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i've mostly been using dreamwidth for like, bi-weekly status posts about programming projects but now i feel like i should actually post some stuff about stuff
so i've been trying to raise peace lilies from seed recently.
this is kind of a challenge. i've wanted to grow some plants from seed for a while, and i got seed trays and seed soil and everything, but outside just buying some seeds it's actually remarkably difficult to get seeds from plants. my spider plant flowers in the summer but i've only had it for two years, and once it got pollinated but the seeds never germinated, and the other it was so hot outside that i didn't set it out for bees to pollinate it. peace lilies flower pretty frequently, but they have this whole timing thing where a given bloom will first be receptive to pollen, and then dry out and start producing pollen, so they can't self-fertilize. so i had to be on the lookout for two of my peace lilies blooming two weeks apart so that one was producing pollen while another one was receptive, and try to manually pollinate them that way.
also apparently most peace lily cultivars are sterile and can only be reproduced by cuttings. (an enormous amount of domesticated plants are that way, which i had known but not really appreciated. 'domesticated olive' is just like, one weird mutant that happens to produce edible fruit with a good branch structure, and from seed produces thorny plants with inedible fruit, and all olive trees are just propagated from graft to graft across the centuries.) so even if i correctly pollinated the plant i had no clue if it could form seed or if those seeds would be possible to germinate and sprout.
but back in april i noticed two of my peace lilies were starting to bloom, and maybe their timing would sync up. and they did, and so i got out a q-tip and swept up pollen from one of the blooms and tried dusting it all around the blooms on the other plant, and then the blooms just kinda sat there and very slowly wilted, and it was july before i realized, oh hey, one of those blooms is still around and its big spiky pollen thing has swollen up a lot and turned green. so i think it actually got pollinated.
and then i had to look up how long a peace lily seedpod takes to mature and form seeds. 'four to six months'. so. it actually started to brown in september, and it went all the way brown and shriveled in mid-october, so overall it only took three months. so then i pulled the seedpod out and started peeling away the husks wrapping all the seeds and separating them out. which was a very delicate process, since the seeds were like, the size of a pinhead and kind of loosely stuck together in clumps. out of that one seedpod i got precisely 54 seeds, plus one seedpod that i dropped on the floor and lost forever :V
so that was enough to put three seeds in each of the 18 little plastic containers that i had. from what i had read, peace lily seeds were fairly unfussy about germination: just kept moist and not cold for two weeks or so. so i set all that up, wet soil in the seed trays, covered with plastic wrap to keep them humid. and then waiting. nothing sprouted after two weeks. actually several seeds visibly went moldy, and algae started growing in some of the seed trays. so i was like, well, i guess that's that, and then i mostly forgot about them.
but then!! late november, six weeks or so after planting them, i looked over and was like, hey that's an actual plant growing in one of the trays. a super tiny plant that might not even be a peace lily, but, something. and so i added a bit more water to the drier containers and waited more. eventually that one tiny plant unfurled a leaf, and then unfurled a second leaf, and as of right now it actually looks like a (very very small; smaller than a fingernail) peace lily! also a few other things are growing in the seed trays, though they're all still in the "so small it's impossible to tell if they're peace lilies" stage, and at least one of them is definitely not a peace lily so i guess it's just some ambient spores or seeds in the soil that germinated. but! i have at least one tiny peace lily seedling that's doing well for now. we'll see how well it does from here.
so i've been trying to raise peace lilies from seed recently.
this is kind of a challenge. i've wanted to grow some plants from seed for a while, and i got seed trays and seed soil and everything, but outside just buying some seeds it's actually remarkably difficult to get seeds from plants. my spider plant flowers in the summer but i've only had it for two years, and once it got pollinated but the seeds never germinated, and the other it was so hot outside that i didn't set it out for bees to pollinate it. peace lilies flower pretty frequently, but they have this whole timing thing where a given bloom will first be receptive to pollen, and then dry out and start producing pollen, so they can't self-fertilize. so i had to be on the lookout for two of my peace lilies blooming two weeks apart so that one was producing pollen while another one was receptive, and try to manually pollinate them that way.
also apparently most peace lily cultivars are sterile and can only be reproduced by cuttings. (an enormous amount of domesticated plants are that way, which i had known but not really appreciated. 'domesticated olive' is just like, one weird mutant that happens to produce edible fruit with a good branch structure, and from seed produces thorny plants with inedible fruit, and all olive trees are just propagated from graft to graft across the centuries.) so even if i correctly pollinated the plant i had no clue if it could form seed or if those seeds would be possible to germinate and sprout.
but back in april i noticed two of my peace lilies were starting to bloom, and maybe their timing would sync up. and they did, and so i got out a q-tip and swept up pollen from one of the blooms and tried dusting it all around the blooms on the other plant, and then the blooms just kinda sat there and very slowly wilted, and it was july before i realized, oh hey, one of those blooms is still around and its big spiky pollen thing has swollen up a lot and turned green. so i think it actually got pollinated.
and then i had to look up how long a peace lily seedpod takes to mature and form seeds. 'four to six months'. so. it actually started to brown in september, and it went all the way brown and shriveled in mid-october, so overall it only took three months. so then i pulled the seedpod out and started peeling away the husks wrapping all the seeds and separating them out. which was a very delicate process, since the seeds were like, the size of a pinhead and kind of loosely stuck together in clumps. out of that one seedpod i got precisely 54 seeds, plus one seedpod that i dropped on the floor and lost forever :V
so that was enough to put three seeds in each of the 18 little plastic containers that i had. from what i had read, peace lily seeds were fairly unfussy about germination: just kept moist and not cold for two weeks or so. so i set all that up, wet soil in the seed trays, covered with plastic wrap to keep them humid. and then waiting. nothing sprouted after two weeks. actually several seeds visibly went moldy, and algae started growing in some of the seed trays. so i was like, well, i guess that's that, and then i mostly forgot about them.
but then!! late november, six weeks or so after planting them, i looked over and was like, hey that's an actual plant growing in one of the trays. a super tiny plant that might not even be a peace lily, but, something. and so i added a bit more water to the drier containers and waited more. eventually that one tiny plant unfurled a leaf, and then unfurled a second leaf, and as of right now it actually looks like a (very very small; smaller than a fingernail) peace lily! also a few other things are growing in the seed trays, though they're all still in the "so small it's impossible to tell if they're peace lilies" stage, and at least one of them is definitely not a peace lily so i guess it's just some ambient spores or seeds in the soil that germinated. but! i have at least one tiny peace lily seedling that's doing well for now. we'll see how well it does from here.
