The purge of the 4-inch Anthuriums has come and gone, and the losses were much less severe than I'd expected,1 largely because I'd underestimated the degree to which the 4-inch plants had been purged already, but also because many of them were still young enough plants that they hadn't developed any serious problems yet. Is this a good thing? Is it a bad thing? *shrug* Who knows.
I haven't really tried to purge the 3-inch Anthuriums -- I threw out four plants on 3 January, out of 398 (so 99% survival), but I didn't have the time to examine each seedling individually and make decisions. As I watered, I just threw out seedlings that were obviously in bad shape, which is what I should be doing all the time anyway.2
In any case. Discarding the 4-inch Anthuriums was less painful than expected,3 but the 3-inch purge hasn't really happened yet. And there's your purge report.
Now, the orchid of the day:
We've seen Tetratonia Dark Prince before, in 2014. That post complements this one well, since I got close-up and wide shots this year, and a medium-distance photo then.
Tetratonia Dark Prince is allegedly easy to grow (Ref.), and supposedly blooms a couple times a year for months at a time (Ref.). Though one of those sites is trying to sell you a plant, so some skepticism is probably warranted.
Tetratonia Dark Prince = Broughtonia sanguinea x Tetramicra canaliculata (Ref.)
The patterning on the lip appears to be mostly a Tetramicra trait; see the photos of T. canaliculata near the bottom of this page.
Wikipedia has a page for Broughtonia sanguinea that strikes me as sort of interesting.
Both parents of Tetratonia Dark Prince are Caribbean; Broughtonia sanguinea is native to Jamaica, and Tetramicra canaliculata is fairly widely distributed: Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Hispaniola, Florida,4 and the Lesser Antilles.
Hoping to get a Schlumbergera seedling post up before the next orchid; the delay is mainly because I'm having difficulty settling on names, and difficulty settling on a process for generating names. One seedling had a perfect name show up immediately, so I can write about that immediately(-ish); for the rest of them, I'm keeping a list of plausible names for each seedling, and I guess adding to the lists until I have a certain number of good ones, and then I'll agonize and choose. This means I'm not going to be blogging them in the order they bloomed, like I did in previous years. You won't notice the difference, but it's going to bother me.
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2 I don't always bother because sometimes I'm having to rush through the watering, and throwing out seedlings is a lot more of a pain in the ass than you'd think, because there are so many spreadsheets to update afterward.
3 Most painful loss of this round was probably 0072 Beth Rowe, which bloomed well and had interesting-colored flowers, but also had thrips damage, pretty clear Xanthomonas, and possibly also scale. I tried, but couldn't rationalize keeping Beth.
0515 Diane Torr was hard too. Her blooms never quite lived up to their potential: one bloom had, like, one or two good days, which I was lucky enough to catch in a photo, but she didn't bloom a lot, most of the blooms never had a photogenic day due to thrips damage, occasionally spathes would refuse to open, and the leaves had a lot of thrips damage as well. Really interesting color, though.
4 In my notes, I have a question mark after Florida; the claim is debated.
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