I have a small yard, and a bad habit of coveting too many prospective parents. I leave virtually no realty for trialing my own seedlings in the ground, which is obviously problematic.
Truthfully, I am suspect of, and dismissive of the seedlings I have created that seem to perform better than the named and patented cultivars I own, typically dismissing the inferior performance of my highly-acclaimed, purchased, patented cultivars as being due to cultivation or rootstock (I presumably dote over my babies more than those that are established in the ground.)
How much realty do you more experienced hybridizers dedicate to growing and evaluating your seedlings, and when you feel you have seedlings of merit (certainly much fewer than 1 in 100 in my case) how to you go about further evaluation, even potentially with an eye to the possibilty of introducing it to market?
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I’m experiencing this same dilemma where several of my larger roses are undesirable parents that I bought when I first started growing roses. Disease-prone hybrid teas like Paradise, First Prize, and Koko Loco, all of which I know (or must assume) are on virused rootstocks. They don’t like setting hips and I don’t care to use their pollen, but they’re established enough to have started coming into their own and still manage to produce some beautiful flowers. I told myself I’d dig them up eventually but the bigger they get, the better they perform and the more attached I become.
They don’t even make for good comparison benchmarks because if they were created now they would never pass muster. Their only utility in my breeding program are providing blackspot leaves for me to mulch the Thunderdome, which is what I call my test bed. It does a good enough job culling my seedlings that I won’t have to worry about space for a few more years.
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Culling older hybrids that perform poorly I can do. It’s the newer, highly-rated ones that I question.
(Having said that, Lavender Crush has almost been culled for its Black Spot, but keeps on redeeming itself with luscious fragrant blooms, and I find myself thinking “if I can just find the appropriate mate…”)
I think I need to acquire another plot of land for trialing seedlings!
How much land do those who have introduced plants have for trialing? I tend to think an “introduction-worthy” seedling is around a 1 in 10,000, and even if, as a for instance, 95% are culled very early, and after year one, 1/5 of the remaining seedlings get into the ground or large pots, that still demands a lot of land for trialing if one hopes for a decent seedling within the decade…
(That thought experiment could have benefitted from more thought and less prattling on, but I assume you get my point…)
As an aside, I wish HMF had been set up to provide a relative disease resistance rating rather than just highly subjective impressions – folks are way too charitable with, for instance, hybrid teas (probably grown with spray regimens) and those that have consistent “excellent” ratings for disease are commonly defoliated by early summer in my garden while many of my landscape roses remain spotless. (Those HT’s, I tend to allow to self-cull with the help of Darwinianism.)
Kordes roses are often a bit stingey with the rebloom, and don’t always tolerate the heat and drought here, but I do find their disease ratings on the German site are probably the most objective and meaningful for me.
Wish American distributors had similar systems, but I suppose such would have to do regional to have any meaning.
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The Weeks Roses catalog seems pretty honest when comes to disease resistance, with most hybrid teas rated 1-2 out of 5 for blackspot.
And yes I know what you mean about wanting to buy land test plot. There’s a few lots in my neighborhood selling for around 12k and I’m lamenting the fact that I have no talent for making money.
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