Friday, August 18, 2017

Anthurium no. 1446 "Kayla Krawford"

Kayla didn't make much of an impression either way, though I suppose on balance she's good; not the most interesting color, but the spathe is pretty well-formed,


and resisted thrips well. This is the same bloom six weeks later:


The leaves are also fairly resistant to thrips, if not 100% so:



And there's also the fact that it bloomed early; it was only 17 months old.1 Kayla's seed parent, 0282 Dave Trading, was the same color2 and also produced a first bud very early (15 months), and then I lost Dave in The Great Purge to thrips. Dave was mainly noteworthy for its (large) size and speed of blooming, not its beauty or originality, but even so it would be nice to have a replacement for him, so I think I'm going to try to keep Kayla.

At the moment, this is logistically difficult; there just isn't room for the number of seedlings I have. I just moved up seven seedlings from 3-inch to 4-inch pots, but should have promoted three times that many, easily -- trying to decide who got to move on was agonizing. So while I would really like to hang on to Kayla as a Dave substitute, I'm not sure it's going to be possible.

Should maybe note that Kayla is from seedling group EQ;3 the only prior EQ seedling is 1447 Daesha Richards, who also bloomed very early (13 months!) and often, and is almost indistinguishable in photos from 0282 Dave Trading. Though Kayla's doing much better with the thrips, and Daesha's blooms were of wildly varying quality.

The drag queen Kayla Krawford is from Arizona, and is a former Miss Gay Arizona USofA at Large, a very complicated title that I don't quite understand, though I guess I don't need to.

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1 Median time from sowing a seed to the first bud is currently 26 months.
The quickest two (0058 Betty Larsony and 1716 Tess LeCoil) took 12 months, though neither bud actually opened; Betty didn't complete a bloom until a couple years after the first bud. Tess's first bud happened in January; she hasn't tried again yet.
I'm still waiting for a bud from a lot of the seedlings, but the longest wait for a seedling that actually did produce a bud still belongs to 0105 Deanne T. Christ (54 months), which has since produced a lot of blooms. Apparently it was just waiting for me to move it to a bigger pot.
The point being that 17 months for a bud that actually opened is pretty fast, and Kayla was in a 3-inch pot the whole time, even.
2 Red/yellow changing to red/white. Almost indistinguishable in photos without any objects to indicate size:

L: 0282 Dave Trading. R: 1446 Kayla Krawford.
3 (0282 Dave Trading / 15 September 2015)


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