Starting winter growing seed-Tecophilaea cyanocrocus
Lee Poulsen (Wed, 11 Feb 2004 22:50:45 PST)

On Feb 11, 2004, at 9:19 PM, Mary Sue Ittner wrote:

One thing really interests me. Lee Poulsen says that his plants always
make a lot of offsets. Do they have to be a certain size to do this?
Or do some do this and not others. The ones I have been (slowly)
growing from seed have never made offsets. I've lost maybe one or two
of the three varieties from my initial sowing, but mostly the number
of corms has remained stable after the second year. As I said before
in my experience some seeds come up the first year and some the second
year even after spending a dry summer.

I think "a lot" is kind of relative. They don't increase anywhere as
rapidly as Ipheion uniflorum does. What happens as far as I can see
with my plants is that each bulb that is of flowering size, shortly
after sending up a flower scape, starts growing small offset leaves
right next to the main plant. It is usually two in number on opposite
sides, sometimes three. If the plants grow well during the growing
season, these offsets are often just big enough to be of flowering size
the following season, and they do the same thing. So the bulbs increase
in number roughly as a power of three. So at first there's not a lot of
increase, but it starts to add up after just a few years. At the end of
the first season, from one bulb to start with, there are three, at the
end of the 2nd season there are 9 bulbs, at the end of the 3rd growing
season there are 27 bulbs (roughly). So an initial investment of
US$15-20 for one small bulb can result in a net worth of more than
US$500 by the end of the third year (if you choose to think of it in
those terms).

BTW, my leitchlinii Tecophilaeas are all bursting into bloom this very
week and are looking nice, esp. since we haven't been having much rain
down here. The violaceas and the pure blue species pots always bloom a
little later. I also managed to get one bulb of a new cultivar that is
supposed to be a lavender version of the leitchlinii appearance. What
I'd really like to get some day is one of those pure white forms that
were observed in a field of wild growing blue ones that were just
(re-)discovered recently. (Meaning they're not completely extinct in
the wild.) I wonder how long it will take to get that form into
cultivation.

--Lee Poulsen
Pasadena area, California, USDA Zone 9-10