| Most flasking services will require a deposit of some sort, and then require you to purchase at least a couple of final flasks. Though breeding is actually very easy in practice, it pays to do the research on a cross. Look into the ancestry of the parents, look into other progeny those parents have produced, etc. Some things just do not breed well, and better to know ahead of time if there is such a problem. Although the initial cost is kindof high, if you are serious about hybridizing, I highly recommend getting your hands on OrchidWiz. I have so far done the leg work for things the old fashioned way (hard copy AOS Awards Quarterly (all the way back through the 70's) and Sanders' List of Orchid Hybrids). I plan to buy OrchidWiz, once I can afford it, as I recently got to toy with it a little and it absolutely blows Wildcatt out of the water. Much more efficient on time than my current method of on-paper flow charts distilled from a stack of books and magazines.
The main thing to breeding well is to have a specific goal in your hybridizing and to have a pretty good handle on the way the parents breed. Colour and shape dominance are important, ploidy is VERY important, and of course you want to make sure your parent plants are strong enough to support a capsule. Cattleya seed capsules take months to mature.
-Cj  |