Bill, these are just my thoughts...so please take them or leave them. Say you cross A and B and get 50 seeds. You pamper them and with luck, they bloom in 2 years. First blooms aren't always the best indicator of what the blooms will really look like, so you grow out the bulbs for another year to Year 3. Keep in mind that with 50 seedlings and 50 resulting bulbs, you will get many different appearing blooms. In the extreme case, you may have 50 slightly different looking blooms; no two being the same! Let's hope/say you get 10 that look identical...(they are genetically different, so you can't call them "the same") so that in Year 4 you can enter the blooms in some amaryllis show completions/exhibitions where they are scored and evaluated by experienced growers and breeders; the Keukenhof amaryllis show on opening day is typical and would provide exposure. Hopefully, you could do some networking to determine if the blooms that you think are so outstanding are truly unique or if similar blooms have been developed by anyone else. So... Then if this bulb has bloomed well for you and is unique with the characteristics that are accepted: scapes strong enough to support the blooms (hopefully at least 4/scape), two scapes/ bulb, you have successfully forced them so that holiday blooms could be obtained, etc. then you would pay someone a large sum to propagate the bulb via tissue culture, resulting in thousands of genetically identical clones of the one bulb you started with. Grow them out for another 3 years and you can think of selling, hopefully with the help of a distributor. Somewhere during that time, you name and register the bulb... And we see it in a catalog 8-10 years after you planted that first seed!!! It's not a fast process. I don't think that the profits are huge unless you are growing tens of thousands of bulbs (or more)! Along the way it would be likely that, depending where you live, you could have some loses due to insects (NBF) and disease. This could set you back a bit or more! This is why I make my crosses for my own pleasure!! But, if I see a real winner in my own backyard, I wouldn't hesitate to set the wheels in motion to propagate it for sale. You could too!!! Again, I'm sure I didn't think about everything, but that just the way I see the journey from seed to sale! K

Heat must play a role here. If I can get to the flowers as they open in the early am, even if it is hot, above 87 degrees, they still will take, but not always set seed. It just swells up and then the flower will fall off. I think if it were not for the heat, that those swollen flowers would set seed. Almost any pollen I use early in the late spring, before the humidity sets in will take and produce seed pods. I like using the streaky seedlings that have been growing over winter because they flower very early, and I get a lot of streaked seedlings from my seedlings every year. Mary Ann, my named streakers did not flower this year well either. I think it was because they were moved last year, and I am hopeing for some bloom from them next season. If not, I am cutting back tree limbs for more sun. The only streaked seedlings I got were from Liberty Bell, a streaked NOID from Foxwillows, and my streaked seedlings from 05/06 winter seed starting.

Edlyn, per Help Me Find - Roses, yes, Iceberg is a triploid. "Ploidy" does not necessary regulate whether a rose is fertile as either pollen or seed parent. Ralph Moore created a number of triploid roses which are extremely fertile. My rose, Lynnie, is bred from one of Mr. Moore's triploids and is triploid itself. Lynnie is INCREDIBLY fertile. Iceberg has other issues creating viable seed. Its ability to even set seed seems to be highly climate variable. Here in Southern California, Iceberg heavily sets hips containing very few seed each in the cooler, damper coastal climates. In the inland heat, where I live, you seldom see hips on Iceberg. It just doesn't set them well where it's hot and dry. I have attempted using Iceberg's pollen in a number of crosses and none of the resulting seedlings have proven to be of much value. I have also tried using it as seed parent, with total failure. IF your climate and conditions are more conducive to Iceberg wanting to get pregnant, you may be able to raise some seedlings from it. Whether they will be of any value or not, remains to be seen. More often than not, they aren't. You may benefit from purchasing a Premium Membership on Help Me Find. It costs only $24 a year and it permits you to research the lineage of any rose listed in the database, for which there is information. You can browse to see if the rose has been successfully used for seed, pollen or both and what any commercial results have been. If ploidy information is known, it will also be listed there. Kim Here is a link that might be useful: Iceberg on Help Me Find - Roses

Ha ha, Ima, I'm going to move where you live! When SS was in first grade, to get to his bus stop he was supposed to walk down our street, cross the main street where not only was there no crosswalk, there's no intersection! (our street is a side street that comes off of the main street so there's no light, no stop sign, no yield, no "slow kids crossing", nothing but parked cars and our little dinky street poking unseen between them. Assuming he managed to cross this street at age six without getting run over by a texting, on their way to work driver who was not expecting a little kid to step out between parked cars in front of them, he then had to walk across a bridge, cross the street again at a t-intersection with stop signs on one side only, and cars turning left and right without slowing, and then he arrived at his bus stop. And of course the same thing in reverse on the way home. I think what happened was that the route was drawn up via a map, and no one realized that pedestrians could only cross the bridge on one side - the far side, thus requiring two non-crosswalked street crossings. Still, it was a mess. We always walked him, of course, but...The other problem is that even though he was five minutes from that school, he was the last stop on the route. That was fine, except on the few times when there was a sub bus driver who would do the route in reverse - whereupon he'd be dropped off 25 minutes earlier than usual to find no one waiting. A "big kid" of nine, bless his little heart, would take it upon himself to walk SS far enough home to help him cross safely if that happened. The "big kid" was so excited at the end of the year when DH and I got him a McDonald's gift card and a thank you card - he said he'd just been "helping out a friend". :) Last year we called the bus company and got the stop switched to the end of our street. I walk SS down in the morning; he's the only kid at that stop since we got him into the different school and he's too young to wait alone! But in the afternoon he is allowed to walk home alone; our street is a dead-end, very quiet, and all the neighbors know each other. It is completely bizarre to me to think that most eleven year olds cannot cross a normal street at an intersection with a cross-walk. I wonder if there is something else entirely going on there - does the bus company want to cut that stop from the route? Are they trying to get a crossing guard there? It sounds odd to me.