Anthurium Seeds: A Brief Guide To Anthurium Pollination
Anthurium Seeds
Most people propagate their anthurium plants through cuttings. But the downfall of this approach is that the offspring that is produced is identical to the parent plant. If you want variety in the anthurium flowers that you produce, you will need to learn how to pollinate your anthuriums in order to get them to produce seeds. The plants that you grow from these seeds will have traits from both of their parent plants, but sometimes you can get something completely unexpected due the presence of recessive traits. The most challenging element about growing anthuriums from seeds is getting the seeds to form in the first place. To do this, you will need to learn about anthurium pollination.
These flowers have both male and female components, but usually they won’t self pollinate, because the stigma is active before pollen is produced. This ensures that wild plants are cross pollinated as frequently as possible to improve the genetic diversity of the species.
The first thing you must do is gather pollen. Wait until the flower produces pollen and use a brush to collect the pollen in a vial. Store this vial inside a freezer until another flower is ready for pollination. Or use the pollen immediately if another flower is already ready for pollination.
After a flower blooms, wait for the stigma to secrete nectar. When this happens, the flower is ready for pollination. Use your brush to dust pollen over the stigmas. Then all you need to do is wait until seeds are formed.
You may have to wait for a full year for the seeds to mature. They are mature when they stop growing and start to fall off the spadix. Pop the berries that contain the seeds and plant them immediately. After a couple of weeks, the seeds will begin to grow and then, you will only have to wait another two to three years to find out what the new flowers you have created will look like. It takes about two to three years for anthuriums to produce their first flowers after sprouting from seeds.
Anthurium Potting Soil: How To Create The Ideal Potting Soil For Anthuriums
Tulip Anthurium
Choosing or making the ideal anthurium potting soil is important if you wish to grow a healthy anthurium plant. If you use a bad potting soil, your anthurium may grow slowly, stop flowering and even die. Before I tell you how to create the ideal anthurium potting soil, I am going to give you a little background on the growing media that wild anthuriums grow in, so that you can understand what makes for a great potting soil.
Wild anthuriums don’t grow in pots. I hope that this isn’t a big surprise. They come from South America and they grow in tropical jungles, primarily upon the trunks of trees.
Growing on trees allows them to receive a lot of water from rain and fog, and it allows this water to drain away rapidly. They’re unusual plants because they love moisture, yet continuous exposure to moisture can kill them. Growing on trees allows them to keep their roots out of standing water and allows their roots to receive plenty of oxygen.
When choosing or making a potting mix you must remember the reason why they grow on trees. Most out of the box planting mixes retain too much water. So if you use these types of mixes your plant may die from being exposed to too much moisture. The surplus water may prevent oxygen from reaching the roots and allow anaerobic bacteria and fungi to grow.
You can prevent this by making your own potting mix. Your mix needs to drain well and it ought to be light and loose to keep your anthurium healthy. Here are two excellent potting mix recipes.
High End Anthurium Potting Mix
This mix will cost you an arm and a leg. Well, maybe not that much. But it is probably one of the better all around mixes for anthuriums. I must warn you, it will take a little work to procure all of the ingredients and mix them well. The links in the recipe below will take you to Amazon.com where you can buy the ingredients if you can’t find them in your local garden store.
5 parts Miracle Gro moisture control mix
2 parts peat moss
2 parts orchid mix
1 part perlite
To make this, just find something to use as a measuring device, like a pot. Then put five scoops of the miracle grow potting mix, two scoops of the peat moss, and so on, into a large container and mix thoroughly.
To save time, I would recommend mixing up more than you need at the moment and storing the excess in a water proof bag or container for when you need to repot your anthuriums in the future.
Simple Anthurium Potting Soil
If you don’t want to go all out with the high end potting mix, you can use this potting mix recipe, instead. It will still work well and it costs less and is easier to make.
1 part peat moss
1 part fir bark
1 part perlite
The same instructions, as above, apply. Mix thoroughly and make more than you need to save time in the future.
Hawaiian Anthurium Potting Mix
When you are growing a lot of anthuriums and I am talking in the tens of thousands (I’ve never counted) it is simply not economical to use commercial potting mixes. But here in Hawaii, the solution is simple and economical. We grow our anthuriums in volcanic cinder. It drains really well, but it also has a lot of pores so it holds on to just the right amount of water too.
We buy cinder by the truck load for our farm. But if you don’t happen to have a cinder cone a few miles away, either of the potting mix recipes that I described above should work well for you.
Anthurium Farming: How Anthurium Growers Raise Anthurium Flowers
Anthurium Farm
In Hawaii, growing anthurium flowers is a big business. Anthuriums are grown on more than two hundred commercial farms. Some of these farms have been in business since the 1950s, which was the decade that farmers first started growing anthuriums commercially. Keep reading and I will describe the techniques that these farms use to grow massive quantities of anthurium flowers.
The first step in growing these flowers commercially is building a shade house. The purpose of the shade house is to provide shade to the plants that will be grown in it. The reason why shade is vital to growing anthuriums is that these plants would tend to get burned by the sun if they were to be grown in direct sunlight. To build a shade house, the parcel on which it is going to be built must be cleared and graded with a bulldozer. After the land is leveled off, galvanized pipes are set in place. These pipes are used as columns to support the cables and shade cloth that are used to construct the shade house.
After the shade house is completed, volcanic cinder or other growing media is distributed on the ground of the shade house using tractors. The cinder normally comes from volcanic cinder cones and is brought to the farm in large dump trucks. Usually a layer of cinder about two feet thick is placed on the floor of the shade house.
Once the cinder is in position, anthurium plants are acquired. They can originate from top cuttings of more mature plants in other parts of the farm or they can be the result of vegetative propagation. They are then planted in the shade house.
Usually, Hawaii’s frequent rain showers provide enough moisture for the plants. But, when the rainfall is insufficient the anthurium plants may be watered through overhead sprinklers.