FlytrapCare Carnivorous Plant Forums

cvlover wrote:You want to test water propagation, agar propagation or tissue culture propagation?
You don’t test tissue culture propagation this time do you?
Water propagation: is a traditional way to propagation plants such as vegetables in water. Cut a brand and dip it into to water then a few weeks later plant got root and transfer to soil. However, many plants don’t like water propagation such as rose, apple… They prefer soil and required root hormone to improve root propagation.
Agar propagation: You want to replace water by agar. Agar will give more root and faster than water? Agar is much cheaper than water? What are the pros and cons in replacing water by agar? You can try for fun but I don’t see a “big advantage” in using agar vs water.

Notes: “(no sugar is normally added to soil, but needed in TC medium)”
Sugar is the nutrient for plants, fungi and bacteria in vitro and ex-vitro. If you mix sugar in a cup of water or in soil you see fungi, bacteria all over place few days later. They will kill your plant the same way when you get contamination in vitro. It is the reason why people don’t add sugar to soil.

Why so combative? Let me see if I can answer these:

Why not try all three? Not simultaneously mind you, but each separately with notes on observations and measurements?

Why wouldn't I be testing tissue propagation? Isn't the hobby about learning? I believe that the existing procedures being done may be the most successful and productive to date, but there may be room for improvements.

I have done water propagation on many species of plants, including Gardenias and Roses with just distilled (and tap) water and hand blown glass rooting "jars". The interest is that if you can do that with a species that is known for needing nutrient rich soil, what can you do with a species that is known to be thriving in nutrient poor soil?

Why not use just Agar and water? Most plants like to have some sort of support material to grow in. If there has been success in just water, what would adding an inert support material do? It would be kind of difficult to send home plants with friends just free floating in water! Also as a nutrient poor medium, it may be less likely to mold or get bacterial colonies as nutrient media does. Since VFTs are known to require nutrient poor soil, they would seem the perfect subject for such a test.

Finally, although I didn't mention sugar in my posts, I have seen many backyard gardener posts on the web where people mix instant gelatin powder (the sweetened, flavored kind) to their plants as a soil amendment with reported good results.

My thoughts are as follows:

It seems you already believe that some of the questions you posed have been answered as shown by your tone. Of the ones that didn't sound rhetorical, the rest seemed to be condescending in tone.

I believe that there is no such thing as a stupid question. I also believe that there is always room to improve our hobby and the methods we use. It is in that spirit that I propose the questions in my previous posts.

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I am sorry that we misunderstood each other. I don't offend anybody and never said " question is stupid". I discuss about water propagation and agar with water. Water propagation is good. Most of my vegetable in my backyard are from water propagation: mint, coriander, onion, and herbs.

I discuss sugar because my friend lost his expensive orchid collection. Some body in an orchid forum said that COCONUT WATER is a good nutrient which contains sugar, hormones, amino acids.. and it's good for orchid. It's make sense and he tried it on his collection: at first his orchids look good: green leave and more root but later all of his Cattleya get fungi and virus diseases. When he realizes that Coconut water is good for plant but all so good for fungi/virus it's too late. Coconut water or sugar is a knife with 2 blades: it help you and it may hurt you; use it with caution.

Some suspect that good nutrient soil (high fertilizer) kills CPs because fungi/bacteria (F/B) in soil kill CPs not fertilizer. CPs live in a "poor nutrient" environment for thousand/million years and the environment has a minimum/limited F/B that CPs can survive. Now we provide nutrient which grows CPs and also grows F/B and some F/B indeed kill CPs. It could be a reason why CPs not die in high fertilizer TC media. It's just a theory and need more discussion.

I now understand. I apologize for my tone in the last post. Funny how even after many years of being online, one can misinterpret someone's tone by their writing style. Again I apologize.

The thing that drew me to this thread was the original question posed as I understood it. And that was how can a plant that under normal conditions thrives in a nutrient poor environment require those nutrients for tissue propagation.

Which got me to wondering if you can propagate plants in a nutrient poor culture media. And if I am wondering something that I have been unable to answer through research, experimentation is the next step.

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