Amarine

[Heinie]

I cut the scape off before I could see if the ovaries started growing.

A lot of the above items are plant specific therefore you should rather ask me at the time of need to plant a bulb. It will mostly be very good capillary action from the pot. See my notes on the side of each item in blue font.

Pot soil, The character of the soil, composition (crushed bark is not available here). For bulbs you will almost all the time go for about 60% sand with 30% coarse grid and 10% compost.

Watering My bulbs are all planted in the same growing medium mix therefor you learn very soon what the watering cycle should be. I water once a week and now in winter the bulbs in active growing stage get rain water every day with no problems due to good drainage.

Fertilization at various stages I feed my bulbs every 2 weeks in the growing season.

Seed sowing This item has a very wide spectrum of sowing needs for different seeds but generally seeds are placed on top of the growing medium and covered with a thin layer of growing medium. A good tip that I leanred from someone years ago is the following. When you want to sow seeds you fill the pot to the mark where you want to plant the seeds and then water it well. Only after watering well you place the seeds and cover it with more medium. In this manner the seeds wil not float to the top when it is watered on dry medium. Untill the seeds have established nicely you should water them by means of a light spray with an appropriate bottle nozzle.

Size of pots For planting single bulbs in a pot I select a pot that gives me about 50 to 80mm of space from the bulb to the side of the pot.

That should give you a good idea of the needs above.

[M Farooq]

Farooq,
Thanks. If you let me know what you would like to know I will work something out.

Thank you. My questions are rather generic queries related to crossing plants. If you wish, you can start a separate thread. In my experience, I never saw lilies (and many other plants like rain lilies, Plumerias, jasmines) forming seeds "naturally". The ovules rather die along with the flower. But as it is clear from the previous discussions that we have to induce formation of seeds manually in some plants. My questions were:

1. How do we induce formation of seeds in plants which do not like to produce seeds under normal conditions e.g., Plumerias, jasmines (e.g. Jasminum sambac), Hibiscus rosa-sinensis
2. How do you practically find out compatibility of two separate plants for a cross-pollination trial?
3. How successful is the cross-pollination experiment, for instance, what are odds that the new seed so formed after cross-pollination will be different from the parent plants?

Thanks
Farooq

[Tahir Khan]

Heinie, is the Amarine you made from cross breeding the same available commercially or is it different ?

[Farhan Ahmed]

Mr.Heinie I have made your exclusive subsection in "what is blooming in your garden" so its easier for you as well as for us to keep track of your lovely blooms. You can PM me if you want any customization etc of your sub-section

[Heinie]

Farooq
Answer as per your pointers

1. There are many plants that do not self at all and then you have to use another plant of the same clone. Paramongaia does not self either, I had to obtain a second bulb but it still has not set seeds yet.

2. I do not have the knowledge of plant chemistry so I attempt what others did or attempt by trial and error because I just learned today that my age has a long way to go yet to reach Muhammad.

3. I am still toiling with that same question and that is why I do so many experiments and most of them fail too due to the lack of the inner knowledge of plants.

Tahir
I used the Nerine bowdeni in my cross and am not sure what Nerine specie in the commercilly crossed hybrid was used.

Farhan
I am very honoured to have my own category so the customization is just fine for me. I do not need anything off standard to the rest of the forum.