Spring Surprise

In the wilds of Madagascar, photo by Christophe QUÉNEL, used with permission

It is now being vigorously alleged that spring has arrived. Whatever, it’s still very cold. So the heat mat needed to be switched on to speed up the germination of new coleus seeds—the go-to plant in these parts if you want to discombobulate the local woodchucks who appear not to know what to make of these gorgeously resilient things. 

The seeds were started in a small cell pack, just small enough to fit in the Precious Plant Unit where only the most special plants are housed, receiving 14 hours of gentle light from two 17-watt T5HO bulbs. The mat is underneath the small pots and was off for most of the winter. A couple of A. obesum seedlings had to be kicked out, having beautifully recovered from root pruning earlier on.

In this PPU, however, is the most precious in the not-so-impressive collection: a Pachypodium brevicaule seedling.

Part VI Adenium Seedlings: One Year Later.....

This is the 6th and final part of the series on growing adeniums from seeds. The seedlings we are looking at here are now one year old and almost ready to be treated as adult plants. 

First, a few words about growing hard. It is the easiest way to grow adeniums--all you need to do is leave it in the most killing sunny spot outdoors and forget to water it regularly. The plant's reaction to this neglect is to grow fat (to store water) and short (since it doesn't have to stretch towards the light the way it would if grown indoors).

The best thing about Adenium obesum, however, is that they can take a tremendous amount of abuse short of a flamethrower. 

In previous posts, you'd have read that these seedlings were repotted quite often, mostly because experimenting with roots is fun. These seedlings will probably stay in these pots until they outgrow them, though. They are planted in gritty mix, with two to three lava rocks underneath so that the roots will have crevices in which to curl around. The plan is to check them out at the end of spring when it is warm and sunny enough to power the seedlings through the abuse of being uprooted.  Someday, those roots will look great. We hope.

Plant Rescue: What to do with store-bought adenium

It was on sale, you couldn't resist it, it looked so odd, it called you by name, et cetera, et cetera. Whatever the reason, you end up walking out with your first store-bought adenium in a pot. What now?

Adventures With Gritty Mix

If you found a blog this obscure, you were probably looking up gritty mix. It's supposed to be excellent for plants although in the beginning it was unclear to me why. The explanation was sixty thousand kilometers long so that took care of that idea for a few months. It fell under the category of "I'll read that someday."

But the gritty mix is all over the web you just have to find out wtf is up with this thing anyway. You find out that the mix involves an odd assortment of ingredients in it, including the some strange substance normally used for baseball diamonds. WTF is up with that, right.  I thought baseball players were born with and walked around in their own personal cloud of dust and that's how you knew you'd grow up to be a baseball player. O well. 

The thing is that people who use this gritty mix swear up, down and sideways that the stuff was uber. I was particularly interested in its ability to keep plants from drowning. I never had the patience for figuring out which plant needs how much water and when. As a result, my jungle rotates between near-drowning and being bone dry, eventually leading to inevitable death by black thumb. 

This is annoying since I don't keep plants for the love of watering them. Watering is just something one needs to do so plants don't die. If this gritty mix will take guesswork out of that process, even the quest for baseball stuff might actually pay off.

It turns out it does!

Gritty Mix and Transplant Shock

Although the adult adeniums flourished straight away in the gritty mix, transplanting the seedlings at six months was not so uneventful. In fact, they went batshit almost immediately--first turning yellow, then dropping leaf after leaf until finally, 5 of 7 seedlings had gone completely bald.

Adult Adeniums in Gritty Mix

Potting Up Adult Adeniums

I repotted my adult adeniums in this mix at the end of spring 2013. it is now late summer and the results have been more than satisfactory. The nature of the potting medium makes it way easier to tend to these plants in that, they need no tending at all. Even if it rains everyday, the medium drains so freely that they never soak over a prolonged period. When it isn't raining, they are fine being watered twice a week, if I remember it.

The pots are top-dressed with whatever I have lying around, mainly to keep moisture from evaporating too fast. Here they are. Left photos were taken in early spring and right photos were taken late summer. None of them has flowered; I don't really care. 

Part IV: Transplanting Adenium Seedlings (with 2020 update)

Updated February 2015

So you have successfully germinated adenium seeds. What's next?

Adenium seedlings are not really delicate or sensitive. In an emergency (say, someone knocked your pot off the shelf or a cat sat on your week-old seedlings), you can repot them anytime. If sowing and germination has been uneventful; you can wait a couple of months, maybe more. Usually though, seedlings in their cribs will start demanding more nutrients and the more aggressive ones will siphon supply off of their neighbours, leaving you with runts. To avoid this, it is usually better to move the seedlings into their individual pots after two to three months.

Broad Strokes: Caring for Adult Adenium Plants

Adeniums are easy plants. The level of complexity in their care and cultivation depends entirely on how much trouble you are willing to go through and how much entertainment you intend to squeeze out of it.

Some people wire the branches like bonsai, some people prune both root and branches in spring to give the plant a new look. I've even seen videos of people actually braiding the roots of young plants so they would expand that way as they get older. There are probably more bizarre tricks to make the plant do more bizarre things. It is a testament to the versatility and incredible tolerance of the adenium.  Imagine subjecting african violets to this kind of sustained torture.

Personally, I am working towards keeping my regime simple. 

My adult adeniums were all bought online and arrived naked, i.e. bareroot. If you buy yours in the winter, they will have gone dormant and will not have leaves when you get them. In the warmer months or if they were grown in warmer climate, the leaves will probably be scraggly and disheveled. Don't worry, it will get over it.

Pot

From the get go, I decided I was going to grow these plants in wide, shallow pots purely because I prefer that look. So that's what I did---I took three huge plastic nursery pots left over from some other experiment best forgotten. Then I trimmed them down to a depth of about 4 inches. The plants stayed in those pots until I was sure they were not going to keel over from transport and transfer shock. The following spring, they were repotted in various sizes of what are known are azalea pots--they are wider than they are deep.

If you plant your adenium in a shallow pot and it already has an extensive root system, more of the plant will be exposed and the roots will continue to grow as the space allows below and around it. My cunning plan is to force my adult plants to grow more horizontally than vertically. 

You can use a deeper pot if you wish, as long as your potting medium drains really fast. The roots of this plant do not tolerate being soaked in standing water too long and will eventually get squishy from root rot.

Let's say you want the roots to be a particular shape. For instance, if I wanted the plant above to more or less develop roots the size of the pot it is in, all I need to do is leave it alone in that pot for as long as it takes it to outgrow it. You know your plant has outgrown its pot when you see roots coming out the bottom drain holes. Or when it is misshaping the pot. Or when you are having to water it two to three times more than you normally have to. Or all of the above.

Potting Medium

It's no use asking what is the best potting medium for adeniums. There are as many formulae as there are recipes for cheesecake. Some people recommend specific proportions of sand, compost, tree bark, and aerating materials such as perlite or pumice. Some use animal manure, coconut charcoal, rice husks, peanut shells even styrofoam bits. In the end, you do what suits you, your climate and your watering habits.

I initially planted my adeniums in pure crushed pumice since I already had that lying around. Most people use a 50-50 mix of potting soil and perlite. I don't like perlite, the keep floating to the top when I water. 

I tend to forget to water my plants so I don't like potting soil either because it usually has peat in it. When peat dries out too long, it becomes hydrophobic--it stops absorbing water. It takes extra amount of effort rehydrating the stuff and that is crap I don't want to deal with.

Eventually, I got around to mixing up a batch of what is known in the gardening hive as the gritty mix. It takes some effort building up this potting medium but all in all it has been worth the trouble since it radically simplified the care for my adeniums. You can read my post about it here.

But if you do not wish to go that way, I recommend making a medium composed of 3 parts crushed pumice and one part potting soil. If pumice is hard to find (I get mine from Amazon), you can use perlite. They float.

Light 

Adeniums grow best in direct sunlight--as much as you can provide for as long in the day as possible. 

Since I got my adeniums in the dead of winter, they sat on the shelf of a south-facing window until spring. When night time temperatures go up to 16C, you can put them outside in part shade at first, and slowly move them towards more sun in the summer. Pick a spot where they can get as much as 6 hours of full sun. 

Do this gradually--one week in part shade outdoors, one week in a spot with morning sun only, one week in a spot with morning and noon sun before finally, moving them out in full 6-hour sun or more.

You will notice a dramatic difference in vigor and growth. These plants once established, are happiest where it is hottest and sunniest. 

Heat and Dormancy

This can not be stressed enough. Adeniums need heat--a lot of it. You can never overheat an adenium plant, short of boiling it. I know growers dab smack in the middle of the equatorial desert and they grow theirs in the ground, out in the open. Weird hybrids---because they are weird---are sometimes grown in pots and given some shade when in bloom but otherwise, they get the same 40C to 50C that all their other adeniums get in that habitat. 

As long as adeniums are kept warm or even hot as well as intensely-lit during the winter, they need not slow down or go dormant. This means a temperature range of over 20C at night and warmer during the day. 

Personally, I keep about half of my adeniums in a dark, cool basement shelf during the winter just so I don't have to think about them. They are watered maybe once a month, just to keep them from desiccating. Most of the time, adeniums kept this way during the winter will send out unshapely growths but that's not an issue. I just hard prune them in spring and they grow back quickly. 

Watering

At the height of summer, my adeniums get water every three to four days, plus rain. But don't panic if you forget--they are tough, forgiving plants. 

Remember, though, that your potting medium must be fast-draining. If you put one liter of water in your pot and only a bit comes out, that means your soil is too dense and slow. Replace it!  

Fertilizer

This took a considerable amount of research but in the end, I decided the simplest way is the best way. I use an all-in-one fertilizer every time I water. The gritty mix makes this possible because the water runs freely through the potting medium and does not sit in a stagnant pool at the bottom of my pots, eventually burning the roots of the plants. This way, I don't have to keep track of fertilizing schedules.  I use Dyna-Gro FOL-100 Foliage-Pro Liquid Plant Food with 9-3-6 NPK ratio. The direction said to use a quarter teaspoon for a gallon of water, I use an eighth and fertilize every week.

Bugs and Pests

I have never actually seen anyone taking up residence in my adenium plants, other than spiders. But spiders are your friend--they will eat insects trying to colonize your plant. Having said that, I have a weak solution of soapy water that I spray on my adeniums occasionally, whenever I get paranoid and suspect nefarious buggy activities.

A couple of drops of non-detergent dish soap in a bottle of water has been adequate. Maybe I will get a real infestation and will have to launch a full-blown chemical warfare to defeat it. So far it hasn't happened. 

Pruning

Pruning is a lot of fun! Again, this is based purely on aesthetics. If you don't like the way your plant looks, you can always hack off a branch here and there, either to remove an offensive outgrowth or to encourage branching at certain points. Pruning can also encourage vigorous growth since you are introducing a tremendous amount of stress and the plant will react accordingly. Sometimes it can also trigger bloom. 

I use a box cutter, wipe it down with alcohol and slice diagonally so water does not bead on top in case it rains before that cut dries out. Just to be safe, sprinkle a bit of ceylon cinnamon (a mild fungicide) to prevent fungal growth whilst the injury is drying. Do this when you know it isn't going to rain everyday, right?

Go to this site for more information, it was certainly useful to me.

Extremely useful article on Good Growing Practices and Container Gardening

Related Posts: Adenium in Gritty Mix

                        Preparing adenium for winter

                        Sowing Adenium Seeds

                        

Part III: Adenium Seedlings Care

I think the most entertaining stage of adenium cultivation is when they are seedlings---that is the period after they germinate up to about a year, maybe even two. 

After sowing the adenium seeds, my arbitrary cut-off is two weeks--if seeds have not come up after two weeks, I consider the exercise to be over and done. At this point, you can remove the lid from your seedling container as well as the propagation mat, if you are using one.

Adenium obesum seedlings, Week 3

I have discovered that after three weeks, the seedlings are significantly more sturdy. By no means should you subject your seedlings to deliberate abuse. I'm just saying that if your cat should bat at it, it would still be fine.

Part I: Sowing Adenium Seeds In Cold Places

The best time to sow your adenium seeds is in spring. Having said this, however, don't let anyone tell you that you can not winter sow because you can. But you should not do this unless you know you will be able to provide adequate light and warmth throughout the cold season. Otherwise, you're just asking for avoidable aggravation. 

This article is about winter sowing adenium seeds, yeah? 

You will need a spot to incubate the seeds as well as to grow them during winter. This is a lantern that has been retrofitted with high-output fluorescent bulbs.

Where to get seeds

There are various online sellers of adenium seeds. Most of them would show you pictures of what the flowers are supposed to look like someday. This became a factor for me only because I really would rather not have pink. But I have since learned from the experience of others that the odds of you getting what is advertised are close to only 20 percent, if you are lucky. Parent plants have to be hand-pollinated in order for the resulting seeds to carry the desired traits. No clue about the odds of that being successful, even if the plants are isolated from other specimens.

Having said that, when I bought my seeds on Ebay, I still made my choices based on what flowers the grower was trying to come up with. So I ordered seeds that are someday supposed to bloom red so dark, it will be almost black. We can hope.

Most seed suppliers that I found are outside the US and the ones most favored by the Adenium Hivemind are in Taiwan and Thailand. They will ship internationally and take care of the necessary phytosanitary certificate for you if you are ordering for your own use. I don’t know what the volume threshold is but if you are buying more than that, you will probably need an import permit; in which case, you’re on your own.

Phytosanitary certificates, we have to assume, are issued to exporters of plant materials after they have met certain criteria ensuring that their stuff are not carrying some horrible disease that could kill off agricultural crops and destroy civilization as we know it.

If you are looking around for Adenium obesum seeds, I suggest you also check out Adenium arabicum—these are even funkier vegetables and some of them supposedly grow really fast. In this little how-to, I am only going to cover obesum and arabicum because they are what I have tried so far. I have no interest in the others.

Seed preparation

If you got your seeds from someone who knows exactly how fresh it is, you will not have to do any seed preparation. If you bought your seeds and have no way of knowing how old it is, you will have to soak your seeds in warm to tepid water for 2 to 6 hours.

Commercial growers usually dry out their seeds to prevent mould developing if they are not to be planted immediately after harvest. Sometimes, the seeds are just old and umphless. You will have to revivify them.

Successful germination depends largely on the age of the seeds but your odds are improved if you pre-soak them before sowing. So unless you got your adenium seeds fresh from the womb of an adenium seed pod, you should not skip this step. 

I have to mention this twice because I did get lazy on my second try and was able to germinate only 3 out of 10 seeds. Also my own sister somehow managed to ignore this one instruction and had to exhume her seeds after having just sowed them. So again: if you have no way of knowing whether your seeds are fresh or not, you have to soak it in warm to tepid water for 2 to 6 hours.
 

Soil preparation

As adult plants, adeniums thrive better in very airy mix—mine are planted in a similar mix that I use for my haworthias, consisting mainly of pumice and about 5 percent peat moss or potting soil, whichever I have available.

But to germinate adenium seeds, you want something with more soil that drains well but holds a bit more moisture. I have successfully used just normal potting soil mixed with about 25 percent perlite. Catus mix will work too but I think even that is too heavy. If I used that, I probably would still add perlite to it. This early in their development, the seeds and the emerging seedlings require to be consistently moist.

You should prepare enough potting medium to fill your container because your seedlings will be staying in it for at least 60 days or more.

How to choose the container

What you want is something at least 3 inches deep with drain holes. Unlike, say, coleus, adenium seedlings will be staying in that container longer and will need more room to grow roots.

The first time I sowed adenium seeds, I used a Tupperware container. I drilled three drain holes at the bottom and covered that with a piece of screen so stuff doesn't fall out. My pilot seedlings are still in there so the second time I sowed adenium seeds, I decided to use a salad box. You can get one of those high-tech, special-purpose seedling thingies if you want. I personally think they are not deep enough. Salad boxes are good. They are the right depth, they fit the spot I want to put the seedlings on while they are growing and they come with their own lid. I cut about half-inch holes at the bottom and air holes on the lid. Not to be obsessive (right) but I also put appropriately-sized screens on the airholes to keep bugs from getting in.

You can use any other pot or container that you have, just make sure they have drain holes and prepare a transparent lid for them. With holes.

Keep  in mind that over time, the planting medium will settle a bit, like so:

When these seeds were planted, the soil was up to that line on the container. But now it has settled a bit. If this container was opaque, there will be that much shade on the seedlings. Just something to keep in mind.

Light and heat

Things are handled a bit differently in the tropics. But anywhere there are seasons, you will have to consider your light source and the temperature.

Adenium seeds need temperatures between 25C and 35C to germinate. It makes obvious sense to sow your seeds in the summer but I don't care about obvious. I wanted my plants to already have a presentable caudex by December so I sowed in the dead of winter (January and February).

There is no way I can heat up my room to the level that these seeds needed to germinate. So, after a little research, I opted to get a thing called a propagation mat. It’s basically a heated pad with enough juice to warm up your soil. I bought mine from Amazon and from the product reviews, I actually found a wealth of information on how to germinate seeds, in general.

First of all, you want some insulation between your surface and the propagation mat: Otherwise, most of the heat would just transfer to the table, shelf and whatnot. You want to block that transfer so the heat goes up instead. I used one of those stiff half-inch Styrofoam things.

My room is heated up to 20C during the day and to 16C at night. In this set-up, I’ve measured the surface temperature of the soil going down to as low as 25C and going up to as high as 36C. I decided peaking at 36C was probably too much for the seeds so I propped up the container on the closest objects I had---a bunch of river stones I had used to topdress another pot nearby. This creates some air movement between the heat source and the container.

Light is the other important thing. Without going heavily into photometrics, let me just say this—plants need different kinds of light conditions for their specific survival strategy. Think of the sun as a buffet table, serving every conceivable dish from every conceivable cuisine. Plants take what they need. As far as I can tell from my research, your artificial lighting set-up depends entirely on what kind of plant you are growing and how sensitive it is to the kind and amount of light you provide. You will not believe the amount of detail enthusiastic growers go into to be able to grow impossible things in impossible places.

In the end, I decided my adenium seedlings will be grown under two 17-watt T5 High Output fluorescent bulbs—nice little things, they don’t waste so much of their energy generating heat instead of light. The container is positioned about 4 inches away from the bulbs—it provides them with as much light as a 17-watt T5 bulb can give without scorching.

I’m sure they could all use more light than I am providing. They will get more when it’s warm enough to put them outside. In the meantime, they appear to be satisfied and I am not willing to go through conniptions to give them heaven, you know? Because then it will be work, not fun.

In short, do whatever works for you. My low-power, high-output arrangement works fine for me.

Sowing

• Prepare one cup of chamomile tea and let it cool. This is a mild anti-fungal solution. Moisten your potting soil with this brew—just enough so it is wet but not soggy.
• Fill your container with the moist potting material all the way to the top, leaving about half an inch to an inch of space from the rim. If your container is opaque, sowing the seeds too low will put it in the shade part of the day and your seedlings will develop the tortured look as they stretch out towards the light, something known as etiolation. Not pretty.
• Put the seeds down on their sides, about 2 inches apart to give them enough room for growth.
• Cover the seeds with about an eighth inch of your potting mixture or, better yet, dry sand. Remember: DO NOT BURY. Just sort of cover them up a bit so they are not exposed. That's about an eighth of an inch of soil.
• Spritz with water.
• Put the container on the propagation mat and cover with a transparent lid—you can use cling plastic, just poke several holes in to provide some airflow while also keeping humidity high. The only problem with using cling plastic is you can’t as easily lift it when you need to mist the seedlings.
• You may need to mist the surface every day. Watch that it doesn’t dry out. 

Here's mine, Adenium arabicum incubating.

Fertilization

No need. This debate happens waaaay later, after the plant has been moved out of their first or even second pots. There are two distinct schools of thought about growing hard and growing fast. What I can glean from these discussions so far is that it seems to boil down to a matter of aesthetic preference. More on this later.

In any case, you're done sowing. Now, twiddle your thumbs.

Summer Sowing

Sowing adenium seeds in summer is a considerably simpler matter. Once night temperature reaches an average of about 20C, you can sow adenium the same way except you would not need the heating mat. Put your seedling tray in bright shade, however, not direct sun. Make sure the surface is moist. I covered my container with that lid you see above, mainly because I did not want to have to bother with bugs. 

Next: Germination 
Related Post: Caring for Adult Adenium Plants

Part II Adenium From Seeds: Germination

It normally takes about 3 to 4 days for the first seeds to start pushing through the soil cover. When they started doing that in my pot, I thought I had left the seeds uncovered all this time. But looking at it with my zoom lens, I saw green bits going into the soil. Aaaah. That’s what “heaving” looked like. Who knew.

First one out, 3 days after sowing

Literally within hours, the thing will start actually stretching upwards, like so---

Same seed, same day, hours later.

Now this is the part where some midwifery will be involved. That seed cover is essentially dead stuff. If this was a seed sown in the wild, that seed cover is probably useful as energy source. The natural balance of good critters and bad critters in the soil will ensure neither would overwhelm the vulnerable seedlings. But you’re not sowing in the wild, you’re sowing in what is probably fertilizer-enriched potting soil from the garden center. So take it out, your seedling doesn’t need it. If you leave it there until it drops, fungi may start partying on it and possibly take over your seedlings. 

First, spritz it with water to soften the seed cover. Then, either using a pair of tweezers or your fingertips, ease the seed cover out in the direction it is pointing, obviously. That will hopefully lessen the resistance. Don't leave it in the pot, by the way. Toss it. You can use a tweezer or even a pin. I have tried both and they work. Just don’t use your fingers if you can help it, or you might pull the whole thing out.

Carefully de-cloaked

I mention that because naturally, I actually managed to do just that. I wanted to find out whether I can slide the sheath off with my fingers. The whole plant slid out of the soil--root and all. After the mandatory 2-second panic, I grabbed a pencil, poked a shallow hole into the soil and very gently put the seedling back in. That particular plant survived the manhandling and is still alive, thank you.

Two days after the manhandling incident

Keep misting the seedlings when the surface feels dry to the touch until all seeds have germinated. My arbitrary cut-off is two weeks, by which time all successful seeds should have already germinated. I am sure there are folks out there with the patience to wait longer, maybe six more years. I dont. So I'm calling it an 87.5 percent success rate (7 seeds out of 8).

My obesums sprouted within days of each other, by Day 7, they were all out except one. My arabicums, on the other hand, were a different story. The first batch was a stunning failure---only two came out. Germinating in a sealed container without airholes, they were quickly overwhelmed by the green mat of goo so thick that they had to be transferred to another pot after only a week.

My second attempt at Adenium arabicum seeds was more interesting. Following exactly the same procedure, I got 7 sprouts out of 10 seeds.  Unlike the obesums, however, the germination process took a total of 19 days.

After two weeks, check out the differences between these seedlings, all planted at the same time. The last one germinated long after I have had to remove the lid--early sprouters were pushing it up. The first two seedlings are the same size as the seeds sowed two weeks before. Plants do what plants do. Go figure.

Day 21

Related Post: Damping Off Disaster

Next: Part III Caring for Adenium Seedlings
 

Previous Post : Part I Sowing Adenium Seeds In Cold Places