19.8.25 Test field. Monitoring seedlings.

 It is always difficult: 1) to cull 2) to be able to see a potential in a seedling which can‘t grow well on own root, but may turn out to be very valuable if budded.

However, there are many seedlings which can be culled without making any difficult considerations, for example, like this one:

Because it i) looks too much like its seed parent, ii) despite its good health has nothing special about it, including its very ‚ordinary‘ pink colors, which can be found in hundreds of similar roses, iii) and above all it has a bit unformal bloom shape, too odd, if compared to its seed parent, which has a perfectly formed bloom; and, in my view, it would be a nightmare of a breeder to create just a bad copy of an existing variety. 

Another seedling I am still thinking about culling it is this one, but here it is difficult and I am still not sure:

This one has some small foliage issues, but one can see that it may have difficulties in growing on own root, so here it is exactly the case where one can bud it and see what happens. I really like this bloom, it is big, very double and beautifully fragrant. The point it, I do not have any spare rootstocks for it, so it must wait another year, but than it must be removed from that test bed because I need to make space for the coming hem seedlings. So here comes a thought — trash it and forget it, or plant it into a pot and be ready to make all the needed efforts with its keeping, caring, preparing rootstock, placing it, preparing a spot in a new test bed and so on. And it is not the only one seedling under consideration, I still have some other promising seedlings from earlier years, which I saved from voles (only a small piece of a root was left, but they recovered), and I need to keep an eye on those, too.