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When I purchased my Pregnant Onion (Ornithogalum caudatum) a couple months ago it came with 32 bulblets. Astonishingly, most were physically attached to the mother bulb and the rest (around 10) were in a small ziplock baggie. The Pregnant Onion gets its name from the interesting way it produces bulblets. They appear on its sides. Here you can see the bulge at the lower right of the mother bulb of several bulblets that will appear in a few months as it sheds a layer of skin. The bulblets can be treated very much like seeds, in that they can be stored (for a limited time of three to six months) and planted. If planted fresh from the mother bulb, they often undergo a few months of dormancy before they start growing. So if you have a lot of bulblets you’re trying to grow, patience is key. As an ornamental houseplant, they keep growing once they start. |
| Three weeks ago I took the 32 bulblets I mentioned above and placed them in three loose rows in a tray of soil (1/3 peat, 1/3 perlite, 1/3 vermiculite) and any extras I just pressed into the soil randomly until all 32 were pressed into the soil in an upright position. Sometimes it can be difficult to tell which end is up (pointed) and which end is down (rounded). In those cases, simply partially covering them while laying on their sides is sufficient. As they start growing they will right themselves fairly quickly. A few days ago one of the bulblets began growing and then today I noticed a second one start growing, both shown here. With patience, I hope to see the majority, if not all, of the 32 bulblets start growing. At some point I’ll begin potting them up in small pots to grow them further for a few more months and then start placing them for sale on eBay. As stated earlier, once they start growing they pretty much keep growing year-round as houseplants. They are not edible. |  |
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As my Cape Sundew (Drosera capensis) continues to get bigger it also starts looking more like an adult with long strap-like leaves covered in globular trichomes. The leaf to the right is still straightening out after having spent the past two days eating an insect. And the young hooked green leaf unfurling is growing very rapidly. After Cape Sundews eat an insect, they are known to grow fairly rapidly, up to 3/8″ a day owing to the rush of nutrients received from their last meal. |
| I placed my Hideous Sea Onion (Ornithogalum caudatum) next to one of the legs of my chrome plant shelves with the intention of it clinging to it and climbing (it’s other common name is Climbing Onion). But after nearly two days, all it did was wave around and twirl, hitting the chrome pole about once every 90 minutes. I finally got tired of watching it behave like an epileptic in slow motion and loosely tied it to the pole with a piece of yarn. Only then did it begin to act like it “got the hint” and started to curve around the pole. But before long I started thinking about a couple other climbing plants I have and thought maybe I should go ahead and secure them to the same area so they can all climb my chrome shelves for the summer rather than spend the summer out on my balcony where the Oklahoma summer here can get pretty brutal. |  |
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So I gently secured my Mouse Melon (Melothria scabra) to the same pole the Hideous Sea Onion was attached to and in the back I secured my Cypress Vine (Ipomoea quamoclit), which today produced its first flower, but I accidentally messed it up so won’t photograph it until I get a nice one opened up in a day or two. Both vines are very robust and fast growers, so I will have to keep a close eye on them and trim them from time to time to keep them in check. But I think they will be nice to see indoors. However, I will have no choice but to manually pollinate both of them if I want to save seed to sell (which is my objective). The Cypress Vine will be relatively straightforward, but the Mouse Melon has separate male and female flowers, so I’ll have to spend a bit more care in pollinating those – which is also why I chose the Mouse Melon to be up front. |
| The Cypress Vine has some of the most beautiful leaves of any plant I’ve ever grown, by structure alone. They are so wispy and feathery that I totally admire the vines even when no flowers are present. When it does bloom, it produces small star shaped blooms very popular with humming birds. The flowers come in white, pink and red. With five vines in the pot, I am hopeful to see all three colors (for saving seeds too). I know already that at least one is red, because that is the color of the flower that opened this morning that I accidentally destroyed. |  |
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Something like three or four weeks ago I placed five Mary Washington Asparagus (Asparagus officinalis) seeds in a ziplock baggie on damp paper towel and three of them germinated about a week ago. Today I transferred them to a small cup of soil. One of them looks crooked because, germinating in a plastic bag, its stem was bent down toward the roots. All three will straighten out in a few days. Edible Asparagus requires about three years before it can be harvested, but I’m mainly just growing it because the plants themselves are very attractive. |
| A few weeks back I took cuttings of Aurora Borealis Kalanchoe (Kalanchoe fedtschenkoi ‘Aurora Borealis’) as well as started some plantlets of Alligator Kalanchoe (Kalanchoe daigremontiana), another Kalanchoe that grows plantlets along its leaf margins. Fedtschenkoi, on the other hand, will usually never produce plantlets on its leaf margins UNLESS the leaf has been removed from the mother plant. Lay a leaf on damp soil and it almost always produces hot pink plantlets along its margins then. Alligator to the left, Aurora Borealis to the right. |  |
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You can see that the stumps on my White Polka Dot Plant (Hypoestes phyllostachya) is rapidly producing lots of buds to regrow the foliage that I removed and placed in water to propagate. The Red and Pink varieties are doing the same, but appear to be slightly slower than this one in putting out fresh growth. These are wonderful, colorful small plants, but are exceptionally sensitive to lack of water and will wilt and drop leaves within just a few hours of the soil going dry. |
| My Mason jar full of Golden Pothos (Epipremnum aureum) has lots of growth coming off it and so I decided to take a bunch of cuttings today and root them in water so that I can increase their numbers in order to eventually plant a pot that’s really full of them, as well as sell future cuttings on eBay. It’s important to note that Golden Pothos is NOT a Philodendron, though it looks very much like one. The common Heartleaf Philodendron (Philodendron scandens) bears a completely different genus. However, they may be treated and grown very similarly. |  |
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I was able to take six cuttings, each with a couple leaves and one or two obvious aerial root buds on them. Like the parent plants, these can readily be rooted and grown in water, at least for the time being. They have been one of the best-known classic “easy to grow” and nearly “impossible to kill” houseplants for centuries. They look great in pots, hanging down, hanging from balconies, or trailing over the ground as a thick ground cover. And in the wild they can get quite huge with massive leaves as they run up tall trees in tropical regions. Very VERY rarely they can bloom, though it is so rare as to be almost unheard of. |
| I decided to place the six cuttings in cups on my “propagation station” shelf, mainly because that’s the safest place for them not to get knocked over, and also since I’m not using it for anything else, the lights on that shelf remain off. Golden Pothos like light, but that shelf is currently getting light from the shelf above it, which is a bit subdued and more to its liking. Later on in a month or so I’ll pot them up. |  |