True inbreeding (sibling to sibling) or tight linebreeding (Mother to son, Father to daughter) are both wonderful tools, if you know how to use them properly. Culling, of course, goes hand in hand with these tools. Inbreeding is useful because it doubles up the genes, both good and bad, bringing everything to the surface. This is where most breeders drop the ball... they don't cull with a heavy hand, or refuse to cull at all, and the poor results give the impression that inbreeding is a bad thing. If the poor results are eliminated, leaving the good to work with, then you see that inbreeding is a great tool in "cleaning up" a genetic pool. I am speaking in terms of canine breeding because that's what I'm familiar with. I'm not sure if the same breeding principles apply in the plant world, but I'd love to find out! I need to find some time to read, and some good books on plant genetics! The truth is... it's neither legal nor ethical to inbreed or tight linebreed for humans... but if it were, and the proper culling could be done, we could effectively eliminate a lot of the defects and illnesses that we suffer from as a species. We effectively removed the problem of entropian in our Bulldog bloodlines, and 3 generations of breeding later, we had dogs with clean eyes. That's just one example of a genetic problem that can be quelled by using the proper tools and following through. Dave, you raise some good questions on plant breeding, and I'm interested to find out what the answers are. I'm not sure how closely related plant and animal breeding is at the genetic level, but it's a subject I find fascinating... and hope to learn more about in the near future.

Dave, I am not sure what your question is here. The calyx is the green covering of the bloom bud. When the flower opens the calyx is on the back side of the flower. Pollen should be applied to the tip of the pistel. The pistel is the fan shaped tip of the carpel. When talking about peonies people seem to refer to placing pollen on the carpels rather than on the pistels. The pistel doesn't seem to come up to a point like they do in many other flowers but rather they are flattened and the receptive part of the pistel will be the edge of the fan shaped structure. The carpels are located in the center of the stamen boss. It is best to open the flower of the pod parent to remove the stamen as soon as the flower bud is loose enough to get inside of it. Then generally the next day as soon as the flower opens you can begin to pollenate. I generally only pollenate flowers once and sometimes twice however it would be better to pollenate each flower for 3 consecutive days. After about the third day the carpel will not be receptive (it will no longer be sticky). Peonies have developed toward a self infertile nature but not entirely. The carpels are receptive very soon after the flower opens and some cultivars perhaps become receptive concurrent with opening. However the stamen seems to have to further mature before pollen will become active which happens a few days later. I think with most cultivars that have fertile carpels and fertile pollen there is an overlap of fertility between carpels and pollen which allows for some self pollenation. If cross pollenating herbaceous peonies I especially like to cross pollenate using a pod parent that is a Japanese type bloom. These flowers do not have pollen and there is no chance of self pollenation. Dave, I hope this helps, Leon.

Peppers are not wind pollinated, so you don't have to worry about pollen blowing through the mesh. Pollen for insect-pollinated plants is heavy and sticky to stick to the pollinators. And peppers have perfect flowers so if they don't get insect-pollinated, they can pollinate themselves. Crops that are wind pollinated (corn for example) or that don't have perfect flowers (squash and melons for example) are trickier. Right now the way I'm handling it is only growing one species of each at a time (the neat thing about squash is there's four different species, so you can grow four different varieties at once and they won't cross), but if you want to get fancy and grow more than one variety of each species at a time, there's things you can do with bagging or taping blossoms and hand pollinating. But you really don't have to worry about that with peppers. Just keeping the bees away somehow is sufficient. Also, I assume that since there's more than one species of pepper, you can do like what I'm doing with squash and plant one variety of each species with no protection and be fine. I have heard there can be some cross-species hybrids, but I'm assuming those are rare enough that I won't worry about it. After all, if cross-species hybridization was common, you wouldn't have separate species anymore.

I think the little plastic bags might cause humidity problems/clumped pollen, but then again if you can glue a bud shut to induce self pollination (low success rate though) the bags may work to some extent. I had poor results bagging individual buds with the little mesh wedding rice sachets (your 25% sounds about right), but very high pollination rate bagging the whole plant or large branches. I think the weight of the little bag and/or manipulation putting it on may cause damage and promote blossom drop. When half of a plant was bagged it had comparable fruitset to the unbagged half. I was surprised and very pleased with the results, especially when I ended up with dozens and dozens of little pea sized cumari fruits each having only a handfull of seeds. Roadkill, You can pollinate with self-pollen by hand and then bag the same way you do when creating hybrids but you either have to open a mature bud or get to the newly open blossom before a bee does. There is a good chance that fiddling with the blossoms will cause them to abort so its just a lot easier to bag buds.