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