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October 11, 2005
Growing Baby Plants
I had just about reached the end of my patience with the flat of amaryllis seeds I planted a couple of weeks ago (yes, I know it was only like two weeks and I was being overly impatient). Some of the seeds had very visibly rotted over the weekend, so I was looking at the flat thinking it might be time to throw the whole thing away when I noticed this:
That's a tiny little sprout. And a few other seeds are sprouting, as well, though they are not as visible. Hooray for the baby amaryllis belladonna!
In other planty news, I'm conducting an experiment in fern cultivation. Every piece of advice I've ever read on the subject talks about sterilizing the soil before sowing fern spores. But the advice they give for sterilizing it wouldn't actually do much to make things sterile (they advise that you pour boiling water over the soil, rather than steaming it in a steam box the way they do in greenhouses).
My theory is that this is a ritual rather than a requirement, and people keep repeating it because they've been told it. It makes sense to me because in the wild, ferns propagate by spores by just dropping them and letting them have at it, and certainly nobody is sterilizing the soil for them there. The survival rate is lower than you might want in a greenhouse situation, but part of that is other factors like competition, which I will be handling with transplanting and feeding.
So I'm testing my theory by taking some ripe fern fronds from the fern on my studio desk (a California Five-Fingered Fern) and laying them in a moist bed of potting soil, covered by a plastic cover (I bought a brownie pan that came with a plastic lid for the purpose). Note that I've also skipped the step of collecting the spores separately, because it skips a step, and that's good for the impatient gardener. So far, there has been no action in the tray, but it has not been very long, and I am told it can take up to five or six weeks until visible results appear. It is my hope to have far too many ferns to deal with by Christmas.
We'll see how that goes.
Posted by ayse on 10/11/05 at 10:46 PM
Have you tried "sterilizing soil" by using the microwave?? Take a half cup or larger soil mix add water to get moist, place in zip-lock plastic bag, seal, then put in microwave. You have to keep an eye on it. Make sure the bag doesn't pop. "Hot plate, hot plate." Take out of the microwave for 10 minutes to cool then repeat 2 more times. It works for sterilizing soil for cactus seedlings.
but you have to be insainly patient to raise cactus from seed, so they later died in a "potting accident"... ahem.
I haven't tried sterilizing it in the microwave, though that does sound like it would be considerably less complicated than making a steam box.
I used to have a bunch of cactus raised from seed when I worked in a greenhouse, but then I moved to California and gave them all away. You're right: it's a long process. I doubt I would ever do it again.