I have been collecting seeds for the first time this season. Up to now, I have mostly collected seeds from bee pods, but now I am starting to harvest pods I actually planned.

I have been astonished by how many seeds some of them contain. This morning I picked two pods, one Bonnie Corley x Blackberry Tart and the other from Blackberry Tart x Bonnie Corley. The first one had 18 seeds and the second 24.

My question is how many should I plant? At this rate, I am going to run out of energy to pot these and room to plant them (assuming they germinate) in no time flat.

Depends. You can always plant all of them then keep the strongest 3 from each when they emerge, killing the weakest. Or just choose the fattest seeds and go with those.

Everyone has their own strategy. All based on how much room they have to grow eventual seedlings, and how much they really want to see a specific outcome.

The LA usually sells seeds in batches of 5, so I like 5. Guaranteed 1 or 2 will not germinate usually leaving me with 3 live seedlings to pick a winner from when they do bloom.

If you have fields of space there is no limit on how many you can grow, obviously. But in a residential area like yours, space may be at a premium.

All that said, since you may be breeding for rust resistance you have a HUGE advantage over others. You do not need to see the blooms and can weed out the bad ones in the first year if you detect rust, having never seen a bloom. This means you theoretically can plant masses and masses of them, only picking the most rust resistant ones to go on with and see if they have nice blooms in future years.

How many should you plant? That is a question only you can answer, because the best answer is plant all of them. If that is not an option, then only you can decide how much time, space, and effort you want to devote to them.
I have read that some registered plants came from just one seed from a cross. I have planted thousands of seed, haven't had a thing so far worth registering.

plasko20 said: ...since you may be breeding for rust resistance you have a HUGE advantage over others. You do not need to see the blooms and can weed out the bad ones in the first year if you detect rust, having never seen a bloom. This means you theoretically can plant masses and masses of them, only picking the most rust resistant ones to go on with and see if they have nice blooms in future years.

That's my plan. I am going to be ruthless about getting rid of seedlings that show rust early on. I guess I can plant them close together when they are little, too.

I did lose some pods. I had a gorgeous-looking one on Elizabethan Argus, and then one day I looked for it, and it was gone. I would suspect deer, but it's in the fenced-in back yard deer have not so far entered. My vegetables and other plants were all untouched. I also lost a few that started to develop and then dried up. I guess that is just par for the course.

DeweyRooter said: That's my plan. I am going to be ruthless about getting rid of seedlings that show rust early on. I guess I can plant them close together when they are little, too.

I did lose some pods. I had a gorgeous-looking one on Elizabethan Argus, and then one day I looked for it, and it was gone. I would suspect deer, but it's in the fenced-in back yard deer have not so far entered. My vegetables and other plants were all untouched. I also lost a few that started to develop and then dried up. I guess that is just par for the course.

You can plant multiple seeds in a pot. I like 5 in a recycled half-gallon milk jug [but have planted more ] & just plant the whole ball in the field for rust screening. You sure don't need 2 ft between seedlings.

Thanks for the tips, everyone! Keep them coming!

This is such a dilemma for breeders of dips, Nan! When one opens a tet pod there are very often only 5 seeds to begin with (depending on cultivar), so one plants all of those big, fat seeds and there aren't any questions. But dip seed pods commonly have 30 or more little seeds, and sometimes many pods, so one is forced to figure out what to do. If one knows the pollen parent- and it is desirable and the cross is congruent with goals- it helps with the commitment of planting out a "long cross". There ARE times it may make sense to plant all the seeds, and many aspects to consider. But when the pollen parent is unknown, I think it's harder to commit space and resources. I didn't keep up with labelling of pollen parents on all crosses this year, so this is my dilemma too. Desirable crosses and LOTS of seeds (Mountain Orchid, for example was absolutely loaded with pods), but fuzzy pollen parent ID some of the time. Was it Hakuna Matata or FKA J.T. Polston or Dream Sequence or Wild Cherry Wine...? Everyone loves a mystery but this makes for difficult decision-making.

I suggest you do what suits depending on the cross. Make guidelines that fit with what you want. Just have a plan for weeds if your seedling area gets really big! The weeds don't mind rust unfortunately! If I were a cartoonist, I would draw a picture of weeds carrying me away or consuming me like a carnivorous plant or something. Death by weeds!

I've always been advised to make "more". More crosses, more long crosses, more seedlings, etc. Well, I did just that this year and have nearly 900 seeds with nowhere to put more than a third of them. It's silly really, how annoyed I am about this. Not the lack of space, though. The fact that I let a lot of things, weeding and watering for two, take back stage. And forget about simply sitting on my porch and enjoying the blooms. Don't get me wrong, I will continue hybridizing till the day I can't. Love it! But, I will never again buy the whole "more is better" line. No offense intended. Spent some time reading the Lewis daylily blog and found his interviews with several successful hybridizers illuminating. The more narrow the focus, the fewer crosses made, fewer seedlings planted. As low as 200/300 per year. So plant what works for your circumstances, and enjoy. There, I said it.

How many seeds to plant depends to some extent on why the cross was made or what the hybridizer is try to do with a cross. Professional plant breeders might produce hundreds, or thousands or tens of thousands of seeds of a cross (depending on how difficult/easy it is to produce the seeds). They have so many requirements that the seedlings must meet that very large numbers are needed to have a good chance of success. Of course, they are breeding with very specific goals.
If you were crossing say a daylily with a 3" red flower and 15" tall with a daylily with a 6" flower and 30" tall because you wanted a daylily with 4" red flowers that was about 25" tall then you would not need many seeds. If you were crossing two eyed daylilies together because you wanted many eyed daylilies then you would not need too many seeds. If you wanted a specific flower size, scape height, flowering season, etc. then you might need many seedlings from the cross depending on how different the parents were to each other and how different they were from the characteristics you wanted in the seedlings.

Some information about the specific cross 'Bonnie Corley' x 'Blackberry Tart' and its reciprocal.
Scape Heights - Bonnie Corley 25" Blackberry Tart 24"
From basic genetic theory and expectations I would expect that the average scape height of the seedlings would be between 24" and 25". By average I mean the mathematical average produced by measuring the heights of all the seedlings, summing those heights together and dividing that total by the number of seedlings measured. The heights of the seedlings would range from less than that average to more than that average but we cannot guess how short or how tall they might be. The more seedlings we were to grow the better chance we would have of finding a few seedlings that were quite short or a few seedlings that were quite tall.

Flower Size - 'Bonnie Corley' 4.5" 'Blackberry Tart' 6.5"
From basic genetic expectations we would expect the mathematical average of the seedlings to be approximately 5.5" (that is the average of the two parents). The remainder of the description would be the same as for scape heights above except that it would be for flower size.

Flower Colour - 'Bonnie Corley' pink with cherry red eyezone above green throat 'Blackberry Tart' cream with veining in patterned eye
I would expect eyed seedlings ranging in colour from pink to cream with veining in the eye zone on at least some seedlings. Since the grandparent information is incomplete (i.e. seedlings were involved) it is not possible to know whether there might be self seedlings or a larger colour range in the seedlings)

Bloom Season - 'Bonnie Corley' early-midseason 'Blackberry Tart' early
I would expect that the seedlings would mainly range from early to early-midseason.

Rebloom - depends on location, season, weather, growing conditions, etc.

So the number of seedlings to grow would depend on how extreme a seedling you might be hoping to find. In other words how different from the expected.

Wow! Thank you for that detailed analysis, Maurice. I am a beginner at hybridizing. My goals are to produce some rust-resistant plants with good garden habits. I crossed Bonnie Corley and Blackberry Tart because I like both plants very much, and they were blooming at the same time. I mainly wanted to see if it would work. Maybe I will get some decent seedlings from the cross--I hope so.

Nan, when I started crossing, I didn't know anything, so I was doing things most people wouldn't do just to see what would happen. But I would rarely plant more than 4 or 5 seedlings of any cross into my seedling bed, just because I don't really have enough room.

So let's talk about that a bit. I dug up a seedling bed (took three years). So I have a place to plant my seedings. And kind of like crop rotation, I plant 1/3 of my bed the first year. Year one, I won't see much except foliage traits and some plant habit/size things. Year two many will bloom. Year three, they have to prove themselves as keepers. At the end of year three, everything that isn't moved to a permanent bed is removed, and I prepare that 1/3rd of the seedling bed for next years seedlings.

Have you thought about having a new seedling bed for your seedlings? I guess you could do the same thing with pots and it may be easier. Sometimes, I just plant in regular garden space, too, but if you dedicate a bed for your seedlings, each year you can plant as many as will fit in 1/3rd of the seedling bed.

For me, space tells me how many I can plant every year because I have this 3 year rotation in the space I've dedicated to seedlings.

And just one comment on Maurice's thoughts. All true. It's not hard to get your expectations in line for a cross if they are reasonably similar. However, often the most interesting seedling of your cross will be the one that for some reason is way out of the range of expectations.