Ted Byers wrote:

Terrific. I take it, from what you say, that delenatii is both a prolific
producer of seed and hardy to the point of being almost indestructible.
Does it generally pass that on to hybrids it is used to make?


Well, if I can grow it, perhaps indestructable. It is pretty
bulletproof for a species. And in terms of seed, enough for my
purposes, which was never more than a few flasks. Some crosses don't
take. Some hybrids are not fertile. Most probably are, although all
the combinations haven't been tried, of course.


--
Rob's Rules: http://www.msu.edu/~halgren
1) There is always room for one more orchid
2) There is always room for two more orchids
2a. See rule 1
3) When one has insufficient credit to purchase
more orchids, obtain more credit

Ted,

Rob certainly knows his Paph info...spot on
everytime!

Following on delenatii breeding..almost all
delenatii crosses prove to be infertile beyond the
initial crosses.
Yes there are vigorous primary crosses (species x
species) such as you have, but the next
generations prove to be almost universally
impossible. A great pity as many saw it a route
for pink breeding.

There are also some very difficult delantii
crosses to flower such as Delrosi (P.delenatii x
rothschildianum) you probably will have to wait a
good 10 yrs plus to get them to flower.

In passing most people in the volume business are
now beginning to realise that you will never be
able to produce large numbers of Parvisepalum
hybrids. (Unless they get some super fertile
clones - I believe there are some around but not
many). A few hundred but never thousands from a
pod. Most of the Dutch have given up on them as a
pot plant.

In passing if you want to explore some info on
Paph breeding check out my website for a section
on Paph seed.
Regards
Alan L Winthrop.
www.tissuequickplantlabs.com




Ted Byers wrote:

Terrific. I take it, from what you say, that
delenatii is both a prolific
producer of seed and hardy to the point of being
almost indestructible.
Does it generally pass that on to hybrids it is
used to make?


Well, if I can grow it, perhaps
indestructable. It is pretty
bulletproof for a species. And in terms of seed,
enough for my
purposes, which was never more than a few flasks.
Some crosses don't
take. Some hybrids are not fertile. Most
probably are, although all
the combinations haven't been tried, of course.


--
Rob's Rules: http://www.msu.edu/~halgren
1) There is always room for one more orchid
2) There is always room for two more orchids
2a. See rule 1
3) When one has insufficient credit to purchase
more orchids, obtain more credit

Hi Alan,

"TQPL" wrote in message
...
Ted,

Rob certainly knows his Paph info...spot on
everytime!

This is good to hear. I could tell from the way he was writing that he knew
more than most about the subject, but it is also good to hear confirmation
from another expert.

Following on delenatii breeding..almost all
delenatii crosses prove to be infertile beyond the
initial crosses.
Yes there are vigorous primary crosses (species x
species) such as you have, but the next
generations prove to be almost universally
impossible. A great pity as many saw it a route
for pink breeding.

Interesting. But if I were in the business of selling orchids, I'd swallow
my disappointment in a breeding program that won't likely go anywhere and
get on with the business of growing orchids. After all, if I have a P.
delenatii and a P. moquettianum, and even if crossing the two will produce
only 500 babies, and I grow them to about the size of my plant and sell them
for the price I paid, that would provide a gross amount of C$20,000. I
don't know how old my plant is, but given what I presently spend on
maintaining my catts and phals and dends, I could probably raise a lot of
orchids for a long time for that amount. It is a safe bet that if I
produced phals, say a hybrid with Phal. amabilis being dominant, I'd get
hundreds of thousands if not millions of seeds, most of which would be
disposed of in some fashion simply because there is too much to handle. So,
while in relative terms, a given cross may not be very productive, it may
well be productive enough to allow one to make a profit from it. Maybe
there is still an opportunity here .....

There are also some very difficult delantii
crosses to flower such as Delrosi (P.delenatii x
rothschildianum) you probably will have to wait a
good 10 yrs plus to get them to flower.

That's OK since P. rothschildianum doesn't appeal to me anyway, and so it
isn't likely to appear in my collection anytime soon. :-) Different
strokes for different folks, I guess.

In passing most people in the volume business are
now beginning to realise that you will never be
able to produce large numbers of Parvisepalum
hybrids. (Unless they get some super fertile
clones - I believe there are some around but not
many). A few hundred but never thousands from a
pod. Most of the Dutch have given up on them as a
pot plant.

I suspect that this is a function of how you define "large numbers" and what
your overhead is. A cross that produces a few hundred seed from a single
pod, and assuming I had fertilized all the flowers (and the developing bud
when it is ready), would increase the size of my collection of orchids by a
factor of in excess of ten. Anyway, I would not have thought that the
number of seed produced per pod would be a significant consderation, unless
that number was only of the order of a few tens of seeds. After all, if
your target total production is of the order of a few thousand, and you only
get a few hundred seeds per pod, then you have to repeat the cross ten times
on twenty flowers. If the act of doing the cross takes five minutes, then
it would take about an hour to have enough pods to produce the desired
amount of seed, relative to a different cross that poduces tens times as
much seed per pod. It doesn't seem like doing the extra crosses with extra
plants would make the project uneconomical since I'd expect that the cost of
raising the seedlings would be much greater than the cost of manipulating
the flowers producing the pods.

In passing if you want to explore some info on
Paph breeding check out my website for a section
on Paph seed.
Regards
Alan L Winthrop.
www.tissuequickplantlabs.com

You have a nice, informative website. The only complaint I have is that it
doesn't display correctly unless I tell Internet Explorer to use the
smallest text size. Now, since my monitor is a good, high resolution one,
such a small size makes your text quite hard to read. Even at that, you had
a series of icons on one of your pages down the left side of the screen, and
these were half obscured because the window they're in was too small. Might
I suggest you revise your web pages so that they don't care what font size
the user uses or what the specific properties of the users' monitors are?
One of the things I like about HTML is that it makes doing this easy (when I
produce HTML, I do so by hand and so don't have to worry about the quirks
and inefficiencies inherent in those products that generate the HTML for
you); after all, using HTML is not significantly harder than using
punctuation in writing standard English.

Thanks again,

Ted