Orchid seedlings July 6

I still don't think they've grown much. But they're certainly still alive and healthy. I think a few of the individual seedlings may have grown. I think there are several now that have more than the first set of leaves.

Unflasking the Seedlings

The flasks arrived in the mail this morning. Here's a picture of the box they came in and the two flasks--which are actually spaghetti sauce jars with a small hole in their lids, stuffed with cotton. The seedlings are in a dark grey sort of lumpy media, which is why the flasks look sort of dark.





I removed the lids from the flasks, filled them with lukewarm water and poured the water out a couple times to remove most of the grey media. Then I dumped them in a small plate and rinsed them there a little more. Now they look like this.


Then I separated them out and sorted them roughly by size. Here some are on a newspaper to give a better idea of their size.

I filled a mixing bowl with sphagnum moss, wet it thoroughly, put a layer of it in the bottom of each tray and then one by one wrapped each seedling in a bit of sphagnum and put them in one of the trays. There were about 40 seedlings per flask, some of them very very tiny. When I was done, the trays looked like this and I put them under some fluorescent lights, partially covered with a piece of saran wrap.


I'll keep them moist but not wet. I'm a bit concerned about having them all in the same large tray in case of a fungal infection and may get another tray and move half to a different location just in case. I did use brand new trays and a new bag of sphagnum.

Story of an orchid cross

On May 28th of 2007 I crossed LC Mini-Purple "Blue Hawaiian" with C Brabantiae. This is what they look like. Brabantiae is the spotted orchid and is somewhat larger than the Mini-purple.





While the pod on Branbantiae did not take, the one on Mini-purple did. It seemed to take longer to mature than the pod from a similar cross I made a few years ago, but it did mature. I sent it in for flasking on May 8th, 2008. I expect the flasks back this week.

My intention is to post images of the baby plants every week or every other week. If these bloom out like the similar cross I made, they will be pink with darker pink on the lip and a few but not all will have some spots or freckles.