Begonia bogneri: Propagation and Giveaway

[RandyS]

That's awesome! Congrats!

Also kicking, myself for not entering a guess earlier. Meant to but forgot. If its not too late, I'd guess 15 (which is what I was going to go with earlier).

Absolutely. I might change the contest slightly. I originally said: "Guess how many plants I get from these 50 cuttings, after 5 months."

What I might do is try to isolate single plants from the cuttings (only the ones in the first batch of 50), which is what I typically do with Begonias I propagate, instead of leaving them in clumps. It's never occurred to me to do try that with B. bogneri. If I do that, I might end up sending out a plant to whomever's guess is closest to the total number of isolated plants, and if over 25, maybe to a second person whose guess is closest to the number of cuttings which produced plantlets. Hopefully that makes sense.

I'm not sure how much dividing the plants will increase the number. I don't know if it's even possible.

That said, I'm more optimistic about what were the initial 50 cuttings (the ones in the contest) than I was a few days ago. I'm hoping they'll produce a lot more than zero plants. Here's just a few of those cuttings. Labels in some cases, are guesses.





And some of the other cuttings (started March 3rd, not part of the contest). They are growing fast:


Hopefully it's obvious in the April 22 photo that none of the 3 largest plantlets seems to be a single plant. So hopefully I can divide some of the plantlets from what the original 50 produce, and increase the yield. We'll see. Again, I'm going to keep the ones immediately above (the March 3rd plants) intact.

Also important is that at any point now I can remove a plantlet--perhaps one of the biggest ones from those shown above for April 22. I will then have a backup plant. That's important partly because I turned most of the plant my friend gave me into cuttings. It was small to begin with, and it needs to recover.

 

[RandyS]

An update on these.

I removed cutting (from the second, non-contest set of cuttings) so I had a backup plant. It's in a 3 inch pot, with an inverted plastic cup taped to the top.

The plant is doing great:



It's still tiny, but growing fast. The leaf span is probably about half an inch. Note that it's actually a clump of plants.

So far, I've removed 14 cuttings from that set. They are doing well.



The original set (the ones for the contest) were doing less well. Again, possibly fungus, or some problem with the soil? So I removed 10 and potted them up (again, 3 inch pots, with inverted clear plastic cups on top). I transferred the remaining cuttings to new soil in a new container. The cuttings I potted up, really didn't have roots, so I was concerned. Still, I hoped they would recover. I quickly grabbed 4 today and took photos:









Notice a couple things: They look pretty happy. They seem to be developing roots. And they tend to have multiple plantlets--this is clearest in the 1st and 3rd one.

At some point, when they get a bit bigger, and have more roots, I'll have to playing around with dividing clumps of plantlets. Hopefully it's possible.

I removed (and transferred) the cuttings on April 25th. Photos were taken April 30th. So they're recovering pretty quickly.

 

[RandyS]

This just shows the progress of my backup plant. The others are a bit behind, I think because they are in lower light levels. So I plan to address that.

Note that this is growth over only 5 weeks. The second photo is after exactly 3 weeks, then exactly 2 more weeks after that.

 

[DragonsEye]

Growth really seems to be picking up speed.