Good ideas for each group, but not a great grid. One group was almost too obvious, and three were heavily word based, so a bit samey. Having two groups of anagrams of similarity themed items made it really tricky to do in the time, mainly because solving six anagrams takes so long.

adding a particular letter to get another random word isn't really a connection...

@leaf it's infinitely less tenuous than a many other connections I've seen on here, and it doesn't create crossovers that would make the grid not work. I admit it's the weakest of the groups in this grid though.