re-cull some older seedlings to open enough room for those new seedlings. In addition, I will sharpen my eye for culling this year so there will be room for more seedlings next year. A plan is a good thing, but being able to adapt to the unforeseen is better. There were just too many things in my plan that I couldn't control but which I wasn't thinking about when I was making the plan. Good luck going forward and if you can, add a strong dose of flexibility to your plan whatever it might be!
Larry W.
