My wife manages it in our far - VERY far - from sterile house, with fairly crude and inexpensive equipment (i.e., no laminar flow hood). She is mostly flasking orchid seed now, as that's what she wanted to learn to do first, but she has done a little trial tissue culture too since a lot of the steps are the same. Since she had a lot of chemistry and bac-t labs in college, and then spent 25 years teaching chemistry, she started off with pretty good lab technique, and even so there was a learning curve, but not what I'd call a really steep one, and she had some success right away. It's been more about practice to refine the technique and reduce the incidence of contamination than of having to radically change anything, and from what we hear that's true even if you do have really expensive equipment. (Lots of orchid people get into flasking seeds, and most of them don't have access to labs. At least when they start.) When she was teaching high school science classes, she even had some students who managed it, again without high-tech equipment and in a very dirty environment. They used really easy plants, since the purpose was just to show the students the technique, but it worked. I had a piece of some kalanchoe in a test tube of agar in my sunroom for a long time ... As others have said, there's a lot of good information out there on the web, and I like the books that have been recommended. I think there's even a tissue-culture forum out there somewhere - I'd have to ask Cathy. If there's interest, I can share a few sites, sources, and books that we have found on the list, otherwise feel free to e-mail me privately. Steve On Thu, 9 Sep 2010, Josh Young wrote: > This is a very interesting topic, how many of you have tried this and > been successful? Honestly, I wouldn't have ever assumed it to be > succesful outside of a sterile lab. -- Steve Marak -- samarak@gizmoworks.com