Mark,
It's my work as a professional container gardener that has gotten me into semps, so naturally I figured a good size to be the practical 4" or so. The green tects my mom grows get pretty big, when I used to run low on material in the early days I'd raid her garden and every now and then I'd make a planter big enough to compliment one of those big greens. I'd first seen massive semps at the spring garden fair and wasn't all that impressed, probably because the plants didn't have much else to their credit. My first time out to Lynn's and Kevin's was when I got to see some really nice hybrids grown to maturity and unrestrained by a container or rock wall, and it made quite an impression. Melissa's garden is planted in larger containers and also allows for some impressive growth. These attractive large hybrids simply offer a larger canvas to display their radiant colors upon, they also compete better with surrounding garden plants. Too often I've seen semps barely peaking out from beneath other more aggressive plants. And with all of the variations in form and color the genus has to offer, it would be spectacular to have cold hardy agave sized semps, what an image!
To answer your question about about tools for extracting and planting semplings, I use a plastic fork. High tech right? I used one fork for my whole crop, the prong end to pull the clumps out of their containers and the handle tip to dig tiny plug holes in the bed.
An outdoor canopy would really be a fantastic way to conduct bee free semp crossings, my bloom room works alright, but the roof is solid so the semps could definitely use more light.
I had initially intended to wait till this year to begin making crosses, but my favorite semp bloomed out last year so I had to start early. The quest for plants to bread it with made me seek out plants to breed those with. See where this is going? These events set in motion the insanity that is my bloom-filled sun porch today. The same chain reaction happens on a lesser level every time I go to cross a plant, I sit down to make one pollen exchange, then while emasculating the blooms I'll realize the pollen would go well on a handfull of other plants, then I have the same apiffanies with those plants and before you know it the exponential activity overwhelms me and I have to go to bed. I'm working with a massive amount of material now. At first it was hard to see that some flowers had reflexed before I could work on them but now I've gotten used to cutting those flowers off the stalks. Many flowers I haven't bothered to emasculate, when I row out the seedlings I'll mark these so I know to expect some self crosses mixed in those groupings. I'd rather have more options than I can handle, that way the crosses I do bother to make are always of the highest quality, but it does take some getting used to never to be able to do enough. Benjamin Franklin believed the development of a new plant was one of the greatest contributions a person could make to society, though he may not have been referring to ornamentals, I do think this work is worthy of my time.
Kevin,
It's interesting to hear about the two primary colors in what I understand to be the surface layer of the leaf. It makes sense that the delphnidin comes on slower, because my blues are barely showing any of that color yet. Some have a darker purplish tinge to them that seems to come from deep within the leaf, but only a very few show that "frost and flame" blue I'd hoped for yet. I do have one seedling that's grown a bit faster than its siblings and has that classic hazy blue look already, but in an army of crosses for blue one lonesome individual is a shockingly low figure. I guess I'll wait for the winter to temper them before writing the batch off as a bunch of dingy greens. I wonder, given our past discussions about early color development possibly having a correlation to larger numbers of chromosomes for those colors being present, if setting these aside to self cross down the road might help to strengthen the duration and hue of these colors in future generations. I am tempted to mark some of the young plants to see how they compare with others that take longer to develop their colors to test that theory. Perhaps I may further put this theory to test by doing an early cull in my bee seedlings, science aside I could use the space for my next batch.
-Sol Z
