I agree with everything that Joel wrote and his understanding and assessment of things is essentially the same as mine.
jkochuni wrote:I’m extremely disheartened to read a post that insinuates that I’m deceiving the buyer by the photos/auctions I post. I properly label all my plants, and do not rename them as some new variety.
Joel said it very well. I too don't believe that any deception was deliberate. And I know for certain you would never mislabel any plants.
jkochuni wrote:I would hope that anyone purchasing a variety/cultivar would take time to investigate it. X11 and most of the plants I sell can be found on the CP Photofinder
Unfortunately I don't think that the person who won the X11 did take the time to investigate it (I've been in contact with them). And, as was mentioned before, that is no fault of yours. We are each individually responsible for our own actions, and that person was responsible for bidding on a plant that they didn't research well.
jkochuni wrote:The B52 x Giant Form that I have posted for sale has been deflasked for about 3 months, and is a beautiful plant.
I don't think that anyone is arguing that. It certainly looks like a nice healthy "typical" flytrap to me. However, I think that most people are simply confused as to why a plant, which really is an unknown quatity at this point (and looks similar to hundreds of other flytraps I have on my grow rack right now), would be fetching such a high price on eBay. And personally, I question why it would even be put up for auction. Three months ex vitro, in my opinion, certainly isn't enough time to evaluate a clone to make any sort of determination as to whether or not it's sale worthy. And as to why someone would bid $100 on a plant that is a complete unknown is beyond my comprehension, but certainly not your fault. The entire plant still appears to be smaller than a quarter right now from what I can tell from the photos. Do you have any photos of adult plants of that particular clone? Have you grown it ex vitro for a full year to know what it's growth characteristics are? If not, I don't know how anyone could say that the plant is unique or more beautiful than any other "typical" flytrap and determine the value of it.
With Steve and I being in a similar position ourselves, my guess is that people trust and respect your opinion. And if you say that this is a nice enough plant to list and sell on eBay, then it must be worth quite a bit. If there is any deceit happening, it would only be implicit (not intentional) based on the fact that your opinion is quite valuable to many growers and evidently you chose this plant to sell because you think that it's special in some way. But in this case, I don't see how anyone, including you, knows what this plant will really turn out to be.
My main criticism for the listing is this: People trust and respect your opinion on these plants and listing a rather ordinary appearing clone (at least so far) for sale so soon without evaluating it fully means that people are basically bidding it up so high because they trust you. And you don't make it clear in the auction that what makes the plant interesting is that "you do not know what it will become" (as you said). Instead the auction says:
For auction is a new Venus Flytrap cross called 'B52 x Giant Form'. As the name indicates, this variety was produced by crossing the Venus Flytrap varieties 'B52' and 'Giant Form'. 'B52 x Giant Form' has very unique cilia, and maintains a reddish-orange coloration under sufficient light. 'B52 x Giant Form' is a very beautiful new cross that is simply stunning and unusual. Don't miss out on the opportunity to be the first person in the Unites States to own this new variety.
Those seem to be very clearly spelled out characteristics to me,
not "you do not know what it will become" as you say here.
jkochuni wrote:What makes B52 x Giant Form interesting is you do not know what it will become.
That's true, but is is really worth $100+ to find out? You can buy 40 seeds for $10 and get that same opportunity 40 times over. That was the major point of this entire thread, I think. Bidding $100 on a tiny seedling that looks quite ordinary just seems like insanity to many (most) people.
And the price of this auction was bid up early on, which seems even more peculiar. In particular, there seem to be two bidders that regularly bid up the price on quite a few of your auctions very early on. One of them bids on many, many flytraps from many vendors on eBay (t**a) and is a regular FlytrapStore customer. The other (h**h) has some really odd bidding habits and is someone that bids on no one else's auctions. I wrote in a previous post:
Matt wrote:
* bids a lot on homegrowncps auctions
* bids exclusively on homegrowncps auctions (all except one bid in the last 30 days)
* bids excessively high early on in the auctions
* rarely bids on the last day of the auctions
* has never won a homegrowncps' auction despite regularly bidding very, very high (up to and over $100)
* has 0% positive feedback with 91 feedbacks given
To me, that bidding behavior is very suspicious. Jason, have you tried contacting this particular bidder to verify that they're a real person? It may be worth looking into. If I saw that particular type of behavior on FlytrapStore eBay auctions, I certainly would be concerned.
idontlikeforms wrote:3 months not being just out of tissue culture is really a subjective statement. To one person that may be the case but to others, myself included, that is still pretty fresh. IMO, that is way to soon to objectively state that this plant is better looking than most others. I see in your listing that you comment on the color of it. I can tell you that my typicals typically have more color than the plant in your photo. I've deflasked a number of VFTs before and smaller specimens of B52s for example were fully red on the inside of their traps even just about 4 months out of the jar. They also had more yellowish leaf coloring, not unlike the B52 x Giant Form you're selling on Ebay now. The thing is that if a VFT is low in nitrogen and is given sufficient lighting it will color up like this. It will also have yellowish leaves, not richly green colored ones and it can turn red on the leaf spine and on the new traps unfolding too. Seeing this type of coloring in a VFT 3 months out of jar is not a true indicator of what it will look like when much larger and older. I think if you fed the plant in the photo for a couple of months you would see it turn greener and also have less red and that would be a normal phenomenon of VFT growing too.
I just want to echo what Joel wrote here. I too have deflasked perhaps 1500-2000 genetically unique flytraps over the last couple of years. The B52 x Giant Form seedling on eBay looks like the vast majority of them do 3 months out of TC growing under artificial lights.
jkochuni wrote:Royal Red and Holland Red really don't appear different.
I can certainly tell them apart (Holland Red has much longer leaves and longer cilia that are placed closer together than does Royal Red). But they're certainly not substantially different. Many of the red varieties do look quite similar and aren't easily distinguished. In fact, with many of the named flytrap clones out there, there are at least 2 or 3 other clones that look very similar with only subtle differences.
jkochuni wrote:I’m not sure of the real reasoning behind some of the posts on this thread, but I do have my opinion, which I will respectfully keep to myself.
I wish you would have elaborated more here on your opinion and which posts you're referring to, Jason. But I would guess that you're referring to some of my posts in this thread. And I'd also guess that your opinion is that I see you as competition and that I'm trying to put you in a bad light to keep down the competition. Those are just my guesses though. Honestly, I do see you as competition and perhaps that makes me more critical of your auctions than I would otherwise be. But I feel that everything I've written in this thread is honest and true (from my perspective) and my intent was not to paint a bad picture of you. I respect you and your tissue culture skills very much and I really do want to see you succeed. I feel like we both can succeed with our own carnivorous plant stores and perhaps even complement each other's inventory providing more options to carnivorous plant enthusiasts. And where our inventories overlap, I feel like that would benefit the carnivorous plant community as a whole because that will drive down prices to where more hobbyists can afford to buy the plants. I don't feel particularly threatened by you or any other carnivorous plant vendors and I really do want to see all of us succeed. I feel secure with what Steve and I have created together, having carved out a fairly secure selling space with our large online presence being fueled by traffic from search engines leading to many repeat customers through nice plants and excellent service.
What I'm expressing in this thread about this particular auction is just my opinion, nothing more. I honestly did feel absolutely horrible (sick to my stomach even) when I saw the auction price for this seedling over $100. None of the other auctions I've seen go for high prices have had the same effect on me because they have been for plants that are fairly well defined.