Sinningia leucotricha with new fuzzy leaves

It’s so fluffy I want to hug it!
Growing succulents from seeds
It’s so fluffy I want to hug it!
All of my outdoor caudiciforms have now lost all of their leaves and gone dormant. I really want to keep them outside over winter and they should be able to handle it, but in the back of my mind I just know I’m going to bring them indoors when it gets colder.
My Sinningia leucotricha is looking mighty adorable right now. So many fluffy leaves are popping up at once.
This is probably the end of the growing season for the Ibervillea seedlings. The leaves have started to wilt.
I really like how the caudexes look at the moment, even though they aren’t perfectly round. At 10 months, they’re somewhere between 2-3 cm wide.
165 days after sowing and still only 1 out of 12 seeds germinated. This little 2 months old seedling has developed a caudex the size of a pea already.
I decided to change my germination method, hopefully to speed up the process a bit. I dug out all of the seeds I could find (found 4, but one went down the drain when I cleaned them over the sink..) and went for the “wet tissue in a plastic bag” method.
EDIT (April 10 – 2017): Received 3 additional packets with 18 D. Elephantipes seeds and placed 6 of the new seeds in the wet tissue today.
An impressive 1,7 cm caudex on a 3 months old seedling. Thought I had to dig deeper to find it, but this time I only had to remove a few loose stones.
Gotta love the fat little root on its way out of the soil.
I may have succeeded in finding a happy little Dioscorea Mexicana after a search that went on for way too long. It’s also slowly becoming clear to me that I have spent more money on this one hobby over the last 2 years, than any other hobby I’ve had my entire life combined. But man, this feels good!
I have read about Ibervillea being fast growers, but I’m still a bit amazed that the caudex is 1 cm in diameter already. They’re not even 2 months old.
– aka the coolest caudiciform I’ve seen.
We’ve got germination! It took 39 days for the first seedling to show up, but I’m so glad the seeds didn’t turn out to be duds. So far 1 out of 12 seeds germinated.
Method:
They were all sown 1 cm below the surface of the soil (a random mix of aquarium sand, cat litter, pumice, leca, lava rock, zeolite and a tiny bit of peat) and covered with a plastic bag to ensure high humidity. They’re placed under a grow light set to 11 hours with temperatures reaching 25-30° C.
I’m starting to rethink my grow rack strategy. Both of them shoot out vines and latch onto the top rack that is holding my grow light in place, which isn’t very practical.
I dug out one of the Ibervillea caudexes to see how much they have grown in a month. They are already 6-7 mm wide!
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