Scottish Rock Garden Club Forum
Bulbs => Bulbs General => Topic started by: JohnnyD on February 15, 2011, 07:17:40 PM
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Colchicum svovitsii on Google yields no info at all and I am keen to discover the best way to deal with it now it is in flower.
Any ideas please?
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my plant grows outside in a raised bed
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Diane Clement is the 'expert' judging by the number of times her pot full wins at Loughborough.
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Diane Clement is the 'expert' judging by the number of times her pot full wins at Loughborough.
Very true, and elsewhere in the Forum you could get hints to move to Turkey,
http://www.srgc.org.uk/smf/index.php?topic=3148.msg88535#msg88535
or near Geir Moen in Norway http://www.srgc.org.uk/smf/index.php?topic=301.msg8414#msg8414
http://www.srgc.org.uk/smf/index.php?topic=1584.msg39468#msg39468
http://www.srgc.org.uk/smf/index.php?topic=3510.msg94294#msg94294
or Kenneth Karlsson in Sweden......
http://www.srgc.org.uk/smf/index.php?topic=1120.msg27760#msg27760
:-X We kept losing bulbs so we're counting on seed grown babies to flower and thrive :-X
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Diane Clement is the 'expert' judging by the number of times her pot full wins at Loughborough.
Don't know about that, but I'll try. As it's a snowmelt plant, it need lots of water after flowering. Sometimes I just put it outside and sprinkle a bit of the BD's magic white powder on the pot (Potassium Sulphate) and let the rain take its course. If you keep it under glass, then plenty of water is needed. At some point in late spring you should notice the fat fruits which form underground will appear between the leaves, and soon after the leaves will go yellow and die back. I then put it under glass, harvest the seed and keep it completely dry until the autumn when it is repotted. Mine usually makes a stack of seed. I do grow some outside, it is OK in a gritty raised bed but I think it prefers a dry summer rest. I think you'll find it fairly easy John. I lost quite a lot of corms that I left out in a pot last year, to mice or squirrels (I saw the teeth marks) which was interesting as I believe there is enough colchine poison in a colchicum corm to kill a small mammal.
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Thanks everybody.
Diane, I have just the spot.
J.
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Diane:
It may be that the colchicine does not have the same toxic effect on small mammals as it would have on us.
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It kills dogs pretty quickly , Arnold :'(
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what about cats though ;D ;D ;D ;D
Maggie what happerned?
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A friend had a colchicum bulb roll down a slope when she was planting. Her dachsund ran after it, grabbed it and chomped it a little.... horrible death for the wee soul. ghastly thing to happen.
Even put me off feeding them to the inlaws.
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what about cats though ;D ;D ;D ;D
Maggie what happerned?
perhaps it would still work on cats with cheaper species Davey ;)
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For a detailed discussion of what happened to the wee dog. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC539229/
Not a pleasant thing.
I know I have slugs that can eat their way though Colchicum flowers and leaves ad infinitum
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It doesn't affect slaters (woodlice) either. They chomp off my leaves to trough surface level every year. I was told no, not slaters as they only feed on decaying material. Not true. I have seen them late at night clustered round C. szovitsii chewing like mad.
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Colchicum svovitsii on Google yields no info at all and I am keen to discover the best way to deal with it now it is in flower.
Any ideas please?
It needs very wet condtions during blooming and some time after that. In wild very often its flowers comes out from water and it grow on very, very damp places, where springs comes out and on waterflooded riverside meadows. See attached pictures. In greenhouse could be too hot and dry. Corm crop when I grow it outside is a little risky, but allways far larger than on plants grown in greenhouse. Bring pots as soon as possible out of greenhouse an look for good watering. This is important for many spring blooming Colchicums. Les susceptible to spring draught is C. munzurense and its alles.
Janis
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Maybe you already figured it out from the answers above, but if you spell it szovitsii you will get more hits on Google.
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Hjalmar you are a genius. I must get my eyes tested! 8)
Many thanks,
JohnnyD
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Maybe you already figured it out from the answers above, but if you spell it szovitsii you will get more hits on Google.
Can be spelled as szowitsii, too - such is sometimes used and used on my picture captions (must to correct), too.
Janis
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It doesn't affect slaters (woodlice) either. They chomp off my leaves to trough surface level every year. I was told no, not slaters as they only feed on decaying material. Not true. I have seen them late at night clustered round C. szovitsii chewing like mad.
Lesley,
Until this year I would have said the same as the naysayers, but this year with our extra moisture (and I think softer growth) there has been a lot of slater damage, in fact I have had a couple of Verbena killed by them. I put out one of the snail baits that get slaters as well, and there wasn't a dead snail to be seen, but lots of slaters. We've almost had a plague of them this spring, and a lot of people coming into work asking about them as they've seen damage as well.
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Generally speaking I use as little chemical spray as possible but have resorted to a product recommended to me, called (here anyway) Ripcord. It is a spray for application to buildings to stop spider infestation with their webs and filthy droppings. Spiders really are dirty creatures. Anyway, I use it in my plant trays and on benches, around pots, against slaters and it works totally. Slaters don't come into the trays at all where before they were clustering in thousands in every corner. It can also be squirted onto plants with no ill effect to the plants, against slaters and aphis. I found that be accident, having sprayed a bench where I was setting out seed pots and next morning found dead aphis from the adjacent auriculas.
Recently following a lot of rain, slaters have been coming up the house walls and coming in through the bathroom window. Some mornings there have been a dozen in the basin! Not nice. So I've squirted the outside walls and the windowsills as well. Slaters still coming in but they die when they get there so we now have dead slaters in the bathroom instead of live ones.