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The Corroboree
planthelper

i want more pinkies

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success!

the hand pollinating must have worked a treat, i have a new personell record, 19 seeds in one chillito! :)

an other thing is though, that one time i left a chillito for around 3 or 4 day's after emerging, and than over night it dissapeared, definately taken by an unknown animal.

so i make sure i take all the fruits off within 3 day's of first spotting them.

sorry for the side track, but has any of you experienced those pest symptoms with lophs?

perfect concentric holes (3mm or so in diametre), some of them look like the solid bundle of white hairs has been pulled out, and a hole left in it's place. sorry no pic.

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The flowers are emerging once again but more importantly so are the fruit which didnt set at the end of last season. Ridiculous amounts of seed in these fruits so dont let the ants and mice get to em. The most so far for me is 33 seeds from the one fruit but out of the half dozen or so i have picked off so far there has been well over 20 seeds in each. The caespitosa fruits however still only have the small numbers of seed.

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33 is a good score, man!

mine start kicking aswell again now, and as you say, the heat pushes out the fruits which must have laid dormant over winter.

i get only a few fruits, and i seperate the flesh of the seeds just by hand, but does anyone know how it's done with bigger numbers?

how does one obtain "clean seed"? kitchen sieve and bleached water???

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Wow 33 nice one PD, a few of my plants have just pushed out fruits I will have to check em out.

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what a bunch of obsessives, you're counting the seeds from each fruit, lol!!

Well I am not having much pinkies anyway, so I don't have anything to count anyways.

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what a bunch of obsessives, you're counting the seeds from each fruit, lol!!

 

no, we count just the ones with heaps of seeds.

most of my other fruits contain only a few seeds.

i think competition, to achieve high numbers of seed production is alright, hehehe.

if lot's of different flowers flowered at the same time, and all got handpollinated at least twice a day, than you get the best seed set.

mine started flowering, but only a flower here and there, so not enough cross polinattion.

i guess, the best would be to store some pollen in the fridge, and use it for later appearing flowers.

like this, even a person wich has only a few lophs might get more seeeds.

it would be interrressting to know, if self pollinated lophs always produce only a few seeds per pinky.

Edited by planthelper

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me too, last summer i used to get heaps of fruits, this season i didn't get so many. Until i realized that i moved the lophos away from each other so cross pollination doesn't happen in the same rate.

So i moved all my lophos in one spot and now i'm getting close to last years fruit production rate

I don't have time to hand pollinate so this works really well for me. But most fruits don't bare as many seeds.

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hey planthelper just joking keep it up its interesting talk

I have only got fruit twice, and it had just a few seeds like you mention.

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what do you know I picked a pinky with 24 seeds today! [you got me counting them too, lol, you bastards!]

ph and pd you might be on to something in regard with caespitosa and self pollination resulting less seed.

this specimen I picked the fruit would not self pollinate before, and it's got a solitary-head tendency. It must have crossed with anther of a similar solitary strain I think.

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member tantra and i reported that, suddenly from one day to the next, a loph fruit had dissapeared.

well just minutes ago, i managed to observe the culprits in action, and yes, you guessed it, they were ants! :)

i saw that they had taken away most of the fruit already, and some ants were disecting the pinky.

i assume they carried away some of the seeds aswell, because the pinky was quite big yesterday, but today, it had only one seed inside.

conclusion, ants are natures own loph garben helpers!

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I think the ants leave the seeds and take the fruit flesh away. The reason i believe this is because this season i moved a couple of mature plants into a well shaded area. After a good soaking seedlings started popping up everywhere in the pots, some more than others but there they were, baby lophs. I always thought the ants took the seeds as well as the flesh but they must discard them. I have only missed picking fruit a few times i had thought so i was surprised at the amount of seedlings that popped up.

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interressting, i know a story from south africa in regards of various proteas. it's said, that the ants burry the seeds and as such the seeds become a time capsule. once heavy rain arrives and they get washed out of there hiding place, they settle somewhere were they germinate finaly. i think the same could happen with loph seeds, i mean they don't germ unless they are on the surface. being burried a bit by the ants, would assure the seeds get a chance only after lot's of rain.

edit for phonetic spelling mistakes, i'm sure there is still a lot of bad grammar left, hehehe.

Edited by planthelper
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today, I harvested three "pinkies" (fruits) of my ariocarpus kotschoubeyanus, and each fruit contained ~50seeds!

I notice similar before, those arios produce far more seeds per fruit than lophs do, or did this abundance happen, because the flowers probably recieved foreign pollen??

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arios produce far more seeds per fruit than lophs do

yup, tis a fact.

but lophs make up for it by (generally) producing more flowers (and fruits) than arios

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I had a loph fruit the other day with 44 seeds in it. I was blown away!!

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yup, tis a fact.

but lophs make up for it by (generally) producing more flowers (and fruits) than arios

yep! allow me to go into more detail, arios can produce several flowers at the same time, but form flowers only when the day's are short. whilst the loph flowering season is much much longer, let's say, they almost flower all year. this ario had 4 or 5 shrivelled up flower heads, and 3 of them had around 50 seeds each, the other two were empty.

 

I had a loph fruit the other day with 44 seeds in it. I was blown away!!

this is a fantastic record, I assume, it had lot's of other lophs flowering around it, did ya hand pollinate?

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I hand pollinated it with L. alberto-vojtechii pollen. It's self sterile, so I don't know if it actually worked, but all the self pollinated fruits had 5-20 seeds in them.

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