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Re: Aquatic Plants Digest V3 #1214


A trick I heard of a couple of years ago with Cape Fear Spatterdocks-slice
off the end with a neat cut, melt a little wax from a pure beeswax candle,
not a regular one, and dip the end in that.



> Date: Sat, 14 Aug 1999 14:40:30 -0700
> From: lovell <lovell at drizzle_com>
> Subject: Anubias Cuttings and Flesh Eating Bacteria
>
> >>I sliced a rhizome all the way through, and I lost quite a bit of the
> >>plant. Both halves recovered, but I was disappointed with the amount
of
> >>loss of plants as a result of the cutting.
>
> >I've never had that happen. Generally they are very tough and the
> >ends don't rot.
>
> I bought a 4" long piece of A. barteri at the LFS about a year ago.  It
> was clearly a scrap from somebody's tank and not a commercially raised
> specimen.  It had a slightly ragged end where it had (apparently) broken
> off the parent plant, but since the plant looked generally healthy, I
> didn't pay any attention to this.  Gradually, though, leaves at the
> ragged end would rot at their attachment to the rhizome and fall off.  I
> let this go on longer than I should have.  When I finally pulled the
> plant out of the tank to have a look, it was clear that rot was
> progressing slowly up the rhizome.  I thought all I'd I've to do was cut
> off the bad end and the plant would be fine.  (Anubias are the
> indestructible plants, right?)  I squared off the bad end with a razor
> blade, but I could see that there was still just a little necrotic
> tissue within the rhizome.  Once again, I didn't think this was a big
> deal, but leaves continued to slowly rot at the bases and die, so I
> pulled the plant again and decided to keep cutting this time until all I
> had left was healthy tissue.  I was surprised to find that the rot had
> basically propagated all the way up the inside of the rhizome until the
> whole thing was full of it to a greater or lesser degree.  I tried to
> save a pitiful little 3/4" stump and it's attached leaf, but it too
> rotted and died; over the course of about 9 months the plant had slowly
> rotted away to nothing.  Later, when I bought an A. coffeiafolia (sp?)
> "cutting" (that looked like it hadn't so much been cut as broken off the
> end of the parent), I kept slicing away at the rhizome until I came to
> absolutely healthy tissue.  This entailed taking off about an inch of 3"
> long piece, but the remaining 2" with it's few leaves started growing
> well shortly thereafter and is now turning into a pretty little plant.
>       I guess the moral of this (too) long post is that it's best not to
be
> cheap or cowardly about cutting back rotten sections of expensive
> Anubias plants.  It also occurs to me that I have never had this kind of
> problem with commercially grown Anubias -- they are usually vibrantly
> healthy specimens.  But who can resist a cheap little Anubias cutting?
> - -- Sherman Lovell
>


       Gerry Skau
       ANS BigDial Engineering

       IDEOLOGUE: Typically, an obscure humourless zealot who finds
       fulfilment by spouting the ideas of famous humourless zealots.