Seedy Action

Pardon my blurry cell phone images. Doing this post in the quick and dirty style.

I took a little time this afternoon to surface sterilize a ripening seed pod and to sow seeds today. The cross was Paph (victoria-regina x lowii) x fairrieanum (I'll post a photo of the fairrieanum at another time, it was a nicely marked, slightly fragrant one) made January 31st. I thought the pod should stay on the plant another 1-3 months, but it started to dry out, so I harvested it. I somewhat expected the pod to contain nothing, so I decided to use some nearly year old media I had stashed in the lab rather than making fresh. Much to my surprise, the seeds actually look reasonably decent. They have a nice dark umber color, but weren't very 'fluffy' in the pod, making me think they weren't quite mature. Possibly the heat caused the plant to abort development early. Hopefully they'll germinate anyway and be FABULOUS.

And here's another fuzzy cell phone pic of some intermediate stage Lc Green Veil x June Bug seedlings. To see these guys as wee seeds, see this post. I'll need to space these out onto new replate media soon for their final flask development stage. If all goes well the flasks will be ready next Spring/Summer. Green Veil is a bright lime green with a white & purple lip and great flower count, and June Bug (as you can see from the link above) is yellow with a red lip.

I also did a quick "spread plate" of some recalcitrant Phal taenialis protocorms which have been refusing to develop. Hopefully this will kick start them.

If you're interested in learing more about orchid hybridization, flasking, and seedling development, join me at the Susquehanna Orchid Society meeting this Sunday at 1:30PM in Camp Hill, PA. If you can't make it, ask your society's officers to schedule me to give a lecture in your home town! :)