Kai Witte

Hello Aaron, Congrats! Just let nature take its course - they will open when the seeds are ripe. BTW, that can take a long time! A good sign of ripening for most/many species is a notable elongation of the stalk. Breaking them open will often fail to give viable seed though.

Aaron

thanks Kai,
Some of them must be several months old. How is seed propogation with crypts? Difficult?
There really is no need to do it this way, since usteriana produces so many runners, but it would be an interesting experiment...

Kai Witte

Crypt seeds are pretty large. Thus, growing seeds is fairly easy (if the respective species is doing well for you, that is).

There are species which don't propagate easily by runners, so practising with seeds from species where this isn't a consideration still seems like a good idea to me.

The second reason to invest efforts in raising seedlings is that most of the available crypts are only known from one or few clones while seedlings (even from self-fertilizing) allow you to observe some of the natural variation which one tends to overlook when limited to clones widespread in the hobby.

Aaron

Great point here. With the usteriana, I have simply left them alone and the fruits just formed on there own. On other plants (a couple varieties of cordata) that have flowered have not shown fruit. Neither has my nurii. Is there a way to pollinate the flowers artificially? Looks like my coronata will be blooming in a couple of days and I would love to have seeds from it.

Kai Witte

Sure, you can help a plant to set seeds. The textbooks state that you'd need to transfer pollen from 3rd day stamens to the stigmas of 1st day female flowers (you have to carefully cut a fairly large window into the kettle). Ideally, you'd do this with plants from different clones originating from the same collecting locality. You don't have that? Don't despair - it usually seems possible to pollinate crypts with donors from the same clone. Moreover, me and several others have succeeded to obtain viable seed from a single flower: There seems to be a period on the second day when pollen is already present and the stigmas of the same inflorescence still receptive. It still is a bit of a hit or miss approach - so just give it a try but don't expect a high success rate!

Kai Witte

BTW, check out this pic from Jan's crypts pages if you're not fluent with the botanical terminology:
http://132.229.93.11/Cryptocoryne/Bo...res/spatha.gif

Xema

How can you determinate when is the first day???...

I think is a nice point this of getting seeds

Kai Witte

Sorry for being terse: 1st day of an inflorescence with opened spathe.

Xema

well, in my experience, the sphate gets opened some days during... So, do we take as first stage of the flower? when we can see the throat opened or when is totally opened?

Kai Witte

Hello Xema,

Sorry, I misunderstood you. With me the first functional day of flowering has usually been fairly obvious. Some inflorescences started to open already a day earlier (usually during the afternoon or later) but usually this was confined to partial opening of the limb (with the throat still pretty much covered). I have no idea wether such variation affects ripening of the male flowers.

All the observations I mentioned are pretty anecdotal (I'm not aware that anyone studied this in detail) and none of the suggestions are written in stone - so just experiment! And please report back, too. BTW, the key for ready male flowers are tiny droplets at the tip of the little tubes (get a good magnifying lens!). I usually cut the spadix and use forceps to take all male flowers out and then try to transfer those droplets with the pollen directly onto the stigmas. It's a little finicky but it sounds worse than it actually is...