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.

-

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.

Random plant event: Spathiphyllum

Hey, remember last Friday, and the post about houseplants that may or may not produce seeds? And how I said I'd tried with a Spathiphyllum but wasn't sure if I was actually going to get anywhere? Well, we still haven't gotten anywhere, but we're one step closer.

While working on that post, I went downstairs to look at the plant in question. Spathiphyllum spadices are full of a bunch of individual little bumpy bits, which there's probably a botanical term for but I don't feel like trying to figure it out now. One of the bumpy bits had changed color from green to a dull orange, which you saw in the list on Friday if you read the footnotes.¹

In this picture, it looks like there's more than one successful pollination, or at least potentially more than one, but only the one in the center of the shot seems to have been fertile.
Naturally, I wondered how this was going, and whether anything was going to be ready anytime soon. I'd been expecting that Spathiphyllum fruits would work more or less the same way that Anthurium ones do: Anthurium spadices begin to swell up in a bunch of little bumps, and then the bumps get bigger, and change color, and eventually you wind up with a bunch of little rubbery, slightly translucent berries, each containing one large green seed (occasionally two) suspended in a sort of thick goopy pulp.²

So, I poked at the one bumpy thing that had changed color, figuring that I'd just try to rock it back and forth slightly to see whether it was properly rubbery or still hard; I was hoping to get some idea of how close it was to being ripe.

But this happened instead. It could hardly have been more different from an Anthurium fruit. The bumps didn't really swell that much. They did change color, but it was a lot more subtle than the bright orange most Anthurium fruits turn. Instead of a rubbery skin over raisiny pulp, the skin on this remained hard, and just kind of broke when touched; it's not flexible at all. The pulp was nearly nonexistent -- there was just enough there to keep the seeds slightly stuck to one another, but not enough pulp for me to be able to discern a color. I didn't even try to wash the seeds off, as there didn't seem to be anything to wash. Also, instead of one or two seeds, this produced eight.

(Photographed on a paper plate, if the background texture gives you any sense of the scale. If it doesn't, my best guess would be that they were about 3 mm / 0.1 in long.)
As this is a new experience for me, I had no idea how one is supposed to germinate them. I decided to drop them in damp vermiculite and see what happens.³ They were planted on 26 October; nothing visible was happening as of 29 October, but obviously that's still way early. Rumor has it that germination takes about ten days, so nothing ought to happen until 5 November at the earliest.

Even if nothing comes of this and they don't germinate, it was totally worth it just to see what the seeds and fruits look like. I'd always assumed that they must exist,⁴ but it's not really the sort of thing one dreams of seeing. If they do germinate, well, I'm a little worried, considering how excitable I can be when it comes to aroid seedlings.

-

¹ Which you should always do.
² The best description I can give for the texture is that it's somewhere between the flesh of a plum (a little stringy and wet) and the flesh of a raisin (thick, sticky, semi-solid). Closer to the raisin.
³ Which turns out to be approximately correct: some too-late-to-be-useful googling suggests that mixing in some chopped sphagnum moss would probably have been better than straight vermiculite, but this will probably be fine. It might even be preferable, since I don't actually have chopped sphagnum on hand, and wouldn't have an easy way to sterilize it if I did.
⁴ It turns out that there is one photo available through Google image search. Apparently I'd been so satisfied with assuming their existence that I'd never bothered to look. (By the way: the seedlings in the bottom right of that page look adorable. Maybe I do hope I get lots of germination after all.)

How to Start Anthurium and Schlumbergera seeds

Kind of a hopeful title, above -- I know this'll work for Anthurium, but I'm having to take the word of the internet for the Schlumbergera parts. But it'll probably work, and even if it doesn't, I'll give you an excuse to eat cupcakes, so really you'd be a fool not to try, right?

So. First you need to get some fruits, to take the seeds from. With Schlumbergera, that's relatively straightforward -- get two plants of different varieties blooming at once, transfer the pollen (usually white or yellow, on multiple stamens that stick out of the flower) from one plant to the stigma (there'll only be one of them, which will also be sticking out of the flower; usually the tip is fuchsia) of the other, and vice-versa if you feel like it. This is as easy as touching them together. The difficult part is the waiting for it to mature, which on my plants took something like 6-7 months.¹

Anthuriums are tougher. Though the flower² can stay on the plant for two or three months, the individual flowers aren't necessarily dropping or accepting pollen for a lot of that time, and the pollen, once dropped, doesn't stay viable for long either. So you not only have to have two plants blooming at once, they have to be in the right stage of blooming for this to work.

Anthurium flowers are both male and female, but never at the same time; they're female first, and exude tiny droplets of fluid when ready, which kinda looks like this:

(Cultivar is 'White Gemini.')
The bumpiness of the spadix is my main cue here, though for reasons I'll get to, I don't worry so much about getting the timing right.³

Pollen-shedding is a lot more obvious. I don't have a photo of it, but it's easily visible; it looks like white or cream-colored dust, and if the flower's sitting so the spathe is below the spadix, pollen will collect in the spathe. Pollen-shedding can go on for several days. (Couldn't find a reference for how long the flowers are receptive when female, but I think it's also more than one day.)

Since I have several different varieties blooming at any given moment,⁴ and since I'm not trying to breed for any particular characteristics, I just run around the house with a small paintbrush, brushing each spadix in a more or less random order, making sure to collect and transfer as much pollen as I can see. This worked so far, possibly even a little too well.

Anthurium fruits take about the same amount of time as Schlumbergera to develop, six or seven months.

When both are ripe, go buy yourself a dozen cupcakes. You don't have to eat them all yourself, but you need to buy several so they'll give you a clear plastic container with twelve cupcake-sized depressions in the bottom. (If they don't sell cupcakes that way, you can use pretty much anything that has a transparent top and a bottom that's at least a couple inches deep.)

When the cupcakes have all been eaten, relocated, or otherwise disposed of, fill the bottom of the tray with a couple inches (~5 cm) of vermiculite and moisten it. You want the vermiculite to hold as much water as it's capable of holding, but not more than that -- you don't want loose water sloshing around in the bottom of the tray.


So. You'll know Schlumbergera fruits are ripe because they'll change color (my pink/red variety formed fuchsia fruits; the yellow variety formed white fruits that eventually turned light pink). They'll twist off the plant without a lot of resistance.

Anthurium fruits begin the same color as the spadix, change to green as they begin to grow, and then are eventually orange. They're fairly easy to get out of the spadix. Some will pop out neatly if you wiggle them with a thumb, others (especially the overripe ones that have shriveled like raisins) might need a gentle tug with a thumb and forefinger. A substantial percentage of them, though, will burst on you if you try to wiggle them or pull them. The insides are sort of sticky/gummy, not juicy like you'd expect, and so you wind up with odd-smelling⁵ orange gunk all over your hands. If there's a good way around this problem, I haven't found it yet.

Ripe (?) Schlumbergera fruit. I made it stay on the plant for another three months after this picture before removing it, just to be sure.

Anthurium 'Gemini' spadix with ripe fruit.

Removing the seeds from Schlumbergera is simple. You cut the fruit open --


-- then scoop out the seeds. I washed mine off in a glass of water first, to get as much of the pulp off of them as I could (it can't help anything, and it might cause fungal problems later), which means I can show you how tiny they are.



(Close-up.)
Getting them back out of the glass of water was tricky, by the way, but at least they had the courtesy to float.⁶

Anthurium fruits each contain only one or two seeds, embedded in the orange gunk, and the orange gunk sticks to them terribly, so I had to wash them off in the cup of water again. They sink, which is convenient: you can stir the water hard and knock off the pulp, then pour the water and pulp into the sink, then fill the glass again and stir. Repeat until you feel like you've gotten enough pulp off, then pour the seeds out onto a paper towel.


Both Schlumbergera and Anthurium seeds need to be in close contact with the vermiculite, so they'll stay moist, but not necessarily buried by it. The Schlumbergera seeds are small enough that I just fished them out of the water with a plastic rod and touched them to the vermiculite until they stuck; with the Anthurium seeds, you can move them around with your fingers. I did press some of the Anthurium seeds into the vermiculite lightly with the plastic rod.

After that, you put the cover back on, set the container in a suitable spot (bright indirect light or filtered sun, between 75-85F/24-29C) and wait. You should see some growth within about a week on the Anthuriums;⁷ I haven't tried Schlumbergera before, so I'm not sure how long those take, but everybody on-line says they germinate fast and then don't do anything for a while.

The Anthuriums can sit in the container until they start to touch the lid, at which point I recommend removing them gently and potting them up in a decent potting soil, ideally one with some coarse, unchopped sphagnum moss mixed in (about two parts potting mix to one part sphagnum). You may wish to pot several seedlings together, as individual plants tend not to be very full-looking and this will hedge your bets in case some of the seedlings die later. I read on-line that it usually takes 3-4 years for a seed-grown Anthurium to flower, and indoor-grown plants may be a bit stunted from being inside, so it could take even longer, making this a long-term project. On the other hand, when they do bloom, you should have a variety of interesting colors, sizes, and shapes to look at, particularly if you take the sort of anything-goes approach I do with my own crosses.

Schlumbergera seedlings in good conditions should be large enough to take cuttings from in about a year; they'll also take 3-5 years to reach flowering size, though cuttings may flower sooner.

None of this is especially practical stuff -- for the time and effort invested, you'd be better off going to the store and buying a couple dozen plants yourself (especially with Schlumbergera, which tend to be cheaper than Anthurium). I'm bothering to try because both plants do well for me, and I like starting stuff from seed, and I'm intrigued by the possibility of seeing something new and different. Even if I'm probably setting myself up for a disappointment, it's a disappointment that won't hit until at least 2014, by which time we'll be so deep in the zombie apocalypse that I won't even care. Until then, I get the hope of seeing something really cool in the future. Seems like a fair payoff either way.

-

¹ My understanding is that fruit development depends on the temperature. Fruits in warmer spots ripen faster than those in cooler spots. I should possibly also note that just in case the seeds from this attempt all succumb to mold or something, I've only started the seeds from one fruit, and have three more left if I need them.
² Technically an "inflorescence," not a "flower:" Anthurium flowers are made of an insect-attracting part (the colored bit, called the spathe, which is actually a modified leaf) and the many tiny flowers, which are packed tightly together in a column (the spadix). I've never tried to count the number of flowers on an Anthurium's spadix, nor do I recommend that anybody else try ('cause really, don't you have better things to do with your time?) but my estimate is that a couple hundred is probably pretty common.
³ It's probably also important to mention that a number of websites I looked at while writing this emphasized that fluid production usually takes place in the early morning. I don't function particularly well in the early morning, but I've gotten Anthurium seedlings anyway, so I don't think this is probably that critical of a detail, but I read it, so I'm passing it on.
⁴ At the moment, I have thirteen varieties, seven of which ('Gemini,' NOID pink, 'Orange Hot,' 'Pacora,' 'Pandola,' 'Florida,' NOID purple) have flowers. I also have a flower on A. crystallinum 'Mehani,' but I don't expect to be able to hybridize 'Mehani' with any of the others: I think it's not closely related enough to the cultivars I have (which are mostly hybrids of A. andraeanum, A. amnicola, A. lindenianum, A. antioquiense, and A. scherzerianum, in varying combinations) to be able to cross. Though I'm trying anyway.
⁵ My closest point of comparison on the smell is that it smells like corn pollen: sort of an innocuous, barely-there smell that's pleasant without having any real qualities you could pin down.
⁶ Sidenote of interest: I tried tasting the fruit once I'd gotten the seeds out, and it tasted like something once-interesting that had been watered down to the point of unrecognizability. I didn't actually chew any, just touched my tongue to it, so there could be a more pronounced taste if you chew them. Maybe I'll try chewing when I do the next three fruits.
⁷ In point of fact, some of the Anthurium seeds may have the beginnings of shoots when you take them out of the fruit. This is normal, and just means those are more eager than the others.

Random plant event: Murraya paniculata

I have a lot of ideas about things to do with the plants that never wind up coming to fruition. Either the plants are uncooperative, or I lose interest, or I make an error at a critical moment in the process and everything falls apart. (In fact, I'm considering making a post about projects like this -- not quite a Where Are They Now? sort of post so much as a How Come You Never Wrote About This Again? post.)

One of the ongoing failures has been Murraya paniculata propagation. I knew someone must be capable of doing it, 'cause otherwise how would we get more Murraya paniculatas? But I've failed, repeatedly, with cuttings and seeds both, and had kind of reached the conclusion that propagating Murraya was just not in the cards for me.


And it still might not be, of course. Many things could still happen. But last fall (last summer?), I took a cutting and stuck it in damp vermiculite in a clear plastic cup, then put another clear plastic cup on top of that, and taped them together, and then MANY MANY MONTHS happened. During that time, the cups were untaped maybe three times and more water added, and the last time I did that, I put a little fertilizer in as well. (I also knocked it over repeatedly, because the cup has a narrow base and a high center of gravity.) It's been sitting in an east window, where it gets a lot of bright artificial light and intermittent filtered sunlight, when we have sunlight.

And I just noticed, last Saturday, that the fool thing is trying to bloom:


Which worried me, initially, because I leapt to the conclusion that it was wasting energy on blooms when it hadn't even built any roots yet, and I was getting ready to give it the I'm-so-disappointed-in-you speech, but then I found a root --


-- so now I'm thinking well, maybe I've solved this problem. Still too soon to have the Murraya Propagation Party, and it's an unpleasantly slow process even if it does work, but I'm feeling hopeful.

Random plant event: Breynia disticha cuttings rooted

Okay, well, I knew I was being optimistic about how long the Persea americana profile was going to take to write, but apparently I was even being optimistic about how optimistic I was being (Optimism: it's a slippery slope, kids.), because that's not anywhere near happening. (UPDATE: It's done.) Also, when I set up this schedule, I didn't know that the in-laws would be visiting on Saturday, so that complicated things too.

The point being that I don't have much for you today, because I haven't had much time to work, and what time I have worked was spent on a profile which is nowhere near completed, so this might not be my most interesting week. Similarly, if I owe you an e-mail or you've donated via PayPal, it could be a while before I get back to you. For which I apologize abjectly, of course.

The plant-related content today has to do with my trying to propagate my Breynia disticha. It's not so much that I wanted or needed more of them; I was just unhappy with the way my plant was getting taller without really getting any bushier, and was hoping to cut it back to induce branching. Which, when you cut back a plant, you're left with pieces of plant, and as long as I had the pieces I figured I'd try to propagate. So I put some damp vermiculite in a cup, stuck the Breynia pieces in, taped another cup over the top, and waited. And behold! Roots!


And actually it didn't take long to see new leaves and roots. I don't remember any of the dates in question, but it couldn't have taken more than two months. That is more or less in line with what everybody says about Breynia as a weedy ornamental in semitropical climates like South Florida: the davesgarden.com page on it includes many, many people complaining about the suckers and seedlings. The plant wants to reproduce very badly.

It's less enthusiastic about growing, at least indoors. My plant has been with me for roughly two and a half years (since October 2008), and I haven't always been able to keep it as wet as it would prefer. It drops leaves when it gets too dry. But it's been a robust grower and is mostly pest-free (there have been occasional minor problems with spider mites), plus it turns out to propagate readily, so I expect it to be around for at least another couple years.

Random plant event: Philodendron gloriosum sprouts

My experience with Philodendron gloriosum indoors has been extremely mixed, so far, and the main problem has been repotting.

Philodendron gloriosum.
You see, P. gloriosum doesn't want to form a neat little rosette of leaves like 'Moonlight' or find a tree to climb like P. erubescens 'Red Emerald.' It doesn't form a self-supporting trunk, either, like P. bipinnatifidum. What gloriosum wants to do is crawl along the ground. Which is fine, except that it has thick, woody stems, and when the stems crawl to the edge of the pot, they make a right-angle turn straight down, over the rim, and won't bend to accommodate a wider pot.

I repotted my plant once when I first got it, but then it stayed in the same 8-inch pot for two years because I didn't know how to deal with the stems that were going over the rim. I don't know what I hoped to accomplish by putting it off, but it didn't work -- the plant didn't magically repot itself, and it didn't take the problem away from me by dying, so I had to do something.

So on July 19, I finally bit the bullet and cut the stems back so I could move the plant into a bigger pot. The plant has responded to the repotting by growing a huge new leaf¹ from one of the stems I didn't have to cut, and the cut stems are sprouting new growing tips, though very slowly. But, I also had three pieces of stem left over. I cut most of them back, leaving just 3-4 inches (8-10 cm) of stem at the end, and tried rooting those in water. They didn't die, and one actually grew something that looked like maybe the beginnings of some roots --


-- but that died before it got anywhere (the potential roots died, not the cutting), so I eventually gave up, planted the cuttings in potting soil, and we'll see how that goes. It's not looking good so far.

But none of this is the point of my post! The point of my post is that, after I cut off the pieces so I could repot the plant, and then cut off all but the tips of those pieces to try to root them in water, I had some pieces of stem left over. Which I put in moist vermiculite, because vermiculite is magic, covered the container and put it on the back of a fluorescent light (for the bottom heat). It's taken forever to do anything visible, but two of the three canes have finally produced some sprouts:


So it may be propagatable after all, which pleases me, though it's a strange plant to have indoors, all the same. The stem producing the big leaves is twisting under its own weight, the plant never looks particularly full, it's mildly prone to spider mites (though that hasn't been a problem for a long time), and you have to hack it apart to repot it. On the other hand, the leaves are very pretty (a dark velvety green that doesn't photograph well, with reddish veins in strong light and white ones in less light), it seems to tolerate indoor conditions well, and it appears to be propagatable, if very slowly. I like mine, but I'm not sure I would recommend one to everybody. Does anybody else have experience with this plant? What would you say about it?

-

¹ I tried to get pictures, but it was late, and the light wouldn't have been great as a result, and I didn't have a good place to set up the backdrop. I used to do this in the basement, but the basement is presently unusable for anything plant-related, because the husband has been waterproofing and insulating the walls down there since the basement flood three months ago. Also, setting up anywhere else in the house is sort of a problem because everything that got moved out of the basement wound up in the rest of the house, which means not as much room as there might be. I am assured that the basement will be usable again one day, and on my better days, I even believe this might be true.
In any case, the leaf truly is big: something on the order of 12-13 inches long (30-33 cm) by about 7-8 inches wide (18-20 cm).

Vermiculite is Magic, Part 2

I bought a Polyscias scutellaria in late April. It was a big, gnarled cane that had been planted and shipped out as soon as it started to sprout, which is how a lot of Polyscias are sold at the moment.

When it first came home.
Polyscias canes will usually sprout from several different spots at once, and in the process of getting it situated at home, I broke off one of these sprouts. I didn't want to throw it away, so I filled a clear plastic cup halfway with vermiculite, got it wet, stuck the broken piece in there, taped a second clear plastic cup on top of it, stuck it in the basement close to a fluorescent light, and ignored it for a couple months.

A couple weeks ago, I had a spell where I suddenly felt like everything needed to be up-potted all at once. I checked the cutting, and found this:


So probably I didn't need to wait quite so long to pot it up.

The parent plant, after a slight repotting (from a 4-inch pot to a 4.5-inch pot), has gone on to produce some serious new growth -- one of the most recent leaves is four inches (10 cm) in diameter.

At the moment.
The whole genus Polyscias has been, in my experience, way more agreeable to indoor culture than its drama-queen reputation would suggest. We did sometimes have problems with spider mites on the plants at work, and they'll drop leaves if waterings are missed or excessive, but I was expecting a lot worse. As I write this, I've had a P. fruticosa 'Elegans' for almost two years, and a plain P. fruticosa for about a year and a half. No complaints.

Random plant event: Ardisia elliptica seedlings

I didn't know whether this would work; I'd gotten berries¹ on the plant a long time ago (last summer or fall, maybe?), and they turned black/purple like they do. Which is how they remained for a very long time, because I wasn't sure at what point they're officially ripe and plantable. Eventually one started to shrivel a little and then I thought I'd probably waited too long, so I opened them all up and took the seeds out.

I am aware that the photos suck. I needed more light, apparently, though it didn't seem that way at the time.
The seeds are surprisingly small, compared to the size of the fruits, and each drupe only produces one seed. The flesh of the drupe² was also surprising. I expected something more like a blueberry or tomato, where there are multiple seeds just kind of floating around in a semi-liquid mass, but it was actually surprisingly dry, yet soft. More like a banana than a tomato. Seeds are located at the point of attachment to the plant, and take up very little of the drupe.


The seeds are slightly less than 1/4 inch (5 mm) in diameter, and slightly ridged. I wasn't sure how to plant them or how to simulate going through a bird's digestive system, so I just washed them off briefly, stuck them in some damp vermiculite in a plastic clamshell container (like I use for propagating Begonias), and set the whole thing in the warmest, brightest spot I could come up with.


The first activity I noticed was a couple weeks later.³ I was pretty happy to see one sprout -- I wasn't sure whether the seeds were any good, considering how long they'd been on the plant.


Since this picture was taken, the other two seeds have also sprouted, though so far none of the three have shown any leaves: all three plants are still wearing their seed coats, and I'm a little scared to remove them, lest I damage something important. But fairly soon, they're going to hit the top of the container anyway, and then I'll have to transplant, so I hope to see leaves very soon.

Would that I had more than just three seedlings to pot up, though it appears that plants may sucker: the plant that produced the drupes is now a small clump of 24 stems. I can't find anybody confirming this on-line: all the invasive-species sites emphasize the seeds being spread by birds, and don't mention whether or not there might be suckering, but it seems unlikely that the original 3-inch plant I bought could have contained 24 individual seedlings. Measurement and geometry tell me that it's technically possible, though.⁴ Maybe this new crop of seedlings will sucker a little as they grow, and I'll end up with a second, full-looking plant in a couple years, or maybe they won't, but I'll have new seedlings to add to them later on. Either way, I'm pretty tickled that this worked.

-

¹ Technically, they're drupes; the distinction between the two is not that important for our purposes, and brief googling didn't give me any easy ways to tell the difference between the two, so I decided I didn't care. But I'll still use "drupe" henceforth, for the sake of botanical correctness. Pedants in the audience -- and I know you're out there -- will be pleased to know that in most horticultural or lay contexts, people call the fruit of Ardisia elliptica "berries," so now you have a whole new world of people to correct. You're welcome.
² $50 vocabulary word for the flesh of the drupe: mesocarp. (You now owe me $50, by the way.)
³ According to the dates when the photos were uploaded, I started the seeds on June 27, and noticed the first seed sprouting on July 14. This is pretty fast, though for some reason it felt slow.
⁴ The circumference of the clump at soil level is 9.25 inches, and it's a more or less circular clump, which means its diameter is just under 3 inches. (9.25 / pi = 2.94 inches). Add in that the trunk diameters have increased, and that the plants in the clump would tend to lean away from one another, for better light, and we come up with 24 plants in a 3" pot as being plausible.

Materials and Techniques: Selenicereus chrysocardium cuttings

This post might be a little premature, but even if we're not quite at the endpoint yet, enough has happened that I think a post can be built around it. So here we go.

I decided a while ago that I wanted to propagate some of my Selenicereus chrysocardium cuttings, both as insurance against a potential Selenicereus disaster and also to have on hand to trade or sell, should the situation arise. I wasn't sure quite how to do this, so I . . . basically just guessed.

The first step was to decide how many cuttings to take, and of what size. When we'd done this at work, we just cut the ends off of some long "fronds" (actually stems) and stuck them in soil. Which worked. I couldn't really do that, because my plant is only just so large, and and I didn't want to hack it to pieces just for propagation. So what I did was, I tried to make multiple cuttings from a single stem, which I did like so: I cut the -- I guess you'd call it the "midrib?" -- in multiple places, dividing the stem into multiple pieces which all contain some of the midrib.¹ The pink lines in the below photo illustrate where I cut.


I planted them in vermiculite, in a plastic salad-mix container. Why vermiculite? Well, I was concerned about fungal problems if I planted in potting mix, and vermiculite is a sterile medium. It also tends to be really good for rooting things, even things that are ordinarily difficult. This may not have been completely necessary either: like I said, when we did this at work, we just used soil directly and it all turned out fine. But I wanted to be careful. Thus:

I think it looks sort of like a rib cage.
Very little has happened since then. I initially left the top of the container off, for fear of fungal problems. After it'd dried out a few times because I forgot to water it,² I tried putting the top on. This turned out to be a bad idea; the next time I opened it up to check, I had botrytis growing on the cut ends.

Botrytis, sometimes also called gray mold, is a grayish fungus that attacks many, many types of houseplants, and I saw it all the time in the greenhouse at work, usually on leaves that had died and fallen on top of wet soil. It's unusual in a home environment because it's unusual for a home to be humid enough to keep an infection going. I removed the cover from the plastic container, sprayed the cuttings with neem oil, and haven't seen any Botrytis since.

Notice that the botrytis is only located where the plant was cut; it's not ordinarily able to attack uninjured tissue.
Extreme close-up to show the structure. But also because extreme close-ups are cool. (I still want a microscope so bad, y'all.)
I'm a little impatient for something visible to happen -- it seems like I should have at least one of these producing new foliage by now -- but I know they're doing something, because they don't pull out of the vermiculite easily like they used to, so there must be roots in there, and I've actually seen one root so far:


So it should only be a matter of time before I get foliage. And then I can pot them into separate pots, and they will thrive and grow and life will be perfect forever. Or that's my plan, anyway.

-

¹ This may not be necessary, strictly speaking; I am unsure whether one can propagate from pieces which don't contain the "midrib," never having tried it. I think they did try it at work after I left, but I don't know how that turned out. So I was basically hedging my bets here -- I know that you can at least do it the way I'm describing, and if it turns out that a person can also propagate from smaller pieces of the plant, then that's great. Let me know if you know.
² Wet vermiculite looks exactly the same as dry vermiculite, so I can't just look at the plants and know whether they need water. Which means that sometimes they dry out. Fortunately, Selenicereus chrysocardium handles drying out quite well, so long as it's for a reasonable amount of time.

Unfinished business: fern babies, Anthurium babies

I am extremely sorry to have to report that the baby Cyrtomium falcatum and Asplenium nidus ferns I started forever ago, as well as half the Anthurium andraeanum seedlings I started half a forever ago, are not going to make it. I'm even more sorry to report that the reason why they didn't make it is really stupid. I got greedy.

But first, a quick recap.

At some point I didn't bother to write down, I brought home some fern spores from work. I put them on wet vermiculite, and in November 2008 I had the beginnings of baby ferns.


Eight months later, in July 2009, they'd developed to the point where there were signs of actual fronds developing, which was pretty exciting.


Meanwhile, I had some seeds form on an Anthurium andraeanum 'Pandola' that I'd bought in spring 2009, and I planted half of them with some Begonia leaf sections I was trying to propagate, and the other half, I planted with the baby ferns. And they developed and grew and all was good. So at this point we've got some developing Cyrtomium, Asplenium, and Anthurium, all in the same container of moist vermiculite.


And then I did something really, really stupid.

I had bought, somewhere in winter or spring 2008, a bunch of seeds of various tropical plants. I was going to plant them, and raise many, many baby plants, and it was going to be fun and awesome and stuff. Unfortunately, I planted the seeds in a plug tray, which I then failed to keep watered, so the seeds didn't sprout.

But I'd remained hopeful, and didn't throw the seeds out, because who knew, maybe they'd still be good for something. Which I apparently found a convincing argument until sometime during the summer of 2009, when I decided that there was no point in hanging on to plug trays full of very dry dirt anymore; if they'd been viable to begin with, surely they no longer were.

Which in retrospect was a really good decision.

However! As I was dumping them out, I noticed the Cordyline fruticosa seeds, which were big enough to be easily picked out of the soil and recovered. And I thought: hey. Maybe I could still plant these. What could it hurt?

The answer turned out to be, everything. It could hurt everything. Because, see, the seeds, when planted in the vermiculite, also introduced some odd little bugs, which I'd never seen before. I also kind of haven't seen them since, or at the time, because they are/were very tiny and semi-transparent and moved around a lot. This is the best picture I was able to get of them:


And this is the scale we're talking about:


So. Trapped in a more or less airtight plastic container with nothing to eat but developing seedlings and . . . um . . . let's call them sporelings, these bugs slowly went about the business of eating what was there to eat, apparently from the roots up. So the tops of the ferns withered, then browned, then collapsed. Patches of the ferns went black and slimy, and the Anthuriums turned sort of a weird bronze color (though they hung in there for quite a while, way longer than the ferns). I dithered for a long time about whether or not to throw the whole thing out, and eventually decided to toss 'em . . . right at about the same time I noticed that the Cordyline seeds were beginning to sprout. (So at least we know they can still be viable after sitting around for a couple years, even if they're totally dry for a six-month stretch there in the middle.) But the Cordylines were also bronze, and kind of stunted-looking, even for seedlings, so out the whole thing went. (No pictures. Too painful.)

So there's the whole tragic tale. I've started over again, with fresh vermiculite and fresh spores (obligingly produced by my own personal Cyrtomium last November, almost like it knew I was going to need them -- maybe I should have gone with "Psychic" for the "person," when I wrote the Cyrtomium falcatum profile), and so maybe in early 2012 I'll have some news on that.

The moral of the story, clearly, is: don't put nonsterile seeds into sterile media if you really value the stuff that's already growing in the sterile media. And insects are bad.

One could also make a case for part of the moral being that ferns are slow, frustrating, and not worth trying to raise from spores, but I'm not going there just yet.

The reader will be relieved to hear that the other half of the Anthurium seedlings, the ones with the Begonias, are still intact. I moved them into a 3-inch pot a week or two ago, because the Begonias were getting too big for the container and I couldn't transplant one without also doing the other, and so far they're doing okay, though I do worry a little.

Random plant event: Anthurium seedlings' leaves and fern progress

There are now at least five sprouting Anthurium seedlings, as of last Tuesday when these pictures were taken. We now have the development of actual, identifiable leaves:

(This is the batch that's in with the Begonia leaf sections. Also, know that any of the pictures in this post can be blown up to much, much larger sizes, if you're wanting to do that.)
(Same group as the previous picture, but facing the opposite direction)

And now a couple of the seeds I planted in the other vermiculite, with the ferns I've been trying to start since forever, are also sprouting:


The one on the left, if you blow the picture up to full size, looks like it has mold growing on it, but that's actually a root. Scared the bejesus out of me the first few times I saw it. And then when I recovered from the shock of that and figured out it was a root, not mold, I realized that I'd had the bejesus scared out of me AND I DIDN'T REMEMBER EATING ANY BEJESUS and had no explanation for how it had gotten into me in the first place, and so I was scared a second time.

It was a pretty rough day.

(For more on bejesus, see Bejesus Quarterly's "What is Bejesus?" page here.)

Meanwhile, since we're here anyway: the ferns are looking fernier, to the point where we can start speculating about the relative Cyrtomium-to-Asplenium ratio of the plants which have developed. I think it's looking like 300:0 at this point: nothing looks like an Asplenium to me. But then, I don't know what either of them are supposed to look like, at this stage of development.


Though there's still nothing here that could make it on its own in a pot yet, there's been quite a bit of progress since the last time we checked in on the ferns, three months ago. This may just be the way it usually works, or it may be because I've added a few balls of time-release Osmocote to the top of the vermiculite to encourage growth. (Or at least that was the theory. For all I know it may have actually set them back. Have I mentioned how I don't exactly know what I'm doing with the ferns?)


I don't know that we're at the point where I can say we'll have baby ferns any day now (though I intend to dust off the old mini-greenhouse and have it standing by, just in case), but we're clearly just right on the verge of something or another.

How to Propagate Begonias From Leaf Sections

So. You want to propagate a Begonia, eh? Well, here's how to get a ton of plants (and I do mean a ton) from a couple leaves.

You will need:

1 clear plastic clamshell container of cookies, donut holes, or other delicious baked goods (yes, it is critical to the success of the propagation that the baked goods be delicious. Anything with frosting is good.)
1 pair of scissors
1 Begonia you wish to propagate, or at least a couple leaves from someone else's (who you asked permission from first, of course, as you are not a thief)
1 assistant (optional)
1 small piece of stiff, flat plastic or metal (e.g. a plant tag, credit card, etc.)
dishwashing liquid
vermiculite
water

Step 1: Open the container of baked goods and eat them. If you can't finish them on your own, ask your assistant to help. A previously-emptied container can be used, of course, but it's not really in the spirit of things. Remember: this is one of the most legitimate-sounding excuses you're ever going to have to buy donuts, so you'd be a fool not to take it. ("But honey, I need the container for the Begonias I want to propagate.")

Step 2: When the baked goods have all been eaten and you feel the sugar buzz beginning to come on, wash out the inside of the container with dishwashing liquid and warm water. (This is also a good step to delegate to an assistant while you eat the last two of whatever they are.)

Step 3: Fill one side of the container about half-full of vermiculite. Add enough water to completely soak the vermiculite. Drain off any excess. You want it all to be completely wet, but you don't want any standing water, either.


Step 4: Get the leaves you want to propagate. If you're taking them off of your own plant, try to get a leaf which is old enough to be fully-developed, but not so old that it's been damaged or discolored.


Step 5: Use the scissors to cut a circle out of the leaf around the petiole. It doesn't have to be huge; an inch (2.5 cm) in diameter is plenty.


Step 6 (optional): Cut away any jagged edges from around the outside edge of the leaf. You don't necessarily have to do this, but it can make the leaf pieces a little easier to work with and a little more uniform in size, and it can also give you a few extra leaf sections later on.


Step 7: This is probably the trickiest step, which is unfortunate, since by now the sugar buzz is probably beginning to fade. Cut the leaves into sections between the main veins of each leaf, so that each section has a main vein at its center. These larger veins are where the new plant will originate. If you cut pieces off the margin of the leaf in step 6, you can cut a few wedges out of the margins as well, again with a primary vein at the center of the wedge. (In the picture below, the five-sided wedges on the right were taken from the margins of the original leaves; the more triangular wedges on the left came from the inner part of the leaves next to the petiole.)


Step 8: Use your stiff piece of plastic or metal to slice a number of evenly-spaced slices into your wet vermiculite. If the vermiculite is runny and the slices close back up after making them, drain off some more water and try again.

Step 9: Insert the leaf wedges, narrow end down, into the slices you've made in the vermiculite. You can also take the original petiole, with its circular bit of leaf, and plant it in the vermiculite as well, though I didn't. (No particular reason. It may be that I forgot that that was an option, or that the sugar buzz was long gone by this point and I was just trying to hurry through the rest of the process.)


Step 10: Put the top back on the container and set the container in a warm, bright location. Ideally you want about 80F/27C, but this still works if it's cooler than that. I don't necessarily recommend a spot that gets direct sun (too much sun can get too hot for the leaf sections), but it is not actually the end of the world if there's a little direct sun, particularly if it's filtered through a sheer curtain or other plants or something. The leaf sections in this example did get a small amount of direct sun.

Step 11: Wait. I started the leaf sections in this example in late July and saw the first new growth in late September. By mid-October, four of the 22 had sprouted leaves. None of the sections have died.


The main hazard with doing this is rot, which is why I used vermiculite instead of soil -- vermiculite is sterile, or at least really ought to be, and as long as the container is closed most of the time, the chances of a pathogen getting in are pretty minimal.

Another, worse option is to use regular potting soil, but sterilize it by pouring boiling water into it. The disadvantages with this are: you can't pour boiling water into one of these clamshells without melting the plastic, you can't stick leaf sections into hot soil until it's cooled down, and the sterilization may or may not be complete, or may be undone by something landing on the soil while it's cooling down.

Plants can be left in the clamshell for quite a while without a problem, but I would pull them out and pot them up once they get big enough to touch the lid of the container, or have three or four leaves, whichever happens first. For best results, try to ease them into regular life gradually, by propping the lid open slightly, then a little more, and so forth over a period of a few days: otherwise the change in humidity will hit them all at once and they'll suffer for it (it will probably not kill them, but they won't like it).

This method may not work on all Begonias: I've personally only tried it with the variety you see here, though it's supposed to work for all rexes, angel-wings, and other varieties with large leaves. Plants with small leaves are more easily propagated by leaf cuttings: cut off a leaf with a petiole and plant the end of the petiole into your rooting medium (sterilized soil, vermiculite, or whatever). Cane-type plants are more commonly propagated through regular old stem cuttings.

Each leaf section you plant is capable of producing more than one new individual. My experience has been that two or three is fairly typical, and actually, so long as the medium remains sterile, rumor is that one can remove the new baby plants from the leaf wedges and then put the wedges back in to root a second or even third time. In theory, then, the two leaves I started out with here could be turned into approximately 150 new plants. (It'd be okay with me if things didn't go that well, though. I don't even like Begonias particularly.)

So don't ever complain that you don't have enough Begonias to take care of. Nobody will believe it, they'll just think you're begging for free Begonias in a weird passive-aggressive way, or they'll think you're really stupid.