Sol,
You are lucky to have your covered sun room for crosses. I wish I had a similar area to do mine although the paper bags do an amazing job of protecting the plants from outside pollen.It is a pain to remove them and cross every day, however, and the stalk becomes a bit etiolated. Right now I have most of the early stalks finished and am awaiting the late ones to start blooming. There are a couple special ones that I am excited about using.
It's REALLY hard to judge anything in the first year. They certainly surprise me. However, if they look like nothing that first spring of mature rosettes, I don't feel bad about pitching them. You can't keep everything! Right now, my seedlings from the inbred lines look better than 95% of what's on the market. Other crosses are less exciting.
Because the anthocyanin production is dominant all you need is one copy of that gene to get a red or purple rosette. In my hybrids from the inbred Killer X Jungle Shadows lines, I still get a few greens, but much fewer of them now in the F3 of that line. In tetraploids it's hard to get homozygous plants and you can't tell by looking.
The blues are sort of a special case. It looks as though there is a little or limited anthocyanin synthesis plus a lot of wax to produce the blue effect. It is an optical illusion. Frost and Flame came from Minaret, which showed some of this but not as much. I have some F2's of the Frost and Flame X Pacific Blue Ice cross and there are nice PURPLES in that group along with the blues. In fact one of the purples is one I'm considering naming.
In these blue crosses, you rarely see this in early stages. I have several groups of seedlings from blues that just look plain green right now. I do keep these for two years so I can judge them better and not throw away the very thing I want to keep. Even the Silver Song kids aren't showing the silver just yet although there are some frosted limes in these groups that look very interesting. Again too early to tell what they may be in the spring.
Kevin
