Germinating Clivia seeds

This is the process to which I referred in last Saturday's post, the one that got me ~91% germination on a batch of gift seeds. (This is the last day to request your own Clivia seeds.) It works a lot better than the process I used on my Clivia seeds in 2013.

You will need: ripe Clivia fruits, a germination container, vermiculite, vinegar, a pot in which to boil water, a bowl, paper towels, a warm but not hot surface on which to set your container.

(EDITED to add photos, 4 May 2017)

1. Get ripe fruit that contains seeds. I'm not actually super clear on how you know when a fruit is ripe, but I figured it out in 2013 so I'm going to assume it's pretty obvious.

2. Boil some water. (Tap water is fine; softened tap water is not.) This is mostly for your germination medium, so how much water you need depends on how many seeds you're starting, but, you know, it's just water, and it's about as easy to boil a lot as it is to boil a little. Once that's done, cover it, set it aside to cool, and hope that it will be cooled down enough to use by the time you get to step 6.

3. Open the fruit. I just kind of squeeze it until it comes open; this is kind of messy, but not as messy as you'd think, since almost the entire volume of the fruits is dedicated to seeds, so there's very little pulp.¹

4. There is a thin membrane or skin covering each of the seeds individually, which will likely tear as you separate the seeds from one another. You need to remove all of the membrane from the seeds. It's fairly easy to see and feel the difference between covered and uncovered seeds, as the membrane is a little bit fibrous, and thick enough to be visible. It also peels off of about 80% of the seeds really easily, and is impossible to get off of the remaining 20% because the whole thing is kind of wet and slimy and the seed itself is round so there's no easy way to get a tear started. (I had some success with setting down a paper towel on the work surface and rubbing one particular spot on the seed lightly against the paper towel until a hole started.)

This is the most annoying step of the process; it's all downhill from here.

5. Next you'll need to get a container to start the seeds in, and a growing medium. I used vermiculite for my growing medium, and strongly recommend that you do too.² For a container, I used the same clear plastic containers I use for germinating everything else,

but there's a lot of leeway there. Mostly what you need is a container that allows light in, but not air (or at least, not a lot of air -- you don't want the seeds to dry out), and is deep enough to accommodate 1-1.5 inches of vermiculite at the bottom while still leaving a couple inches of room for leaves to grow.

6. You need to moisten the vermiculite. If your boiled water has cooled off to 90F/32C or below, go ahead and saturate the vermiculite. (90F/32C is a guess; I'm pretty confident it's safe, but that doesn't mean 95F/35C is necessarily not.) Pour off any excess water, then cover the container.

7. Rinse the seeds in dilute white vinegar. I was told 2% vinegar, but I didn't actually measure it out when I did it: I just filled a clean large bowl with water, added a couple splashes of the vinegar, and dropped the seeds in.³

8. Pour the vinegar solution off the seeds, rinse with more of the boiled water and pour that off too, then set the seeds in the vermiculite, eyes down. (The eye is a slightly-raised bump on the seeds; it's easy to locate because it's the only distinguishable feature they have.⁴)

9. Cover/close the container and set it in a location with bottom heat (on top of a refrigerator or hot water heater; maybe on a heat mat specifically for seed germination if you're fancy⁵) and wait.

I saw the first leaves and roots begin to appear after about two weeks. They won't necessarily all germinate at once. Some small percentage are likely to be duds, that do nothing at all (about 6% of the total, in my case), and a few others germinate but then just stop developing (about 3%). Since so many did work, I didn't bother trying to figure out what was wrong with the ones that didn't.

10. Seedlings are ready to transplant to individual pots of potting soil (about 2-3" diameter) when the roots are about an inch long. Usually you see the surface of the seed shrivel and dull a little, too.

It's fairly obvious where the soil level should be: the plant starts growing out of the side of the seed, with leaves going one direction and the root going another. Plant it so that the root is below the soil and the leaf is above the soil. The seed will usually wind up mostly above the soil.

My source recommends a mixture of orchid bark, perlite, and a little bit of time-release fertilizer like Osmocote, though I didn't follow most of those suggestions⁶ and my seedlings seem to be fine.⁷

11. I set my potted seedlings on a low shelf in the living room (which means strong air movement, cool temperatures, and brief morning sun) but I don't think they're super-picky about location. I do watch them pretty closely to see whether the soil is drying out, and so far have been watering them about once a week; if we didn't have the ceiling fan going, I could probably get away with less frequent watering.

And that's pretty much it. The tricky part, for me, is getting Clivias to bloom: they need cooler temperatures than we have in the house. I may try keeping some of them outside this year so they're properly chilled.

This is not the only process that people have gotten to work; my source reports being able to start them in damp paper towels sometimes, and that some people soak them in water until they germinate though that doesn't seem to work as well. A few people just plant the whole fruit in potting soil without doing anything else, and apparently get seedlings out of that sometimes. My source says that on at least one occasion, she didn't have time to sow the seeds after stripping the membrane off of them, so she put them in the bottom drawer of a refrigerator, in perlite, and forgot about them, and a substantial percentage of those germinated when she checked them later. But I can vouch for the method outlined above, not the others, so it's what I'm recommending.

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¹ Also, if you have problems with getting gross stuff on your hands from time to time, boy are you in the wrong hobby. I'm just saying.
² I've tried perlite and potting soil previously. Perlite doesn't seem to work for me, though some people apparently can use it successfully. They'll germinate in potting soil, but the main obstacle to germination is fungus, so things work out a whole lot better if you use a sterile medium like vermiculite.
³ I'm told it doesn't necessarily hurt anything to rinse the container out with some of the vinegar solution, followed by boiled water, at the beginning of step 5, but I was pretty confident that my container was clean already, so I didn't bother.
⁴ I'm not convinced that the direction of planting makes that much difference, personally, since the roots are bad at burrowing into the vermiculite. What winds up happening is that the seed scoots around on the surface of the vermiculite, or turns itself upside down, or whatever, as the root tries to grow downward but can't penetrate the surface of the vermiculite. I include it anyway because it was in the instructions I got, and I'm not sure it doesn't make a difference, either.
⁵ The light fixtures on the shelving units in the basement are warm enough that I just set my Clivia seeds on the shelves and let the light for the shelf below them provide the heat.
⁶ The roots were 2 or 3 inches long on most of the plants. (I potted them up on 30 March, about 7 weeks after sowing; some of them were probably ready to go after 4 weeks. Compared to Anthurium and Schlumbergera, Clivia seedlings grow very quickly.)
I did use 2.5" pots, but I used my regular potting mix (about 45% composted bark and 40% chopped sphagnum moss), and I fertilize with the Miracle Gro I use on my other plants.
⁷ I did lose a few. A couple were, I think, late germinators that weren't developed enough to pot up yet. I broke the tip off the root of one of them, which either set it back or killed it. (I'm not sure which one of them it is.) A couple got knocked out of place when I watered, buried under the potting soil, and may or may not be able to grow enough to dig themselves out. I'm still going to end up with about 60-65 seedlings, from an initial 77.

Schlumbergera seedling no. 200

Surprise!

And this one really was a surprise. Started budding in June, and the flower had fully opened by 21 June. This is very unusual for a Schlumbergera, which need long nights and cool temperatures in order to set buds, but seedling 200 had been living in the basement. The temperature drop requirement was likely met, because in the basement, summer is the cool season.

Night length is harder to figure out, since all the lights down there are on timers. The individual timers are set for around 12 hours a day, I think, but they're staggered, such that there's at least one group of lights¹ on down there at any given moment for about 17 hours per day.² Which should prevent blooming Schlumbergeras, but apparently doesn't. Seedling 200 was in the center of a flat, and had another, taller flat between itself and its primary light source, so my guess is that it effectively only got light from one set of lights, which happened to give it long enough nights for setting buds.

But who knows. I mean, sometimes plants just do unexpected things and there's no explaining it.

In any case. So I have to name one last seedling from the 2015-16 season.

To replace the TinEye naming process, which worked reasonably well for quite a while, but stopped generating new ideas about halfway into the 2015-16 season, I've come up with a big list of words, and then I throw those words randomly together in MS Excel to see whether anything interesting emerges. I did a test run of this in the post for 092A Sparky, and although I didn't wind up using one of those names for that seedling, I felt like it still worked pretty well. So, I've generated something like 150,000 combinations, which I pick through during dull moments to see if anything interesting jumps out at me, and I've been saving the plausible names in a different list. So, from that list of names, the previous list of emergency names, and the list of previously considered but unused names, all thrown together, I got a long list of 30 possibilities, which I reduced to a short list of 8.

They are:

Breakin' The Law, which has been previously considered a number of times, but became more applicable when I had a seedling bloom in June.
Renegade, basically the same thing but about half as long to type.
Vamos A La Playa, Spanish for "let's go to the beach." Partly because I like the Los Lobos song "La Playa" --


-- and partly because going to the beach is seasonally appropriate in June.
14th Anniversary, because as long as we're talking about the timing of things, the husband and I just had ours³ at the end of August.
Clyde, for the orange Pac-Man ghost, previously considered for 058B Buff Orpington.
Sun and Snow, which I like because this one has a lot more white in it than most of the orange blooms have had, but also maybe works for a seedling that can bloom in summer and winter. Not that I'm guaranteed blooms in June ever again, of course. And come to think of it, it might never bloom this white again either.
Miss Emma is one of those semi-opaque personally significant names.⁴ You'll have to trust me that it works for the person it's intended to reference.
The Darb is 1920s hipster slang for a person or thing that is excellent / valuable / attractive / etc.

How to narrow it down? Well, I suppose we can skip 14th Anniversary, because the traditional 14th-anniversary gift is ivory. Not sure that many people know this or try to follow that tradition, but a 14th-anniversary Schlumbergera really ought to be white.

And I do really like this seedling, so The Darb seems appropriate, but there will be other pretty seedlings that don't have the unusual timing going for them, so maybe we'll skip that. Miss Emma and Clyde have the same problem: the names are appropriate for an orange/white seedling, but I'm pretty sure there will be others.

Renegade reminds me of that Lorenzo Lamas show. That could be a good thing or a bad thing, but Breakin' The Law has the same basic meaning and doesn't come with Lorenzo Lamas (now Lorenzo Lamas-Craig⁵) baggage, so I can drop Renegade without losing anything.

So that leaves us with Breakin' The Law, Vamos A La Playa, and Sun and Snow. Vamos A La Playa is longer to say (six syllables, to Breakin' The Law's four), and however appropriate the colors might be for Sun and Snow, I've wanted a Breakin' The Law for a long time now,⁶ plus it satisfies my long-standing desire to have a Beavis and Butthead-related name, so seedling 200A is going to be Breakin' The Law.

The Anthuriums have the blog booked up through mid-October, so there's no telling when the next Schlumbergera post might appear, but this might be the year we start seeing blooms from parents other than 'Caribbean Dancer.' So perhaps the ongoing nightmare of orangeness will end.⁷

As a side note, I've been trying to figure out how many seedlings to pot up from each of the many batches of seeds I've started, because if I've learned anything from the 'Caribbean Dancer' seedlings, it's that there's a point of diminishing returns, where potting up additional seedlings from the same batch winds up giving you more of the same thing.⁸ In an effort to have a reasonable guess as to where that diminishing-returns line is, I wound up in unfamiliar mathematical territory and wound up having to ask MetaFilter for help. I'm making all kinds of assumptions -- genetic, aesthetic, mathematical -- and some of them are almost certainly not valid assumptions to be making, but, if I assume that all the seedlings from the first 114 pots are from the same 'Caribbean Dancer' x NOID peach cross, and that this resulted in 13 distinct categories of seedling colors,⁹ and that every subsequent batch of seedlings will be exactly as variable and in the same proportions, I wind up with this:

If I want ____ unique colorations, I have to pot up _____ seedlings

1; 1
2; 2
3; 3 or 4
4; 5 or 6
5; 7 or 8
6; 9 to 11
7; 12 to 14
8; 15 to 18
9; 19 to 23
10; 24 to 29
11; 30 to 38
12; 39 to 55
13; 56+

Based on the amount of space I have, and that math, I'm planning on trying to do 16 seedlings from each group. That works out to a nice even half-flat per cross, and ought to give me eight distinct colors. Two seedlings per new color combination (on average) doesn't seem like an unreasonable effort-to-reward ratio, and sixteen seedlings is still enough to reveal how far off my assumptions actually are. I'll have to be pretty selective, still, about which fruits I harvest seeds from, but . . . it's a place to start. And in 2019, I'll be able to tell you how that worked out for me, I guess.

Also: I said earlier this year that I was going to be starting cuttings from various seedlings and maybe offering them for sale later. This is technically true, in that I did start cuttings of some of them, and if you want to buy any, I'll let you, but I'm not going to make a big deal out of offering them, and it's late enough in the year that the mailing window is pretty short. So your reward for making it to the end of the post is that you get to find this out. Prices are as previously: one plant (usually but not always three rooted cuttings in a 2" x 2" pot¹⁰) for $7, two for $11, four for $22, six for $33, odd numbers discouraged but allowable.

E-mail me to find out which plants are available and make arrangements to receive them.¹¹ Continental U.S. only, first come first serve, limited numbers available, if you have questions then ask, etc.

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¹ I have multiple shop lights plugged into surge suppressors, and the surge suppressors are on timers, so about 5 shop lights go on and off as a unit. I think there are seven timers. Yes, it's a lot of electricity.
I'm switching to LEDs now: the fixtures are supposed to be more water-resistant, which is good; they're supposed to produce way less heat, which is better (I get burn marks on the Anthurium leaves sometimes, if the leaves flop their way onto a fluorescent bulb and I don't notice.); they should last longer; and they're supposed to produce a little more light per fixture, with about half the electricity usage. It all sounds a little too good to be true, but I still going to give it a try.
² This is not primarily for the benefit of the plants; I have it set up that way because the overhead lights alone aren't bright enough to do anything with, so if I want to do anything in the basement, I need at least one of the lights to be on so I can see. Since I get up at different times of day, and water in the basement mostly late, it's necessary for at least one light to be on at any given moment between about 7 AM and midnight.
³ Well, one of them. We have multiple significant dates we call anniversaries, the least important of which is the date of our actual legal marriage. August's is the day we met.
⁴ (Like 023A Stoked, 075A Pushover, 082A Strawberry Madeleine, 095A Perturbed, and 0217A Blood Frenzy.)
⁵ Who, according to Wikipedia, changed his last name to the hyphenated "Lamas-Craig" because his fourth (!) wife, Shauna Sand, changed her name to Shauna Lamas when they married and didn't change it back after they divorced; his fifth (!!) wife was Shawna, with a W, and Shawna didn't want to have basically the same name as Shauna. Which sounds kind of silly, one of those "only in Hollywood" sorts of problems, but when you think about it, it's probably more practical than anything. The last thing you want during a conversation about your ex-wife is to keep getting her confused with your current wife, and a hyphenated name is a lot more dignified than referring to them as "Shauna Four" and "Shawna Five."
One hopes that Shawna Lamas-Craig has the sense to keep him away from any other Shaunas, though, as the dude is clearly zeroing in on a type.
⁶ (It first came up as an option for 083A Psychedelic Bunny, back in January 2015.)
⁷ Hopefully not the only ongoing orange nightmare to end in November, if you know what I mean.
⁸ Not that I'm particularly unhappy about having so many from the first batch; if potting up ~150 seedlings was what it took to get a 083A Psychedelic Bunny, then it was worth it. But I can't pot up 150 seedlings every time I make a cross.
⁹ • Orange/white, like 015A Nielub (22/75 = 29%)
• Orange/pink, like 034A Wahine (15/75 = 20%)
• Red-orange/pink, like 028A Phil Collen (7/75 = 9%)
• "Other" seedlings, that are difficult to fit into a category because they're variable, multi-colored, or change color as the flower matures, like 099A Dessert Room (5/75 = 7%)
• Orange-red/pink, like 055B Fort Venus (5/75 = 7%)
• Red-orange/white, like 008B Candor (4/75 = 5%)
• Red & orange & white, like 079A Yayoi Kusama (3/75 = 4%)
• Peach/white, like 024B Bryce Canyon (3/75 = 4%)
• Orange/magenta, like 088A Cyborg Unicorn (3/75 = 4%)
• Red/pink, like 078A Art Party (3/75 = 4%)
• Pinkish-orange/whatever, like 057A Pyrotechnic (2/75 = 3%)
• Dark orange/white, like 023A Stoked (2/75 = 3%)
• 083A Psychedelic Bunny (1/75 = 1%)
And yes, just to say it again: I recognize that separating, say, red-orange/pink from orange-red/pink is questionable. I was basing the different categories mostly according to whether or not I could identify them on sight alone. If I can't tell the difference between two seedlings without a name tag, then they belong in the same color group. And I can tell the orange-reds apart from the red-oranges. So.
There's also little reason to assume that just because I can split this group of seedlings into 13 types, subsequent batches of seedlings will also be splittable into 13 types. I don't even know for sure that these are all from the same cross in the first place (I'm especially doubtful about the red/pinks.). But I had to start from somewhere in order to be able to ask the question at all.
¹⁰ (In a couple cases, I didn't have three cuttings to put into the pot, or I started out with three and one of them died.)
¹¹ To save you the trouble: no, 083A Psychedelic Bunny is still not available. I propagated it, but this was for insurance, in case anything happened to the original plant.

Random plant event: Polyscias fruticosa

Nothing huge going on with the Polyscias seedlings exactly, but I thought learning a little bit more about how Polyscias works was maybe worth a post.

As of 10 November, 13 seeds have germinated (out of 53 sown). The first has already begun to produce true leaves, though they're not easy to see in this photo:

Maybe three or four others have visible cotyledons ("seed leaves"). There's still a ways to go before I can officially say that I've grown Polyscias fruticosa from seed -- the next hurdle will be transplanting to soil -- but I never anticipated getting this far with it, so even if no plants actually result, I think this is technically still a success.

For various reasons, it might be better if the seedlings fail to transplant. I was in the husband's office a few days ago, telling him that I had had nine Polyscias seeds germinate already, and he was all, cool, that's neat about it. And then as I was saying something else, can't remember what, I saw his eyes drift over to the parent Polyscias -- by now approximately 6 feet tall and 2 feet wide (2 m x 0.7 m) -- and he interrupted me. "You said nine? There are nine?"

Well, that was quick. . . .

The Polyscias fruticosa seeds in fact have begun to germinate. Only two so far, and they're so tiny that it's difficult to get a good picture, but this is probably enough to get the general idea:

Sown on 26 September 2015, and I first noticed that something had happened on 18 October, so 22 days from sowing to germination (for the fastest ones). It remains to be seen, of course, whether any others will germinate, and whether I'm competent to keep the seedlings alive long enough to turn into proper plants, but this is at least proof of concept.

Materials and techniques: Polyscias fruticosa

This post is probably a little premature, since nothing has actually happened with these yet. But since I'm doing non-Anthurium posts sometimes now, I figured it was better to say something, and have this post to remind me later, than to say nothing and possibly forget about the whole business entirely. So.

What happened was, both the original Polyscias fruticosa of mine and a cutting I took from it decided to bloom this summer, which I wrote about in June. At the time, I wasn't sure whether they would be self-fertile or not, but it turns out that they are. So far, so good.

The berries are sort of grayish (previously); they vaguely resemble blueberries.

The resemblance gets a lot stronger when you crush them:

(Though, weirdly, the color in that photo is more or less accurate: the juice is dark purple until it soaks into the paper plate, or dries, or something. Then it turns basically gray. I don't know how many times I had to look at it over and over before I realized that the color was fading from the juice, not that I was losing the ability to see in color.)

At this point, I didn't know what one was supposed to do with the seeds in order to get them to germinate. Searching the internet was unhelpful, so I shrugged and did what I would do with Anthurium: how different could they be, right? So I cleaned them off as best as I could, stuck them in water to rinse and clean them further,

and then sowed them on damp vermiculite in a clear plastic container. If a batch of Anthurium seeds intends to germinate, they'll usually have done something within about 10-14 days; the Polyscias seeds have, as of 15 October, been doing nothing at all for 19 days now. This is hardly enough evidence to conclude that they're duds -- in the same situation, Spathiphyllum seeds treated the same way will germinate immediately, after six months, and all time spans in between, and Schlumbergeras will germinate in nearly-perfect unison after about 3-5 weeks. So the Polyscias seeds might be fine.

Well. I notice a handful have some fungus on them. Those ones aren't fine, obviously.

But so we'll see how that goes. If this doesn't work, I think there are more fruits still on the original plant, so I have the option to take a new batch and let them dry overnight before sowing, and see if that works any better. Or just forget about it, which might be the best thing: I just started like 1500 Schlumbergera seeds;¹ more seedlings surely won't be helpful.

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¹ From 'Exotic Dancer,' plus five of my own seedlings: 088A "Cyborg Unicorn," 082A "Strawberry Madeleine," 023A "Stoked," 026A "Brick Wall," and 057A "Pyrotechnic."
Which reminds me: soon Schlumbergera seedling posts will start showing up instead of / in addition to the Anthurium seedling posts. Already got a few previously-unbloomed Schlumbergera seedlings with buds on them (so far: 018, 034, 056, 103, 106, 107), and there's a chance that 083A "Psychedelic Bunny" might finally be blooming as well. If it is, I could possibly take cuttings and have "Psychedelic Bunny" available next year. I mean, possibly not, too. I still go back and forth about whether I want to try patenting it first. But the first step in doing any of those things would be to know which of the plants in pot #083 is "Psychedelic Bunny," so here's hoping I can find out.

Anthurium News: The Good News

There are still some bright spots to be found in the Anthurium-breeding project, despite the recent rash of dropped buds and minimal first-time budding. To wit:


1) I haven't seen any thrips in about a week. I gave the basement plants the week off from oiling last week because 1) I was tired, and 2) the smell wasn't getting any better. If things went according to plan, I resumed oiling this Monday, but I figured a week off might do all of us some good.

I also haven't seen any scale since I began oiling the plants in the basement. This is also good news, but less so, because it's always been tough to see scale. I'm pleased that I'm not finding it, but it hasn't necessarily gone anywhere.


2) The grandseedlings are coming along adequately. I potted up more seedlings from #276 "Zach Religious" on 24 August, making 22 second-generation plants now, all of them Zach's. I probably won't get 100% long-term survival, but that's fine. Zach has thanked me by producing a new bloom that photographed nicely and is a good bit larger than the previous one:

Seeds have now been started from #271 "Wanda Reulthemal," #273 "Wes Coast," #239 "Russ Teanale," #005 "Chad Michaels," and #059 "Bijoux Tuit." The only interesting things about this so far are that a couple of Wanda's have germinated and should be ready to stick in soil soon, and Chad is spectacularly fertile (more than 70 seeds from one inflorescence, though that doesn't mean that that many will germinate).

Photo actually only shows 60 seeds; another 10 were ready to sow a few days after this, and the spadix still had a few unripe berries.
Many, many more seedlings are developing berries,¹ though some of them are unbelievably slow about it.


3) I'm pretty sure I managed to pollinate 'Midori.' I don't yet know how many of the individual tiny flowers got pollinated, but I can see about eight bumps in the middle of the spadix that are bigger than the others and seem to be growing. Even if it worked, I won't have any ripe berries for quite a while, but I had been worried that it was going to be exceptionally difficult to pollinate, like 'Florida' (still no luck with 'Florida,' by the way) and maybe it's not.

'Midori' was happy enough here that it tried to produce a second bloom a few weeks ago, but the developing bloom got stuck in the cataphylls and snapped its own stalk off. Which is a thing that happens occasionally. I'm hoping 'Midori' will try again before the winter.

I also have at least two blooms on the NOID purple pollinated (picture of one below), one from the NOID pink, and six blooms on 'Pandola.' In all cases, the most likely pollen parent is the NOID red, which is super-reliable about producing pollen and not much else. Though the NOID red has also been pollinated, probably by 'Pandola' or itself.

And yes, I know, pollinated Anthurium spadices are not the prettiest things to look at. Scroll back up to Zach's picture if you feel the need.


4) Does it count as good news if it hasn't happened yet? Because I have a theory which, if true, is encouraging.

I've been sort of mildly bummed out all summer, that there weren't more first-time buds showing up. I guess I got kind of spoiled during the winter and spring -- from late December 2013 to late May 2014, I was seeing, on average, a first-time bloomer every three and a half days. From June to August, that's dropped to one every three weeks.

My theory on this is as follows:

1) the Anthurium seedlings just won't bloom unless they're in 4" pots. I don't know why it matters or how they know, but no seedling has ever attempted to bloom in a 3" pot. On average, once transplanted, it takes them ten months to produce their first bud.²
2) I tend to up-pot in large batches, whenever enough room becomes available. There were 90 plants moved up in January, February, and May 2013, who I think of as the "Class of 2013."
3) It's maybe the case now that all the seedlings from the Class of '13 which are inclined to bloom easily in basement conditions have done so already, and the reason first-time blooms slowed down this summer was because the class of '13 was too old to do first blooms, and the class of '14 (i.e., the 126 plants I repotted in October 2013, January 2014, and April-July 2014) was too young to start blooming yet.

The theory winds up making two predictions. The first prediction is that I should be seeing a couple first-time buds from the Class of '14 more or less now, which has happened with #279 "Tristan Shout."³ The second prediction is that I'll start seeing more and more of those happening as we get into the winter, and by February 2015, first-time buds will be appearing once or twice a week again, as the seedlings from the Class of '14 reach blooming size. That obviously can't be confirmed yet, but it's a prediction. And it's making me feel slightly better for the moment.

It's also possible that the air conditioning is suppressing blooming in the basement, though it doesn't seem to be bothering the Anthuriums upstairs. If that's the explanation, though, the result is the same -- when the heater switches on in the winter, suddenly there are lots of new blooms again.

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¹ As of Friday 29 August, there were berries developing on: #002 "Alexis Mateo" • #005 "Chad Michaels" • #031 "Sylvester" • #059 "Bijoux Tuit" • #063 "Audrey Quest" • #066 "Barbara Seville" • #076 "Bob Humbug" • #083 "Carmen Adairya" • #097 "Colin Ambulance" • #108 "Deena Sequins" • #110 "Delta Badhand" • #125 "Anya Wei" • #126 "Erin Dirtylondry" • #200 "Mario Speedwagon" • #223 "Patty Cake" • #231 "Rhea Listick" • #232 "Rhoda Badcek" • #234 "Ross Koz" • #239 "Russ Teanale" • #244 "Sarah Problem" • #245 "Sawyer Ad" • #271 "Wanda Reulthemal" • #273 "Wes Coast" • #280 "Jujubee"
Not all of those will necessarily reach maturity and be sown, and not all the seeds that are sown will necessarily germinate and grow, but that's a pretty big group, especially considering that I've only been doing this for three years.
Also: holy shit, I've been doing this for three years already.
² Though that's with a range from 1 to 17 months; it's not like you can make them bloom when you want by repotting them at the right moment. Time since repotting is a better predictor of when they'll bloom than the time since germination is, but only barely.
³ Wait, what about #171 "Genevieve la Difference, who also just started forming a bud for the first time according to your previous post?" I hear no one at all asking. Well.
Genevieve is a really late bloomer from the Class of '13; she should have started her first bud five months ago. I think that means she had to repeat a grade. Or maybe she missed so much school after that skiing accident during Spring Break that she had to take an incomplete, so then she made up the work during the summer and graduated late. I dunno. The graduating-classes metaphor is perhaps getting a little overextended.
In any case, Tristan is the only one from the class of '14 to do a first-time bloom when my theory predicts first-time blooms from that group should begin.
Five other members of the class of '14 have tried, precociously, to bloom by now:
• #218 "Noah Fence" (repotted October, bloomed May, completed July)
• #231 "Rhea Listick" (repotted October, bloomed February, aborted April, retried May, completed June)
• #265 "Madame LaQueer" (repotted October, bloomed June, aborted July)
• #280 "Jujubee" (repotted October, bloomed March, completed April)
• #281 "Laganja Estranja" (repotted October, bloomed April, aborted June)

Materials and Techniques: White Oil

As you have probably guessed, I've started spraying the "white oil" on the plants in the basement (as of August 4). This leaves me basically no time to do anything else, so I'm not doing anything else.

Points of interest about the oil-spraying process so far:

1) It is very messy. Oil and soap and water gets everywhere. I'm still doing it inside, because . . .

2) It's also very time-consuming. Watering a round of plants (bring plants to the tub, put plants in the tub, water, drain, take plants out of tub, return the plants to their original location) normally takes me about 15 minutes. Having to bring every plant to the tub means more trips, and then spraying all surfaces of every plant makes each round of watering take longer, so watering is now happening at less than half the usual speed. Taking the process outside would only serve to make a time-consuming and messy process more so: having oil, soap, and water dripping on the plant room floor is the lesser evil.

3) Emulsification is totally real, you guys. When I started the whole process, I had the oil and the dishwashing liquid in a milk jug, and I shook the jug around to mix the two together, and they mixed, but the mixture wasn't stable, so by the time I was ready to dilute and spray a new batch, the stuff in the jug had mostly separated into two layers again. When it was freshly shaken up, it poured pretty much the same as the oil -- noticeably thicker than water, but not by very much. At some point, though, I shook it up and it thickened into something very different, roughly the consistency of mayonnaise (which is also an emulsion made of about 70-80% vegetable oil, water, and an emulsifier¹), yogurt, or thick shampoo. Pourable, still, but much slower, and it sticks to the measuring spoon terribly. That's gotten a little thinner over time, but it's still very different from the oil I started out with.

White oil concentrate (left) and in the spray bottle I actually use (right).
4) I'm also using roughly three or four times more of the oil/detergent mixture than the recipes I found on-line recommended (I'm using 3 Tbsp in a little less than a quart of water; they recommend 1 Tbsp in a full quart), because after a few test sprayings on a Gasteraloe, I wasn't convinced that there was enough oil in the spray to be accomplishing anything. It is possible that this will turn out to be a disastrous decision, but the plants haven't reacted badly so far, aside from the Breynia disticha, which may have been having other problems.

5) And I'm still seeing new thrips and scale, though I wasn't necessarily expecting them all to vanish like magic at the first application. Not sure I expecting them all to vanish ever, as far as that goes.² But I am having a more difficult time locating thrips, if not scale, so maybe progress is being made.

6) Because of the slowness and messiness, posting is likely to be light for the next couple weeks, as much of my free time will be spent drunkenly sliding around on the plant room floor in a pool of soybean oil and soap,³ and/or cleaning up from same. There'll still be orchid posts every five or six days, unless I forget.

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¹ The emulsifier in mayonnaise is egg, not dishwashing liquid. Or at least it's not dishwashing liquid in your better brands of mayonnaise.
² There's a post to be written, sometime, about the claims I found in a number of sites that were pushing the white oil, that because the oil wasn't a chemical, and because it works by suffocating the insects, there was no way they could evolve resistance to it. Sadly, that is not the case: 1) any atom, whether alone or in combination with other atoms, is a chemical of some kind or another. Vegetable oil is not an exception; it just happens to be one of the chemicals that we can eat large quantities of safely. 2) No, thrips are not likely to evolve beyond the need to breathe oxygen, but they can still evolve resistance to white oil. If I ever get around to writing that post, I'll describe some ways that that could happen. But don't hold your breath, no pun intended.
³ (Not that I'll actually be drunk. Though that may not be the worst idea I've ever had.)

Unfinished business: Amorphophallus

I had what seemed like a pretty good idea for staking --

which was to use the hollow foam insulation tubes people use to insulate pipes as my stakes. They're strong enough to hold plants up in reasonable amounts of wind but flexible enough not to introduce new kinks; they're slit down one side, making it possible to slip one on around the petioles without further damaging it (though that did take two people to do); and they're fairly cheap.

Unfortunately, it appears that this idea came too late to be helpful. The A. bulbifer appears to be producing a new bulb, but its petiole was pretty badly damaged and the leaf is severely wilted (worse now than in the pictures), and it's not clear whether it's going to be able to finish making the bulb before the leaf dies.

The A. konjac was also more badly damaged than I had initially thought, and I suppose the process of wrestling it into the insulation tube probably damaged it further even though we were trying to be careful. The wind has also blown hard enough to shove the petiole through the slit in the insulation a few times. (I should have taped it up once we got the insulation on; I didn't think the wind would be strong enough to push it through.) So it's probably just dead, and the plant will have to carry on through the three bulblets it produced this year. Which is not so bad, as consequences go. I suppose I've learned a valuable lesson about putting Amorphophallus outside as soon as it starts to sprout.

Dog Hair as a Rooting Medium

Background:

Dog (Canis familiaris) hair is cheap, abundant, renewable, and produced in such vast quantities that one feels mortally certain that it must be good for something besides canine thermoregulation. Furthermore, most existing rooting media are dependent on the destruction of natural ecosystems (peat moss), require a large amount of energy for production (perlite), or pose a health hazard to the producers and users (vermiculite),¹ so finding a more renewable medium would be a boon to both plant-loving dog owners and the environment.

As canine hair has some qualities in common (holds water, fibrous texture) with other substances used in rooting media and soilless potting mixes, it was evaluated for its potential as a rooting medium.


Experiment:

The floor of a home containing a dog ("Sheba," Fig. 1) was swept, and the sweepings collected into a pile. (Fig. 2) The sweepings were then separated into hair and non-hair, with the latter discarded. (Fig. 3) The material which resulted was fibrous and mostly dark gray in color, with inclusions of lighter matter.²

Fig. 1 ("Sheba")

Fig. 2 (material collected by sweeping)

Fig. 3 (collected material post-purification)
The hair was then added to a plastic pot, 7 cm in diameter. Non-hair material was left out of the pot when it was feasible to separate it. Once the hair had been placed in the pot, it was rinsed with water several times to remove water-soluble contaminants. (Fig. 4)

Fig. 4 (rinsed hair in pot)
Next, the cutting to be rooted was prepared. We selected Plectranthus verticillatus (Fig. 5) as a test subject, because P. verticillatus is known to root readily under a large range of conditions. A cutting approximately 7 cm in length was taken from a plant (Fig. 6), and the lowest pair of leaves was removed.

Fig. 5 (the stock Plectranthus verticillatus plant from which cutting was obtained)

Fig. 6 (Plectranthus verticillatus cutting before removal of lowest pair of leaves)
After making a hole in the dog hair at the center of the pot, the end of the cutting was placed into the hole, and the hair packed around the stem to ensure contact between the rooting medium and the cutting. The pot was then placed in a brightly-lit but sunless location. Moisture level was monitored, and water added when it would have been added for a cutting rooted in soil.


Results:

During the first full watering, a considerable amount of dark brown material washed out of the rooting medium. Chemical characterization was not performed, and the identity of the substance is unknown. Similar but lighter yellow material was washed out of the medium following some but not all subsequent waterings.(Fig. 7) Rooting medium had no discernible odor.

Fig. 7 (drainage water containing uncharacterized yellow contaminant)
The experimental pot retained water much longer than a comparably-sized pot of standard potting mix. However, the distribution of the water was quite different. The upper half remained relatively dry, even immediately following the addition of water, while the lower half stayed very wet. This made it difficult to determine when to water the cutting.

The oldest pair of leaves wilted significantly after three or four days. No new leaf growth was observed; a few small (< 2 mm) roots had formed by four weeks (Fig. 8). This is significantly less root growth than would have been expected from potting soil or water after an equivalent length of time.

Fig. 8 (roots formed after four weeks in rooting medium)
After five weeks, the cutting remained alive but wilted, and had produced no new growth. (Fig. 9)

Fig. 9 (cutting after five weeks in rooting medium)

Conclusions:

Though root development suggests that canine hair may be capable of rooting plant cuttings under some circumstances, development was slow compared to standard media, probably due to the different water-absorbing abilities of canine hair, and it is likely not an acceptable substitute for potting soil.

This experiment also demonstrates that Plectranthus verticillatus, contrary to popular perception, is not in fact capable of rooting in any material, merely in most of them.

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¹ Large-scale production of canine hair also results in the indirect destruction of natural ecosystems and consumes considerable energy, in addition to generating significant amounts of ecologically problematic waste. Objective observation of human behavior to date with respect to animal companions leads us to conclude that humans simply do not give a shit about the ecological impact of their pets, and would continue to attempt to keep domesticated dogs, cats, hamsters, etc. even if forced to live in a poisoned, radioactive, waterless hellscape as a result, because they are adorable and precious, whoosa good dog, whoosa good dog yes you are. If humans are to keep animals as pets in any case, we may as well figure out how to do so in as minimally disruptive a manner as possible.
² The inclusions were primarily composed of household dust, lint, fragments of potting medium from indoor plants, and the fallen leaves of said plants.

An Uncharacteristically Upbeat Post

Fungus
Anybody remember that Euphorbia fungus I've been having trouble with since forever? The one that makes the fuzzy white patches on Euphorbia, Pedilanthus, and Synadenium but not on anything else, and that doesn't go away after being sprayed with rubbing alcohol, peroxide, copper sulfate, or chlorothalonil? This stuff?

I think I may have figured out how to get rid of it. The secret might be strong sprays of tap water. Damaged leaves stay damaged, of course, but they don't grow new patches of fungus. I hadn't tried this previously, because usually the equation is fungus + water = more fungus. In fact, I'd been taking extra care not to get water on the affected plants. The only reason I ever tried spraying the plants with water was because I'd gotten so discouraged that I gave up on ever stopping it, so I figured I may as well make it worse so I could justify throwing the plants out.

Rain doesn't work, though: the fungus got worse on the plants that were outside last summer. Must be the chlorine?

The only plants that washing doesn't seem to be adequate for are the Pedilanthuses. Of the three I still have (P. tithymaloides, P. 'Silver Star,' and P. 'Jurassic Park 2'), 'Jurassic Park 2' seems to be cured, 'Silver Star' might or might not be -- it's hard to tell, because there was a lot of leaf damage, and the leaf damage is the same color as the fungus itself -- and P. tithymaloides is still having problems.


Hippeastrum
The Hippeastrum seedling I got three years ago from Kenneth Moore is 1) going to bloom, and 2) offsetting. I'm not sure I even knew that Hippeastrums made offsets before this; I never paid that much attention to the genus because I never thought I was going to have one.

The flower won't be anything terribly exotic; it's either 'Red Lion' x self or 'Red Lion' x 'Apple Blossom.' But it'll still be my first, which is special enough. And amaryllis blooms are pretty, even when they're ordinary.


Clivia
The rumors about Clivia are true. I'd started to think all the talk about Clivia offsets was some kind of elaborate prank aimed at me, to make me feel bad because mine weren't making any. But behold! (And it only took five and a half years!)

So this is a thing that can happen as well.


Araucaria
But the fun doesn't stop there! I also have an Araucaria seedling! (It's less blurry in person.)

Is it an interesting Araucaria seedling? Well no, not yet. But someday. The story is, I bought three seeds of A. bidwillii from seedman.com last September.¹

I started them on 17 September 2013. I got a clear plastic jar (formerly a Costco bulk pretzel container), put in about 2 or 3 inches of damp soil, then set the seeds on top, then added another inch of soil and sealed the top.

In retrospect, I wish I had used vermiculite, because there's a raging fungus gnat problem in the container now. Washing the seeds first might have been a good idea as well, since I've had bugs come in with previous seedman.com purchases. (Only springtails, but if washing might have prevented that, then washing would have been a good idea.) But in any case. They usually take 1-2 months to germinate, but can take up to 18 months to germinate, I've heard, so this may be a long-term dirt-filled pretzel jar.

And here's a bonus picture of my first Araucaria bidwillii, from last September:

In that photo, it's about six and a half years old, plus however old it was when I bought it.²

The advice I see on-line says I should move the seedling to its own pot as soon as it's large enough to be handled.³ I'm not sure how large that is, but the current plan is to give it its own pot once it starts growing some true leaves: currently it's just a short, bumpy stick. If that sounds wrong to anybody, please leave a comment. For that matter, leave a comment if it sounds right, too.


Coffea
Finally, I've seen the first germination from this year's round of Coffea seedlings:

That took a little less than two months to sprout. For this one, I used soil instead of vermiculite, and I didn't soak it in water for 24 hours after harvest, so I hadn't been sure it would do anything. But it seems the pre-drying soak is optional, and it doesn't matter tremendously what you try to germinate them in. For the moment, it's just this one pot, the six seedlings from last year's batch, and the parent plant (which is doing terribly and I don't know why⁴) but I started a pretzel container full of vermiculite and seeds⁵ on January 15, and have two more batches of seeds to sow (95 seeds next week, and 205 seeds in early March), so this is just a harbinger of the coming Coffea stampede.

Bonus picture of the remaining plants from last year's crop:

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¹ $5.95 plus shipping. That was the same order as the Strelitzia junceas (5 seeds for $2.95; previously), and I also got seeds of Calathea lutea (10/$3.95). Both Strelitzia and Calathea are supposed to be irregular germinators, but it may be time to give up on the Calatheas: they take a lot of space that could be going to Anthurium seedlings, and so far none of the ten have done anything. I can be pretty patient when it comes to waiting for plants to do things, so I'm not planning to throw them out immediately, but . . . well, they should start thinking about germinating, if they know what's good for them.
² There is not a lot of information available about how fast A. bidwillii grows once it's germinated, but based on this picture from Wikimedia Commons, I'm guessing mine was barely more than a year old when I bought it. My earliest photo is from October 2007, ten months after the purchase, when it looked like:

Best guess: the plant is now between 7 1/2 and 8 1/2 years old.
³ For example: " As soon as they are large enough to handle, prick the seedlings out into individual pots. The plants have a rather sparse root system and are best placed in their final positions as soon as possible." (From here.) The part about the roots seems correct, at least:

⁴ My best guesses: cold (it's in the plant room, on the floor, and the plant room floor has been very chilly, several times, because of the periodic blasts of cold this winter), dry (it dries out a lot faster than it used to, and probably needs a larger pot), and maybe hot, dry air (the only place big enough to put it is also pretty close to the plant room heater). There's a second plant in the pot, maybe half the size of the big one, and it seems to be doing fine, though, so none of the explanations completely make sense.
⁵ And I do mean full: 149 seeds. The pretzel jars aren't huge -- about 8-10 inches / 20-25 cm in diameter? -- so the seeds are packed in there pretty tightly.

Unfinished business: Clivia miniata 'Aztec Gold'

I'd thought maybe, but it looks like I don't get a repeat of the Clivia flowers this year. Ah, well.

The seedlings are doing all kinds of different things. Some just sit there. Some get periodically covered with a white fungus. Some have leaves. I started the first batch in a glass jar: I put in soil and some water, microwaved it to heat and sterilize the soil (which apparently didn't work, since the fungus keeps appearing), then allowed it to cool down. I then removed the seed coats from the seeds, rinsed them in a dilute solution of hydrogen peroxide, and dropped them in.

The top-down angle isn't ideal for seeing how much growth there's been, but it's a bit clearer than shooting through the side of the jar. . . .

The second batch, I just removed the seed coat and dropped them into small pots of wet soil. Only one of that group has done anything --

-- and I'm afraid that taking the photo may have set it back, since I brought it outside for the picture, along with a bunch of other plants in a box. On the way back into the house, one of them started to tip over, so I shifted the box, so then others started to tip, and in short order I had dumped them all out onto the ground. The Clivia seedling appeared unharmed, but it did get knocked completely out of its pot, so I'm worried anyway. (Clivia roots are pretty sturdy, though, right?)

But the point remains that there don't seem to be any appreciable differences between the two groups, in terms of survival or progress, so perhaps the microwaving and peroxide and all that was overkill. Time will tell.

Materials and Techniques: Propagating Cyperus alternifolius

I mentioned a while ago that I'd been seeing Cyperus for sale here and there, and had been tempted to get one. A number of commenters encouraged me to do so, and then a reader offered me cuttings of hers. I hadn't even known that growing them from cuttings was possible.

Also, fortunately, it turned out that the reader who offered the cuttings had already written a blog post about how to proceed, so I didn't even have to search the net to get instructions.

I goofed here: I should have taken a picture of the cuttings outside of the water, cut the stems, then taken a second picture of the cuttings in the water. Forgive me; I was excited. The cuttings are upside down, relative to the direction they were originally growing.

The above picture was taken on 3 June. The jar then sat to the side of the kitchen window, where the cuttings got mostly bright indirect light with a little weak late afternoon sun.

By 19 June, two of the three cuttings had produced new sprouts and roots from between the leaves. I then pulled them out of the water, cut off most of the leaves (I left about 3/8 inch / 1 cm on; it was impossible to cut very precisely without catching the new shoots and roots as well, and I figured it probably wouldn't matter if part of the leaves was still attached.), and planted them in potting mix. Molly planted hers right side up, the direction they were growing to begin with, and I left mine upside down: it turns out not to make a difference.

Growth has felt slower than I'd expected, especially considering how quickly the cuttings started to produce roots and growing tips. The whole process has actually moved pretty quickly, considering that I went from cuttings to plants in a month: I'm just impatient.

This is what they looked like yesterday. Surprisingly easy so far; I've kept them in a saucer of water by the kitchen sink, so I remember to check to see if they need water. I expect that will become more challenging once their root systems expand a bit, but everything's worked fine with these two for the first month.

The third cutting has still not produced new shoots or roots or anything; the only notable difference between it and the other two is that it had been flowering when cut off. That may or may not be the reason why it hasn't done anything. In some ways, I don't really care whether or not it roots, since I already have two plants and I didn't, technically, have room for them, but I've kept it anyway just to satisfy my curiosity about whether it ever will. (Thank you again, Molly.)

Random plant event: Leuchtenbergia principis

I started a batch of Leuchtenbergia principis seeds on 8 May. I wasn't sure what percentage would germinate, so I started a lot (56, which isn't even half the number I got¹). I noticed the first seedlings on 15 May, and new ones keep popping up. So I will soon have way, way too many baby Leuchtenbergias, with enough seeds to make way, way more.

So far, they don't look like much,

and Leuchtenbergias are slow-growing plants besides, so they'll probably continue to not look like much for quite a while, but that's just a guess. In any case, things seem to be working as intended so far, so that's something.

Readers who have always wanted to grow a Leuchtenbergia principis but have never been able to find one for sale (which I assume is probably most of you), let me know: I can probably hook you up with some seeds. I don't know how delicate the seedlings are yet, but mature plants are very easy to grow as long as you can supply them with adequate light.² Hopefully the seedlings won't be significantly harder to deal with.

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¹ I'd ordered 100 from cactusstore.com, and at first they sent 25. So then I sent a hey-wait-a-minute-that's-not-what-I-ordered message, and they sent another 100, like, immediately. Plus both packages contained more than the stated number of seeds, so I wound up with I think 131 seeds overall, from an order of 100.
² Leuchtenbergia rates a 2.0 on the most current incarnation of the PATSP scale, virtually all of which is due to their need for stronger light than most people can easily provide indoors.