I have a group of Flying Dragon seedlings. All but one will be used to practice t-budding. Should I select the tree I keep intact to grow out for more seeds on the zig zag, curved thorn criteria?

How many seedlings do you have? First look at all of them as a set. If they are all pretty much the same size and thickness, and all look pretty similar as to thorns and zig zag growth etc, distance between the nodes (thorns) bark color/pattern, you probably dont have any strong variants. Do any stand out as clearly or slightly off type ? You should then try to choose one to keep that seems a good average representative of the set. If your seedlings are all variable, it may be harder to choose. If you want to keep a Flying Dragon, you should choose curved thorns and zig zag growth.

right -- anything with straight thorns and/or straight stem may be perfectly good Poncirus rootstocks, but they will certainly NOT be Flying Dragon.

My first time at growing the Flying Dragon. New seeds germinate daily/weekly. The first were tall and straight. Now there are a couple little tiny things with curved thorns (if you can call a 1/32 appendage, a thorn).

How long should they grow before I decide which is dwarf, and which is not?

I have no intention of culling, but I have a purpose for the true dwarf rootstock. Plenty of land to observe the rest.

Suzi

Standard trifoliata has straight thorns, flying dragon has curved thorns.

It's been about a month now since the first of my Flying Dragon seeds started germinating. The first five to show seem pretty straight. All have tiny thorns but some appear to curve, and some not. Some of the recent germinated seeds seem to have stems that are a bit twisted. Too soon to see thorns.

I know that true dwarf stock does grow slowly, and am wondering if the true dwarf Flying Dragons, just take their sweet time showing up to greet the sun.

I see tiny green tips trying to emerge, but some are really slow. One finally lifted it's leafy head after lying prostrate on the top of the rooting cube for about a week, and it's having a tough time lifting it's leafy head!

Does the twisted, gnarled stem feature show right away, or do they need to be taller than 3" for that characteristic to show?
Suzi