Organic Gardening ToolsA blog about gardening tools and supplies.

Ever thought about how anthurium growers cultivate scores of anthurium blossoms every year? Well the answer is easy, they raise them upon millions of plants. But how do they get these countless plants in very first place? Their magic formula is a method known as tissue culture. Tissue culture is simply put: a procedure used for cloning plants. This is why every anthurium of a given variety looks so comparable; they’re genetically identical clones.

The tissue culture procedure commences with the farmer selecting the very best, most beautiful anthurium that he can uncover. Selecting the very best possible flower is essential since simply no one wants a million clones of rubbish. If the cultivator is going to invest enough time and money to produce a million copies, you can be positive that he wants to uncover the best possible flower to duplicate. After this valuable plant is picked out, the cultivator takes it to a lab.

At the laboratory, a technician first checks that the specimen is free of disease and then cuts off a small piece of it. He will then sterilize the sample and put it into a beaker that contains an agar based medium that’s primed with special plant hormones which trigger the specimen to create a callus, which is an undifferentiated mass of tissue.

The callus is divided into numerous portions and then permitted to develop again. This method is replicated several times. When enough plant material is produced, the calluses are transplanted to growing media which contains a different set of plant hormones that cause the undifferentiated tissues to turn into roots and shoots. This causes numerous baby plants to sprout from each callus.

When the baby plants have become huge enough, they’re transplanted into fresh flasks to grow even more. When they’ve attained a size where they can survive in open air, they’re taken out of the beakers and transplanted in to larger planting pots. For a time, these fresh plants are permitted to mature inside the manipulated conditions of a garden greenhouse. Once they’ve grown large enough and adjusted to growing in the open air, they’re sent back to the farm and planted within the fields at the farm.

Zeke is a self-employed blogger that publishes articles regarding anthurium care.