Tecophilea/plant mixes

Jane McGary janemcgary@earthlink.net
Sun, 31 Jul 2005 12:14:29 PDT
Like John Lonsdale, I do not water Tecophilaea cyanocrocus in summer, when 
it's dormant. Mine are in the driest of my five ranges of frames. I just 
repotted them, and noticed that it seems to take seedlings about 4 years to 
reach flowering size here. This year, after a warm winter, many of the 
corms made good-sized offsets. They make few but large offsets.

After growing them in both the bulb frame and in my frost-free solarium, or 
plant room, I learned that the ones in the frame, which experience much 
colder temperatures, invariably flower better. Indeed, I get generally 
better results with marginally hardy bulbs in the frames. Many are 
surprisingly resistant to frost as long as they're not very wet. I do lost 
a few things with this kind of experimentation, but the increased vigor and 
flowering of the ones that succeed makes up for it, I think.

John mentioned that he repotted bulbs into slightly moist compost not 
because he thought it was a good idea, but because the purchased compost 
(in the British sense, not the American) comes that way. Some summers I'm 
forced to do the same because the sand pile and the forest topsoil I use 
are still moist from late rains. I don't like it either; however, one year 
when the mix was really damp, I noticed that the Calochortus repotted into 
it were unusually robust the following season.

Jane McGary
NOrthwestern Oregon, USA



More information about the pbs mailing list