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Old February 13, 2011   #61
David Marek
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Join Date: Jan 2010
Location: St Charles, IL zone 5a
Posts: 142
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Wendy, Those look great!

For our purposes here, my background is in propagating bedding plants from cuttings. With that said, progress report on mine so far: My light source is from 2 regular T12 4 foot fluorescent tubes, on 14 hours a day. After I put the whole tubers on the light stand the sprouts almost stopped developing quite abruptly and both the tuber skins and sprouts turned purple. The sprouts are between 1/4 and 1 inch long with knobby looking things at the base that look like they want to become roots. The sprout tips are still tight, no leaves. The tubers are starting to shrivel so I put a clear cover over them and moved them a bit away from the lights.

My plan: I expected to have enough of a sprout on the tuber to cut a 1-1.5" tip with a bit of leaves starting to form, then stick it in a peat type potting soil- done in a similar way to, say, a zonal geranium, jade, sedum, etc. This would leave the "mother tuber" intact to produce another set or two of sprouts to repeat the process. Each batch would *in theory* have a different maturity date (?). The plan would be to eat the early ones and save the last batch planted (therefore last to mature?) for next year.

I see you have lots of roots already- which usually means a sigh of relief for me. The section taken from the tuber should help it to really take off. Let's say they do take off, (yours should) my plan B (maybe more like plan B, section 1, if I ever get there) would be to then take cuttings from these established seedlings (cutting of a cutting, of sorts... but don't mess up all your nice heathy new plants), stick those new cuttings in soil, repeat.... do you see where the exponential ("rapid") increase starts to kick in?

Anyway, at week 4 my tubers are burning up their energy without much to show for it so far. I will be putting the tubers in a tray of soil very soon, where they should be happier. I will try cutting apart some of the larger tubers, that looks like it works well.
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