Scottish Rock Garden Club Forum
Seedy Subjects! => Grow From Seed => Topic started by: Tasmanian Taffy on August 08, 2010, 11:01:31 AM
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Hello to all,
I have some seed of fritillaria imperialis (yellow and red forms) and I would like to try and grow these from seed,but I have been told they are very difficult to grow from seed. If anybody can please give me some tips or advise I would be most grateful.I live in Tasmania, Australia and we are in our final month of Winter when is the best time to sow these seed and are there any special requirements that I should adhere to.Any help would be appreciated,regards John Bartush. ??
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Hi John,
Fritillaria imperialis isn't hard to grow from seed. Sow the seed in the autumn, say March here in the southern hemisphere. You will need to store it in order to do that. I don't do anything special with mine, I might keep it in the fridge but I'm not convinced this aids the extension of viability. I know you grow lilies so just follow the same method you would use for lily seeds. Cheers, Marcus
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Hello Marcus,
Thanks for the information I will wait untill Autumn and sow them and hopefully get a few to germinate.Thanks again,John.
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John,
If you're worried about viability come autumn, just freeze a few as you would lily seed.
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I agree with Marcus, not difficult but rather long-winded. From seed, in my experience, imperialis will take up to 7 years to flower whereas other species will take 3-4 generally. Yes, sow it as you would your lilies and don't let the tiny bulblets dry out totally, for their first and probably second years. Keep them in the pot and just barely damp.
If you have enough to try, sow some now or in the next month. You will likely get germination by next autumn when you're just sowing the others. You might decide to put autumn germinating seed in a protected place for the winter.
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Hello Lesley,
Thanks for your help I do have a few seeds of each so I will try sowing some next month and leave the rest until next Autumn as Marcus suggested regards John.
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Rob Hello and thanks,I do keep all of my seed refrigerated regards John.
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If F imperialis is so easy to grow from seed how come you hardly ever see it on bulb lists down here.At $15 to $20 for a NFS bulb one would think every man and his dog would be growing them.bye Ray
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up to 7 years to flower
from seed and low customer demand.
After all, if the price you could charge alone made something worth selling you'd see lots of Worsleya and Brunsvigia on offer.
BTW, re the storage of seed I did actually mean the freezer, not the fridge. Properly dried and sealed frozen seed should remain viable a long time.
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up to 7 years to flower
from seed and low customer demand.
Hi Rob,low customer demand?,if that is the case then why isn't it on the their lists every year.
Need Marcus to hop online and give us his view.bye Ray
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There's been chat elsewhere about the difficulty of keeping imperialis alive, some think that the bulbs supplied from Holland are programmed to rot. Maybe if you grow them from seed you avoid that, but it would be sad to spend years growing them and then see them rot.
Personal experience is that I carefully selected four bulbs and by the time I got back from the shop I found one had rotted. Things didn't improve when I started growing them.
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Hi Guys, in my experience, and I have found that large, adult bulbs of do not fare well at being stored, moved, perhaps even breathed on! They are fragile beasties when handled roughly and kept in the less than perfect conditions of commerce. I have found them much easier from seed, moving them into the ground at the end of a 2 year growing period. If one has good cold winters there shouldn't be a problem after that.
Ray you asked the question: why doesn't every man and his dog gow them if they are so valuable. Heres the answer, and it cuts to the heart of the biosecurity issue that has been raised on the general forum. Large scale commercial nurseries work on economies of scale and turn around time. For these guys this plant takes too long to grow to saleable size, the costs and the risks associated with importing them is too high and the demand is too low to justify the investment. Small specialist nurseries like mine have to pay (unfairly) the same flat fee rates as large-scale commercial nurseries ($30 a minute inspection fees) and are now faced with the double whammy of only being permitted to bring in phytocertified plants and THEN STILL have to have them placed into post-entry quarantine. I used to be able to source this plant from a non-commercial source in NZ but now because of the phytocertification requirement I cant get them because the NZ source cannot afford the costs to have their crop inspected. Why you may ask? Because she doesn't have an inspection service available to her locally she has to pay out of her own pocket to have an inspector flown in and accomodated while the inspection takes place. I HOPE THAT THIS ILLUSTRATES THE MADNESS AND INFLEXIBILTY OF BIOSECURITY WHEN IT DOESN'T PAY ANY ATTENTION TO OTHER COMPETING AND LEGITIMATE INTERESTS.
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That says it all really, or most of it. Any bulb which takes 7 years to raise from seed to flowering will be expensive. Think of all the weeding, watering, fertilizing, protecting from pests et al, that happens to the batch of seedlings over 7 years, let along planting out and potting, repotting etc. So that's from seed.
Then all that other stuff Marcus mention for bought in bulbs. There was a good source here until recently and I don't know how they originated honestly. I don't think they grew from seed but I'm not aware that the bulbs multiply vegetatively to any extent. Nor do I think micro propagation was the answer because they had been available for 90 years or more, before such things happened.
Unfortunately this nursery changed hands a few years ago and one can't now go and buy half a dozen or more for oneself. They are machine harvested each year and sent in containers (!) to Holland for the European market. No doubt they are put in chillers for several months and offered to wholesalers at the right time for northern sales and planting. I'd be very surprised if many/any survive as the machine harvesting badly damages the bulbs and all I've had for the last 10 years or so have had bad lesions and mould patches on them. I've had both yellow and bronze with little success for either.
Although it takes time, raising from seed is the best solution and I have been fortunate in being able to get both yellow and bronze seed from the Dunedin Botanic Gardens in recent years. I'll ask for more this year and if they remember to save it for me, I should be able to send some out. I also have some very healthy-looking seedlings from Otto's form, which is 'Rubra Maxima,' a shorter, red form. These are coming up now but are still 4 years off flowering.
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Ray,
When I lived in the UK I could go down to my local DIY store in autumn and pick up (courtesy of the Dutch) both yellow and orange forms of imperialis (& never had a problem with growing them, provided I chose carefully and bought them as soon as they arrived). But Europe is a much larger market. Australia is not only smaller overall, but broken-up into different segments - when I lived in FNQ practically the only cultural consideration I had to think of when growing warm or intermediate orchids was which nail to use to mount them in the shadehouse, but things like galanthus were impossible. Here in Tassie when I used to visit the Gillanders I could see their entire years stock of imperialis grown in just a couple of polyboxes.
As Marcus says some things are just going to have too low a level of demand to make their importation or commercial production worthwhile. At least imperialis is on the edges of commercial availability, things like F. eduardii just aren't there at all. If people like Marcus or private importers are shut out because of bureaucratic hurdles where will that leave us? Denied access to things which pose no threat to biosecurity because the system is inadequate.
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Lesley,
Imperialis will multiply vegetatively if grown shallowly. The stress forces them to split without you having to scale them. Of course the daughter bulbs are too small to flower......
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Thanks Rob, I didn't know that and now you mention scaling, I guess that's probably how Blue Mountain Nursery has been doing them forever. I know they used to (and still do) increase Iris x Sindpers by removing ALL the storage roots and growing them on to make little bulblets on top of the root. A couple of times I've objected to getting the iris from them and finding not a single storage root in place, every one removed. Needless to say I wasn't given any satisfaction about replacements but did, in the events, have all bulbs grow on and flower, and make new storage roots quickly.
I can remember the halcyon days when I could visit the original owners, Stanley then his son Dennis Hughes and get superb bulbs, one or a hundred as desired, every one in perfect condition, then an hour of chat about things plant related followed by tea and scones. Not now alas. Fact is, I'm getting old rapidly.
I said 90 years in the above post but my mother who would be 102 if she were still alive, used to play with Stanley among the rows of irises, frits, tulips and other bulbs when she was a small child so it's likely more than 100 years that the nursery has been supplying bulbs, shrubs and trees to New Zealand gardeners.
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Hi Lesley, yeah i reackon all that mechanical digger action was probably the main way Dennis got his progation stock! If you score the bottom of your bulbs or even cut the top third off and let the scales lay in the soil many will bud. Marcus
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I had some F.I.seed from the exchange this year (January). Planted them in March and continue to await their emergence. I keep whispering to them that they can come up any time now but they're NOT LISTENING. I used to see them in Ken's poly boxes too Marcus and like many of the plants he kept, I now keep kicking myself that I didn't get them then.
SLOW LEARNER!!
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HI All,some interesting comments here,i agree with David that this is a bulb that's is diffult to grow to flower,every time they are offered in a list here I buy one and I might have it for a year or two then it's off to plant heaven as was the case of the one I bought from Marcus in 2008.
I was always under the impression that Marcus grew all his own bulbs but his comments about importing bulbs from NZ changes all that.
When I said that these bulbs cost $15 to $20 for NFS bulbs I was not impling that this was expensive as Lesley says its a long time from seed to flower.
No one has really agreed with Rob that there is a low demand for this species here,and I would suggest that the demand is greater than the supply,why else would you put a limit of 1 per customer if there was little demand for it,when you are importing bulbs one would think you would import enough that your customers could buy as many as they liked.
So Marcus hope you have got broad shoulders bye Ray
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Actually Ray, Marcus said that for the large guys
the demand is too low to justify the investment.
Nor can I see a small nursery wanting to run the risk of flooding the market - too large an investment of time and money at stake.
John,
Despite being very close to Woodbank and making frequent visits, I too kick myself at what I missed. Still, at least Ken still sells things sometimes. I'm looking forward to October.
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-I'm puzzled by this.
I had it in my last garden (thin chalk soil) it grew like a weed, forming a large clump after 7-8 years - in the end I dug it up and threw it away as it had something of eau-de-tomcat about it.
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I often think the "low demand therefore we don't grow it" thing is a self perpetuating myth. There's low demand because it's not available. It's not available because there's low demand. Same as (our) TV programmers. "You watch rubbish so we supply rubbish" But we watch rubbish because they won't supply quality. Should spend more time in the garden. Well I will, come some warmer, lighter evenings 8)
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Hi Rob,it would appear that you and I have a very different views on how to run a business.
What is on in Tassie in Oct?
If having this bulb on your list every year even at a limit of one is flooding the market then I say bring it on.
Hi Giles,am sure there would be a lot of people in the South and maybe the North who would like to have this plant grow like that at their place.bye Ray
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I often think the "low demand therefore we don't grow it" thing is a self perpetuating myth. There's low demand because it's not available.
Hi Lesley,I would agree with that.bye Ray
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Hi fellow frit fanatics,
To clarify my comments, Rob quoted me right. The big guys wont bring them in because they cant sell enough in a small market like Australia, we are talking 100,000s. They cant propogate them quickly/or cheaply enough from the stock they bring in. Cuttings take six to nine months to root and grow on to sale, bulblets take years. Also the losses are too high and the acclimatisation too problematic. They all have to come by boat in refrigerated containers, airfreight is out of the question, and then placed in temperature controlled warehouses for a period. Its all fraught with problems when dealing with soft bodied bulbs. No-one as far as I know has worked it out successfully. This goes for anemone blanda and eranthis sp.
Small guys like me rely on range and rarity, not scale and turnaround. I cant afford to put all my eggs in one basket. Ray if you think you can grow enough of 360 lines of stock every year on your own and put them up for sale to the gardening public - your better man than me. Methinks you dont understand too well the dynamics of nursery microeconomics. I hope this gives you some insights.
Back to the Fritillaria imperialis question. Its interesting what Lesley was saying about Blue Mountain Bulbs. I think the Dutchies are in trouble with this, if they are sourcing stock from the southern hemisphere. Commercial quantities of seed are hard to come by there and expensive. If one wants confirmation, take a look at Jelitto's last few catalogues there isn't a listing for this species. Cheers, Marcus
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In Aberdeen Fritillaria imperialis is a thing of uncertain temperament : we have some that do reasonably well year to year and others that barely survive.
Bulbs given to us by dear friends only just over half a mile away are feeble in comparison to their magnificent flowering clumps! ???
I've given up worrying... if they flower I'm pleased, if they don't, they don't. :P
As an aside: some of my best friends are nursery owners. Some manage better than others but none of them are driving fancy cars. Some are barely putting food on the table and others have given up the ghost......the life of a small scale and/or specialist nurseryman is not an easy one, I can say that for sure.... I might not know how to get these flippin' frit imperials to flower, but I do know that.
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Its all about opportunity costs, one would not invest in a product or a venture if the cost, interms of time, risk, outlay are too high compared to other more profitable options. Its business its not gardening. If you want to do that then dont run a nursery. Cheers, Marcus
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Ray,
You have reassured me.
I,too, am looking forward to October (Hobart's or is it Tasmania's Rare Plant Expo)
All the fore-going hasn't shed much light on techniques for growing frit imperials but it certainly strengthened my resolution to support the local sources.
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Hi Rob,actually you were the first to make the comment about "low demand" but you didn't say if you were referring to big guy/little guy.
Hi Marcus,I think I have more understanding of what is involed in what you do than you give me credit for.No doubt that there is a lot of time work and money and patience in what you do and it does take years to build up enough stock to sell,and thats why I don't do what you do.
Not sure why but agree that seed of F imperalis is hard to come by.
Could you also send me your seed list.thanks bye Ray
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Ray,
You have reassured me.
[Hi John,?
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Hi Ray, sent seedlist to the email address I have for you and it bounced back. Could you email me and I'll forward it on? Cheers, Marcus
PS Sorry to talk shop
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I might not know how to get these flippin' frit imperials to flower, but I do know that.
They are sulky beasts. I had to move my clump whilst in growth when we had a new sewer line installed about five years ago. Still waiting for them to flower properly.
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Hello Marcus,
WOW! one small query has certainly opened a rather large can of worms,now I don't know wether to try growing them or throw the seed out (only joking).Marcus could I also get a copy of your seedlist please.I think you have my address or if its easier you could email it to me bartush@iprimus.com.au thanks regards John Bartush.
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Hi John,if I am the person who opened the can of worms all i can say is,a frank and open disscussion never hurt anybody.bye Ray
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Hello Ray,
I wholeheartedly agree with you,John.