Anyone has any experiance on how to take care of Cyp. californicum after removal from flasks. It seems to be the hardest step after germination in flasks. If any one has any experiance, I would appriciate any hints, eveny negative hints (what does not work and not to do).

Best Regards,
Ed
(paphman@gmail.com)

this is one with which I have only a small amount of experience - some deflasked just this year. I am using 50 % perlite: 50 % number 3 silicon sand. I have two flats - one gets automatically watered (RO water) every morning and the other roughly every other day. At this point I have a few seedlings coming up in each flat - we will see how they do in the coming months. I am doing the daily watering in one group since in situ californicum has a lot of ground water.

Ron Burch

Ron, that is helpful.
Do you fertilize? how often? what ratio of NPK? what concentration?
I collected and filtered about 100 gal of rain water this year for this and some carnivorous plants. I think that will come in handy.

Thanks,
Ed.

If you use nonorganic media early in the life of a seedling - highly recommended!!! - fertilization is necessary. Use ONLY inorganic fertilizer as all the organics must be decomposed by bacteria and fungi first and you are trying to keep these away from young Cypripediums for the first two years out of flask. Take care that your fertilizer has some ammonium nitrate since some of the species "absolutely" require ammonium and many require nitrate for their nitrogen source. Also, since you have a highly defined medium like perlite and/or sand your fertilizer needs to contain all the trace elements. I use Dynagro GROW - it has ammonium and nitrate and it has a large variety of trace elements. It is designed as a hydroponics fertilizer so it is very complete. For any fertilizer, use it VERY dilute or it will kill your seedlings almost immediately. If you measure conductivity, if you mix one of the complete hydroponics fertiilzers yourself, a reading of 300 ppm is very good (this is a small fraction of what is used for most applications!). If you use Dynagro GROW, then 1/4 teaspoon per gallon twice per week gives me very good resutls. I also add Dynagro ProTect at 1/8 teaspoon per gallon - this is important for some species places with a lot of lime - many of the Asians - since it raises pH of the Dynagro to about 6.8 (it is about 5.6 otherwise).

Ron Burch