*sigh*
I did something I said I wouldn't ever do (never say never) and inadvertently purchased a flask of randsii...they are coming deflasked, which is good, but I'm a little nervous.

Would anyone like to share successes/failures/advice on this species? I know they like a lot of humidity. Or advice on compotted paphs in general? Thanks!!

when i read the topic tilte i thought you pinched your tigrinum sheath to death :lol:
i wish i could help i am sure you will hear from ross

Baaaahhhh!!!!!!! :lol: MC HAMMER in the hizouse! :poke: Good luck with your flasklings. I did the agar on method when I got my first and only flask. I used the Antec suggestion etc.. I don't think I kept them moist enough so I lost a few plants early on.

Congratulations Mom!!!!

Are you getting the babies with the agar on? That is what I prefer, having studied Antec's web page. I compotted mine in a pot with small seedling bark on the bottom and wet spagnum moss on top, and just clumped the babies, agar on, in the moss. That seemed to work well for me, and now I've divided them into smaller compots. Just watch for light levels & for excessive heat.

I did not do very well with plants that came unflasked with agar off. I made the mistake of following directions in an old orchid book and planted them spaced apart. I did everything wrong for that bunch (they were phrags) and I only have one baby that made it. If I had to do it again, I would clump the seedlings closely together in spagnum moss.

My experience in compotting is very limited, and I'm sure we have members with much more experience who can add pointers. I'd love to learn more, too!!

My one & only flask experience was purchasing a flask of Phrag. 'Lynn Evans-Goldner' from Chuck Acker. Despite my total lack of knowledge & haphazard growing conditions (no green house, just a sunroom, varying humidity, different potting mixes), I have 16 seedlings from a flask purchased in March or April & have given away 4-5 (I hope they have good luck with them). I think phrags are probably much easier than paphs to raise, though. It's been an interesting experience, I'm ready to try another flask, to see if I can do better (although I'm surprised that so many plants survived, most of my losses were not early in the deflasking process, but later...). I really would like to learn more about orchid breeding & micropropagation, that's going to be my focus this fall & winter, as well as trying to improve & control growing conditions for the plants I already have....Linda

Congratulations!! We can trade when the kids are old enough to travel. :D

Lucky you ! I never could get a hand on P. randsii in flask. (MAy I ask where did you get it from?)

I've never had good success with adult plants, they are really slow growing, some authors "states" that they need 12 h full sunlight per day to bloom but I do not believe it's true (I don't think they ever tried to grow this specie) , I've seen in-situ pictures which showed quite shady conditions. Nevertheless I've been trying all kind of growing conditions and right know I'm trying to grow the plants in more basic conditions so let's see.
It is a difficult specie otherwise it would be seen more often at exhibits and in nurseries
THis is my favourite Paphiopedilum specie

Thanks guys. I'm a little (ok, a LOT) anxious today but hopefully I'll get over it and all will be fine. Ah, the fun of trying something new....

(oh, and I think the tigrinum may be a leaf, and no, I have not been messing with it Tadd/Stan. :cheeky: )

When the little buggers arrive, rinse them thoroughly to remove any bacteria that may have started to grow while packed in the damp box. It also wouldn't hurt them to give them a short soak in very dilute Physan 20. How I pot them up is then dependent on the size of the plants. The smaller the plants, the closer together I pot them and the finer the potting mix I use.

Good luck!

I hope I'm still around to see the photos of these babies when they flower :evil: :poke:

Have fun - I deflasked a few Glaucopar on the weekend. It's an unnerving experience seeing just how "small" they are when they start out and realising how long it'll be before they flower.

Somebody's gotta do it :)

Cheers
Stephan

randsii is quite easy to grow, keep it wet and shady, and it grows like a weed. It is actually one of the fastest growing multifloral paphs. Except that many wild collected plants ( most adult plants, apart from a few ones not publicly available, are in fact wild-collected for less than a year) are contaminated with erwinia in the rhizome, hence they die over a year or two, with chlorotic leaves, and a general plant stunt. An healthy plant produces masses of roots in no time.

Seedlings should be easy to manage, if they are not selfings.

randsii is quite easy to grow, keep it wet and shady, and it grows like a weed. It is actually one of the fastest growing multifloral paphs. Except that many wild collected plants ( most adult plants, apart from a few ones not publicly available, are in fact wild-collected for less than a year) are contaminated with erwinia in the rhizome, hence they die over a year or two, with chlorotic leaves, and a general plant stunt. An healthy plant produces masses of roots in no time.

Seedlings should be easy to manage, if they are not selfings.

Papuanum

Can you show us some healthy erwinia free P. randsii plants?

Would anyone like to share successes/failures/advice on this species? I know they like a lot of humidity. Or advice on compotted paphs in general? Thanks!!

Heather, you're in New England - there should be a sphagnum bog somewhere near you. Go out to the bog with a pair of sissors and chop off enough of the live moss about 3" long to fill your compot. Keep the growing tips facing up. Put your seedlings between 1/2" or so layers of the moss in one of your aircone pots - growing end up. Better yet, put half of them in live sphagnum and the rest in something dead like bark or CHC and let us know which grow on the best.

Then put the pot in a flat under one of those plastic domes (the high 6" ones, not those little farty 2" ones.) I've never seen them for sale from any of the US suppliers but you can find them up here in the Great White North - they're a Canadian invention. (Yeah, yeah, I know we're supposed to have lots of air movement and all that stuff, but seedlings DO NOT ROT in sphagnum under plastic domes.) Don't worry about using up a whole flat with one pot - it's only a matter of time until you'll get a bunch more flasks and fill the flat. It works - 100% guaranteed - I've been growing them that way for years and I seldom lose a seedling. Even those obnoxious bits of proliferated callus often succeed. Cheapest seedling mix you're ever going to find and you only have to water them maybe once a month or so so you won't be tempted to be pinching at them every day.

Cheers,
kpb

H, snip me some sphag too :poke:

Huh! That's weird. I swear I didn't see these posts - left right around 2pm!
http://www.slipperorchidforum.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=20877#20877

I just came back from my bog about an hour ago. First time out there in over 2 years! Freaky!
I did not "snip" sphag, but I could. Oh, and it isn't really about snipping, I just reached down and pulled out a strand, so I suppose I could grab a handful, just as easily.
I wasn't sure if it was really an okay thing to do! Goodness, though, there is an awful lot of it out there.

The seedlings have been potted, I'm not messing with them again so soon, but I'll keep this in mind.

In the meantime, perhaps maybe we need a live sphagnum thread??

I did not "snip" sphag, but I could. Oh, and it isn't really about snipping, I just reached down and pulled out a strand, so I suppose I could grab a handful, just as easily.
I wasn't sure if it was really an okay thing to do! Goodness, though, there is an awful lot of it out there.

I suppose whether it's ok or not depends on how many people are doing it. If you snip off the top 3" or so it regenerates very quickly and you're probably doing more damage by tramping around in the bog than by harvesting a modest amount of sphagnum. If you're antsy about harvesting, it's really simple to propagate it. I went on a literature quest once years ago to find out how to cultivate sphagnum and could hardly find anything about it. Finally, in an old +-1910 moss manual I found a paragraph that said to just put a half inch or so of damp peat moss in the bottom of a flat, chop up a bit of the species you want to propagate and spread it over the surface. In a few months you'll have a flatfull of moss. Pretty much every bit will grow. Needs to be covered for humidity, of course.

The strand you pulled out in your photo is exactly the right sort! Can't tell you what species it is - got a bunch of books once but gave up trying to identifying Sphagnum species - it's difficult.

The reason I snip it off is so I can get a bunch all the correct length to fit in an aircone pot. When I go out to collect it, I fill a flat or two all the correct length and with the growing heads all up so I just have to is take off flakes for potting.

There are many different species of Sphagnum in a single bog, each adapted to different conditions. You noticed that the moss grows in hummocks. They are continually being replaced by new ones - the low spots grow up and the current hummock becomes a low spot. The pH is lowest on the hightest places and highest in the low spots. The best moss for potting comes from the side of a hummock - not the top. The pH there is just too low.

Also, the moss to get is the stuff from a bog - not the stuff that grows in the woods or in shady ditches - it just won't take the light levels you need for Phaphs.

Be sure to water with very pure water - rain / RO / whatever. If you must fertilize, use very low levels. I don't know what the Paphs get from the moss, but whatever it is, it's all they need for growth.

There - now you know everything I know (or think I know) about Sphagnum moss. Try it. Beats the hell out of dead NZ Sphagnum both for effectiveness and price. Nothing like it for putting roots on a rootless plant too. (I had a rootless snitch of some Paph or other years ago that had spent 18 months in NZ Sphagnum with no results. Two weeks after putting in it live Sphagnum it had root buds forming.)

kpb

ps - dead NZ sphagnum isn't always dead. I had some come to life once and cultured it on peat as above. Had the culture going for years and used that when I was too lazy to go out to collect the native stuff. It was finally overtaken by weedy mosses.

Papuanum

Can you show us some healthy erwinia free P. randsii plants?

I will take pics of mines as soon as I have time, for the time being, here is a pic of an healthy randsii :

http://home.eznet.net/~asalzman/photogal/img0080.htm

It must be an healthy dark green plant with fat leaves like that. It grows best in shade, but hate rockwool ( I tried it Greenmix and Growcubes, the latter being especially dangerous for several paphs, sharp shards embedded in the cubes that makes a lot of wounds), and sphagnum moss.

Yellowish leaves or chlorotic mottling and slow or stunted growth indicates erwinia. White blotches scattered here and there on the plant is pseudomonas. Not only randsii, but several others species are affected. If you are carrying PCR on paphs plants, or even straight ELISA for several strains of erwinia, and of pseudomonas, many plants are affected, mostly multiflorals actually.

Sphagnum really is easy to grow--even I did it! I gathered a mat of it from my parents' boggy lawn edge and put it on a lump of Oasis (absorbent floral foam) in a dish of rainwater. It grew surprisingly fast. I wasted it trying to save a dying Dracula (too much garlic in the water?) but have enough to culture some more. It will probably come in handy some day. Maybe it would jump start my wee sanderianums.

One thing people warned me about when gathering wild moss was that it could introduce little molluscan enemies into my growing area. I didn't notice any with mine. Have you, Iconoclast?

Sphagnum really is easy to grow--even I did it! I gathered a mat of it from my parents' boggy lawn edge and put it on a lump of Oasis (absorbent floral foam) in a dish of rainwater. It grew surprisingly fast. I wasted it trying to save a dying Dracula (too much garlic in the water?) but have enough to culture some more. It will probably come in handy some day. Maybe it would jump start my wee sanderianums.

One thing people warned me about when gathering wild moss was that it could introduce little molluscan enemies into my growing area. I didn't notice any with mine. Have you, Iconoclast?

Thanks for another idea - now I've got all this moss, and wasn't sure of a *quick* way to get it growing before this weekend. Want to keep it going -oasis is easy for me to get a hold of, peat, I'm not so sure about.

nice Heather. Wouldn't mind sharing in this when they get established.

Sphagnum really is easy to grow--even I did it! I gathered a mat of it from my parents' boggy lawn edge and put it on a lump of Oasis (absorbent floral foam) in a dish of rainwater. It grew surprisingly fast. I wasted it trying to save a dying Dracula (too much garlic in the water?) but have enough to culture some more. It will probably come in handy some day. Maybe it would jump start my wee sanderianums.

I don't think it matters much what you "grow" it on as long as it holds some moisture. Peat may have an advantage if you're propagating it from wee chopped up bits. Once it has a bit of length it holds it's own water and, since Sphagnum has no roots, it really doesn't need a substrate. Main thing is to keep it covered by a dome to minimize evaporation. If you grow it for any amount of time in the open air watever is in your water or air will concentrate at the growing tip and will either suppress it or kill it. Incidently, you can control the rate of growth with fertilizer - the more you fertilize the slower it grows.

Sanderianums love it - I'll post a pic of my sanderianum seedlings in moss when I get a round tuit.

One thing people warned me about when gathering wild moss was that it could introduce little molluscan enemies into my growing area. I didn't notice any with mine. Have you, Iconoclast?
That's probably one of those warnings from an expert who has never tried it. I've had bush snails by the bushel in bark, but I've never seen anything damaging come in with wild spahgnum. Sheet moss, feather moss or other wood mosses, perhaps, but not sphagnum from a bog. If your Sphagnum is coming from the lawn, ymmv.

Sphagnum, by the way, has antibiotic properties. Apparently they shipped tons of it from Nova Scotia to Europe during the WWI to use as wound dressings.

kpb
An expert on many topics, most of which I know very little about.

Well, I'll be trying to get *something* to grow it on in the morning. Right now it is just being kept "moist" in a bucket. I've found 2 small furry black caterpillars so far, and from a bit that was gathered right at the edge of the water, an icky fat worm. Other than that, nothing has surfaced the last couple days. I just used a bit to wrap around my climbing Beverly Fischer. Maybe it will do better than the "dead" sphag. did at keeping the roots growing.

Um, so yeah, if I can get this going....:wink:

Heather,

Great find! Did you get them from Jack in Florida?