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Quote from: MarcR on October 12, 2022, 04:13:40 AMWild Seed Tasmania offers 5gm of D. latifolia or D. moraea for 9.35 AUD.
That is about $5.62 or 6.08 Euros. 5gm is about 300 seeds
They offer an extensive catalog of Tasmanian seed at similarly reasonable prices. A phyto costs 36AUD ($22.85  or 23.04 euros)

I find that this allows me to attempt to grow species that tend to be somewhat difficult without spending a fortune.

Then add postage, then add around 30% of the total cost to import them into the UK - so around Euros 50, maybe a little more, for two species in this case - that is a a LOT of money and even if germination was great, I have no idea how anyone would be able to sell them in the UK - the demand would be minute.

At least one of the species is available in specialised nurseries here at far less for a large plant.

You are very generous Bern.

I should say that the idea is no more than an extension to what people called a "hot box" when I was active in the cacti and succulent hobby - an isolated area to keep spp. such as Melocactus, Discocactus etc..

The other advantage is that on especially cold nights, maybe even every night, is that it is VERY easy to throw extra bubblewrap over a cloche (and to remove it when not needed) - not so to add multiple layers of insulation to an entire greenhouse.

Major limitation - plant size.

Quote

QuoteQuote from: CG100 on 09/10/2022, 09:08:02In a cloche in particular, air/temperature distribution is difficult

I bow to your expertise, thanks for writing all that down. It has always fascinated me how my greenhouse is (too) hot at the top in daytime and (too) cold at the top at night.I never got around to setting up a solar powered fan to shift air from top to bottom.

Presumably you do not have the convenience of mains electricity in the greenhouse?

I have had a heated greenhouse for something like 30 years and never considered anything but electricity, and fan heaters, from day 1 and have laid underground SWA cables to do that. Far too easy, clean, near maintenance-free and easily controlled to go any other way, for me anyway. But then, half a lifetime ago, I spent several years working in industrial air-conditioning/ventilation........

Fan heater

Capillary thermostat

Cartridge heater

Ceramic heater

Some typical components -

see below

Hi Bern
You have asked an awful lot   

My benches all have solid (as opposed to slatted) tops to them, so the base of the cloche is effectively sealed. As the plants are very largely dry habitat species, they are watered rather little - anything that needs more moisture is bagged, though not neccessarily sealed. I have used the system previously when I had a large Sansevieria collection and had no problems with moisture/RH.

The frame of the cloche is made from what is known as roofing batten in the UK - timber around 30mm x 25mm - there are different sizes. The height is fixed by the height between bench-top and the eaves of the greenhouse - so around 60cm. Bubble-wrap is just stapled to that.

Heating - I have always used domestic fan heaters - the common, cheap, simple, ones in the UK have two settings - 1kW and 2kW (I have used more than one in any greenhouse, always set at 1kW, to get better and more even temperature control). In anything but a huge cloche, even 1kW may be too much in most weather here. Years ago, I actually built a simple lower power fan heater.....................

The home-made is a length of galvanised pipe with a mains V computer/electronics-cooling fan attached at one end. The heaters are industrial cartridge heaters and/or ceramic heaters which are secured to the pipe, through the wall. This uses a very crude capillary thermostat between the fan and the heaters - the strong air-flow speeds up the reaction time (reduces hysteresis). The fan runs all the time, only the heaters are on the capillary thermostat. The fan could/would run literally all the time but the whole fan heater is on a simple central heating thermostat, within the greenhouse, set at around 8-10C (a couple of degrees higher than the heater capilaary thermostat).

In a cloche in particular, air/temperature distribution is difficult, so I always butt a plastic pipe against the intake (rain-water down pipe or whatever), so the fan drags air mostly form one end of the cloche, and pushes it out at the other. No need for any join as such, just put the pipe end against the fan, (When heating a greenhouse, the cheap fan heaters have an intake on the top, so I fitted a "chimney" over the intake grill so that air was mostly drawn from near the roof.)

Thermostats - I built electronic thermostats around 20 years ago - in an 8 x 12 foot greenhouse, two, 1kW fan heaters one at each end, with temperatures 5-10C different inside-outside, a glass thermometer showed almost no change as the heat switched on and off.
I will see how the capillary etc. works first.......................... I can always easily cahnge to the electronic control.

From what little I have seen of commercial electronics.............................. they leave much to be desired.

Lighting. I do not need extra lighting in the greenhouse, but did grow LOTS of seedlings in the past, using ONLY artificial lighting. Back then it was SON/HPS/Lucalox (all the same lamp), plus a high CCT (high blue) fluorescent strip. Today, anyone would use LEDs.

I am no fan of heater mats unless they are buried under a few inches of sand or the pots are on a mesh shelf /support half an inch or more above them. The temperature produced differs massively between under and between pots and is VERY difficult to control adequately. Buried in sand, it would be a major achievement to get even temperature distribution. I see lots of problems and no advantages over heating the air in some way.

If you can't find things that I mention, or it isn't clear, let me know and I will try to explain better, or post links to any products.

I have just weighed a few seperate tspn of nitrate here and they vary 5-6g. 

That gives a concentration of roughly 0.6-0.7% at Marc's dilution rate, using the fine griity nitrate here.

The hassle with any failures is that if that batch is all you have, you can never be sure of whether the seed was dud to begin with. So far as I have seen, D. seeds tend to be sold in 10's-20's in Europe - so not worth splitting and not cheap enough to try several packs.

In the UK, utility bills are now sort of fixed - but everyone will be paying for the subsidy for as long as it takes, assuming world fuel prices drop at some stage (although the crude oil cartel agreed to reduce production - aka increase prices - yesterday).
The only utility that is not easy to be cut off from in the UK is mains water, as it is a big deal in public health. gas or electicity can be cut but that leaves a huge bill or bankruptcy waiting...................

As for heating the plants - I am not heating the greenhouse this year - I have constructed large bubble-wrap "cloches" over the benches and I am only heating those, not the entire greenhouse.

There is a reasonable amount online from various studies and what they tell you in total, is that experimentation (concentration and dwell) may pay dividends. In other words, there is too little actual knowledge, and that ideal soaking conditions varies species to species.

Experimentation would be great if anyone has large numbers of seed, but otherwise...................

For what it is worth, I treated some Diplarrena seed for 24 hours in 3% this last weekend. Time will tell.

Personally? I'd be surprised, within logical reason, if seeds could be left for too long (in other words, don't strectch the soak to days upon days, but otherwise......................). I have seen concentrations used (not recommended) from around 1% to5%., and not as low as you mention.

Mention is made in a couple of places, including Iridaceae of S. Africa, of the underside of the petals sometimes being violet/purple, but I can find no detailed description or helpful photographs that add anything more helpful.

Quick update - coincidence or not, the "not natans" look far happier on the north-facing sill, and are already a better and more uniform shade of green.

Somewhat late, but referring to Amaryllis, Duncan, Jeppe, Voight, the distribution of the species is a whole lot of sub-Saharan Africa and into the Middle East, and he also states that flowers may appear before, with or after the flower.

Multiflorus and longituba are noted as being very similar and over-lapping in range. (Maybe implying some doubt over the validity of longituba?)

Hi Uli

My moniker is Carl.
I have only seen the names natans, thaianum and calamistratum used for aquarium Crinums in the UK. The "not natans" plants are like none of them. They may not even be Crinums as the leaves only grow to 15cm or so and then die completely - if they survive, I would assume that the leaves will increase in size, but Crinum leaves are usually extremely long and survive over several years, even if dying back from the tip, though not sp. such as paludosum.

NL is notorious for handling "strange" plant material - there is a large and interesting article online about trully vast numbers of wild-collected Galanthus being laundered as nursery-raised.

If you search hard, you will find pictures online of wild "aquatic" Crinums growing in shallow water and at the water's edge. I am sure bulbs must get washed out by floods and eventually come to rest on the shore.  Plus there are the spp. that the S Africans call vleileli - the Crinum species (the name is also applied to some Nerine spp.) that only appear above ground and flower if there is a few inches of water lying, as a result of seasonal rains - spp like paludosum. (I tried a single bulb of campanulatum - another vleileli that is grown as a pond plant in warmer parts of the world, grown the same way - it rotted.)
Certainly, so far, thaianum here does not need to be completely submerged, or the leaves to be wet.

I asked for some advice about a year ago, about aquatic Crinums. Thanks for the conversations that resulted.
As I bought some bulbs, I thought that I would provide some feedback.
I bought two small bulbs of both C. thaianum and C. natans from aquarium supply outlets, mostly because they were the cheapest and the whole thing would be an experiment.
They were potted into 3 inch porous clay pots using a very gritty/sandy compost, and then the pots were put into 1 litre plastic laboratory beakers (also very cheap), sitting on a shallow layer of large pebbles. The beakers were then filled with rain water so that the bulb necks were clear of the water, and placed on indoor window sills. They were/are fed totally randomly by adding fertiliser (Miracle-Gro) to the top-up water.
All bulbs grew well in 2021, making good leaf growth. During last winter they probably routinely saw lows of around 10C, maybe slightly lower. C. t. lost all leaf although C. n. just stopped growth. I let the water drop so that just the base of the clay pots remained wet.
Once the plants showed the beginning of growth this spring, 2022, the beakers were filled again.
C. thaianum each have 4 very deep green, glossy and very lax leaves 12-15 inches long that lie "in a heap" beside the beakers, so do not touch water.
C. natans isn't C. natans!!
For some reason it did not occur to me until this spring, but the leaves are narrow and the edges are not puckered. The leaf growths are rather like a spider plant (Chlorophytum comosum). It is anyone's guess where the plants originated from, but Crinum sp. or not, it will be very interesting to discover the species – all I have to do is flower at least one of them!!!!!!
The supposed C. natans came with European labels and if sourced from NL, may be wild-collected, as the country is well-known for some level of below the radar trading in lots of plant species.
One of the unknown Crinums has made two small offsets, although one is dormant, but still firm. It may be the aspect of the window sill – unshaded, west-facing – but both are a less deep green than I would like, so they have been moved to an unshaded position on a north-facing sill.
The C. thaianum are on a south-facing sill in dappled light as a consequence of outdoor trees and shrubs casting diffuse shadows.
Another challenge will be deciding if and when they need repotting and then finding some acceptable and suitably sized outer water-tight vessels.