hi guys! id like to introduce myself, but first let me say that this is a great forum you have going on here. very informative and lots of gorgeous pics.

my boyfriend and i live in central missouri, and are now on our second year of doing crosses. we will admit that we are ignorant newbies, but thats why we are here...to learn! however, we are pretty experienced in gardening as a whole. we arent newbies in that respect.

last summer was quite a learning experience. turned out to be a disaster. the drought gave us a lot of trouble. not just with the lack of water for the plants themselves...but the deer were starving and hit our beds nightly. between moving that and all the transplanting that we were doing on the property, our plants were pretty sad last year.

we have 75 different varieties so far. 5 of those are un-named and unregistered seedlings from a local hybridizer. and 15 of are unidentified. either mislabled when purchased, or natures own crosses/seedlings on plants that have been established here long before we were. so i would say that we got a good "start" on plant stock to play with.

and last years crosses took well, but we noticed that we had no idea what we were doing. didnt know when to harvest, or how exactly to go from there. we had researched as best as we could, and thought we were prepared, but still found questions along the way. i dont know if we were crossing duds or if the drought was doing it, or if are plants were unhealthy (they didnt seem to be)...but almost every single seed pod we had, started browning and dying off before it was fully developed. and what came out of them resembled tiny dried up rasins, more than daylily seeds. but we tredged along and continued with the process anyways. earlier this year, we refridgerated them, and started them in pots. to our surprise, many actually began growing. and we had several 1 inch tall little plants poking out of the pots. i was transitioning them from indoors to outdoors when a huge storm hit, and we came home to find them all blown around the yard...when we actually thought we did a good job of protecting the little guys (it was just that bad of a storm). so needless to say, all of our crosses from 2012 are gone. like it never even happened.

but we learned a few things, so all is not lost. and we planned to put that knowledge to use again this season. however, now all these tornado like storms are beating the poor plants apart. and we are running into the same issue of some of our seed pods are turning brown and dying off when they are still small. others that fully develop are found empty and so on.

so i guess my first question is: is whats happening to our seed pods something wrong, with the plant, with what we are doing, the weather? or is this just the natural thing that happens when crosses are not viable?

also, i have read a lot about refridgration, some do, some dont. im wondering why and why not? and we are also wondering whats the best way to go about starting all these seeds (trays, six pks, gallon pots, etc)?

and one more thing, labeling your crosses and seedlings. how are others doing this? is it something that each breeder developes on his own and does his own thing...or is there a universal way that is recommended or only recognized by AHS?

so far, we have been doing diploid crosses as A-2013, B-2013, C-2013 and so on. then starting over the alphabet with A2-2013, B2-2013 and so on. and the tetras weve just been numbering as 1-2013, 2-2013. does this work? is there a better way? any input would be greatly appreciated!

and that leads me to our next question: once the cross is determined viable and actually starts growing does that same designation stay with the seedling until its properly named and registered (if registered)? or is it assigned a new label? when looking online, i see what others have their crosses marked as, and it doesnt make sense to me.

anyways, thank you guys for reading this, i know its long. we have a lot to learn. and please dont think i got on here to have you guys explain every single little detail to me. i value all of your experience and advice and will take all that i can get. but we are not looking for the lazy way out either...so if there is a good resource for these types of questions, please direct me! thanks again!