Episode 275: tissue culture with Plants In Jars

Laur of Plants in Jars. Photograph: Plants In Jars.

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TRANSCRIPT

[0:00] Music.

[0:16] Jane Perrone

If you want to learn about houseplants, your ears are in just the right place. This is On The Ledge Podcast. I'm Jane Perrone, and you are listening to episode 275.

[0:30] In this episode, I talk to Laur of Plants in Jars, all about tissue culture, from acclimatizing plants to finding out what that stuff they're grown in actually is. Plus I answer a question about the elusive everfresh tree.

Greetings, plant lovers. How the devil are you? I am flipping exhausted. I don't know where September's gone. If you find it, please give it back to me. But it's been a very busy few weeks and next week is going to be even busier. Lots of stuff coming up that I can't really tell you about. That's convenient, isn't it? And also the launch of my Houseplant Gardener in a Box product which is published by Skittle Dog and this is a lovely thing to add to your houseplant knowledge and display. It's a box containing 60 cards, each of them devoted to a particular houseplant plus a houseplant care booklet. I think this would make a very, very nice Christmas present, along with a copy of Legends of the Leaf of course, so do check that out on my website janeperrone.com if you want to find out more about that. It's available in North America and in Europe, so hopefully you'll find it easy to get hold of. Thank you to Sandy and Aidan who both became Ledge Ends recently.

[1:59] Becoming part of my Patreon community, and if you are part of that Patreon community, at the Ledge End or Superfan level, there is an extra leaf number 117 featuring an extra chunk of chat with this week's guest, Lore from Plants in Jars, where she talks about her setup in her home, her tissue culture lab and what she's got in there and why she no longer uses scalpels. Yeah, it does involve injury I'm afraid. So if you are wanting to sign up for a seven day free trial of Patreon you can check out that episode of my bonus podcast for free and after seven days you can just cancel and go away and not get that extra bonus content. So do check that out in the show notes at janeperrone.com if you're interested in finding out more about me.

[2:50] Music.

[2:56] Now tissue culture is something that affects all of us who are interested in houseplants and somebody who I've been following for some time on social media now is Law of Plants in Jars. Laur has an Instagram and a YouTube and sells her own tissue cultured plants and is great at explaining how tissue culture works. So I'm really delighted to have her as a guest on the show this week. And we're gonna be talking about what's involved in acclimatizing plants that have been tissue cultured. So if you buy tissue cultured plants, how do you make sure that they turn into nice, big, healthy specimens? Now, if you've not come across tissue culture before, might be worth going back and listening to episode 161 of On The Ledge, where I explain tissue culture with the help of Chris Reynolds from Seedless Labs. But here's the TLDR on the matter of tissue culture. Tissue culture is basically growing plants from a little bit of plant tissue, not in soil, but in a special solution of nutrients that you're doing in a sterile place, in lab conditions, rather than in a greenhouse or in your home.And it's a form of cloning: each plant is a clone of the parent.

[4:26] There are lots of tissue culture labs around the world, a lot of them are focused in Southeast Asia and South America, but lots of people are taking up tissue culture as a hobby and a small business, so this is something that I wanted to look into further. So settle down, grab yourself a hot drink of your choice and enjoy my chat with Laur of Plants in Jars.

Laur, thank you so much for joining me on On The Ledge podcast. This very popular topic of tissue culture is what we're we're going to get into today, because this is your bag. How did this fascination with tissue culture begin? Because it's not for everybody. This isn't everyone's obsession with the houseplant world. So where did it start for you?

Laur

I've had kind of a side hustle of importing plants from overseas and then just quarantining them, growing them a little bit, maybe propagating them and then selling them mainly on Etsy.

[5:19] So I was mainly importing plants from Thailand. And then I've, I've imported from Japan and Indonesia and Ecuador a little bit too, but it's very labor intensive. I have a greenhouse and I've potted all the plants up when they come over. And there's just not that many kind of barriers to entry to doing this, you need an import permit, but at least in the United States, it's free to get so really, like anyone can do this. There's a lot more people doing it now like buying plants from overseas and selling them on Etsy than there were when I started like three or four years ago. I think I started right before COVID. So probably 2018 or 2019. And I decided that if I truly want to scale this into an actual business, I need to get into the business of actually making the plants. So that kind of took me down the rabbit hole of what is tissue culture. And I think I probably learned about tissue culture, the basics of it a few years ago and, I just remember my mind being blown, like, oh my god, you can create infinite plants from just a very small piece of plant tissue or sometimes even just a single cell from that plant. So I was just super interested. I kind of went all in. I bought the Laminar Flow hood before I even really knew what I was doing and all the equipment. And back then, I was still gainfully employed, so it wasn't as big of an investment as it would be for me now because I do sell plants full-time now.

[6:42] But yeah, that's kind of how I got started. I think I first tried tissue culture about a year ago, I think last September, so even a little less than a year ago. And then right now I'm actually kind of taking the first finished plants that I started back then out of tissue culture. So it's been really exciting.

Jane Perrone

So a normal Monday morning at work at that point must have been, oh, what did you get up to at the weekend?

[7:06] Well, I bought a laminar flow hood just playing around. I mean, that's-

Basically, yeah. Yeah, I mean, and that's not a small purchase either. Where do you even start looking for a laminar flow hood? Where did you buy your laminar flow hood from?

Laur

Mine's, well, mine's from a company called Air Science and they manufacture them in Florida, which is where I live. So it seemed like a easier choice. And they also had the, I have a really small one. Mine's like 24 inches by 24 inches. But a lot of businesses have these multiple person flow hoods that are huge. But I was like, okay, for my house, I just need the tiny one. So I just decided to go with them.

Jane Perrone

[7:48] Did you ever sort of think to yourself, wow, I've really gone a bit hard on this. Am I making a mistake here? Am I really that enthusiastic about it or did it just always absolutely captivate you?

[7:58] Laur

I knew it was something I really wanted to do. It was a little discouraging in the beginning when I first started trying tissue culture and literally every single thing I put into tissue culture was getting contaminated and I was like thinking, is this even possible to do at home? I have the laminar flow hood, it should be working, but since then I've really improved my sterile technique a lot. I've pretty much learned everything just from reading books about tissue culture and then there's some videos online that have been helpful too. I tend to go all in on my hobbies.

Jane Perrone

Well, I mean that's excellent. I think it's obviously worked out brilliantly. This is now your job and your career, so that's awesome. It's really great that you're also sharing your expertise on social media as well, which is great. I guess what's interesting to me is that there's so many people like you who are changing the game by not being a giant nursery of several generations or somebody who comes from a plant science background. You're just an individual person who's striking out in this area. It's the same with plant sales, like as you were doing before, individual selling plants, and that must be skewing things for the big producers, I'm guessing. Because even though the volumes might be small, there's enough people, individuals selling plants now that it must be impacting on the overall plant buying scene.

[9:29] Laur Yeah. And I think big companies that sell plants, like in the United States, it's like Home Home Depot and Lowe's, where those are the big box stores that sell pothos and all your typical monsteras and things like that. I think they're starting to realize that there's, a good amount of people who are interested enough in plants that they want these kind of more unusual plants with more unique variegation patterns. I've seen Home Depot now starting to stock 'Thai Constellations' and things like that. I haven't seen them in my Home Depot, but I've seen them on their website online, maybe from third-party sellers. But enough, I think the interest is there. And even, at least in Florida, our grocery store that's really popular here is called Publix. And I noticed my Publix is now selling 'White Knight' Philodendron. So I think they're realizing that that interest is there. And then the hobbyists are people like me that do like very small batches of plants, either importing them or propagating them or tissue culturing them to propagate them, just makes these kind of collector plants more widely available. Because it's pretty rare now that I'm interested in a certain type of plant and I can't find anywhere to buy it. For example, there's this fern that I really want for myself, not even to tissue culture just because I want it, as a plant called the blue oil fern. And you can get them on Etsy from another like just small you know individual person like myself but that's the only place where you're able to get it. So I think it's cool that hobbyists are selling their plants and I hope that more people start to try tissue culture because I think the more people that kind of get a grasp on it and get the hang of it the more widely available these kind of collector-type rare plants will be more readily available.

Jane Perrone

It's like, why does my grocery store never have that amazing, like my one is always like, you know, one really sad wizened snake plant and that's it. I'm obviously missing out on the, like the plant drops because it's never in my local store. I don't know.

Laur

Yeah, I definitely see the Reddit posts of people getting really lucky. Also just like finding random variegated plants at Walmart and stuff like that. But I mean living in Florida, this is like the mecca for tropical plants, so it's a good place to be if you really like aeroids and things like that.

Jane Perrone

Tissue culture plants covers plants that are relatively mature, that are being sold in nurseries, down to plants that have kind of just come out of the flask as it were, which are kind of newly tissue culture plants and are very young and immature. Obviously, there's a big benefit from buying those very young plants in that they're going to cost a lot less than something that's had to have, you know, weeks or months of work put into it. So what I want to kind of get into is, what are the big advantages and disadvantages of going down that route of, you know, buying tissue culture plants quite young? And then to move on from that, when you get a delivery of those young tissue culture plants, what's the procedure? Because I think this is something where you could waste a lot of time and money getting this wrong.

Laur Yeah, definitely. I've seen enough Facebook posts of dying mint Monsteras that people have bought, which is really just unfortunate. The biggest pro, like you mentioned, is just the price difference. Obviously, for a very small plant that's in tissue culture stiller has just come out, you're going to pay a lot less for it than a big mature version of that plant. I would say another one of the pros too is the cost to ship tissue culture plants is a lot less than actual, you know, sizeable plants. Sometimes when I'm importing plants from Thailand, the shipping can be almost as much as the plants themselves. But tissue culture, obviously, you can fit hundreds of plants in a relatively small container.

[13:27] There are some cons to buying tissue culture plants too that I'll just mention before I talk about the acclimation process. I would say uncertain variegation is one of the cons that come along with tissue culture. When you see these laboratories that sell tissue culture flasks direct to consumer, a lot of times they will charge kind of a premium for plants that are already showing variegation and usually they'll be labeled shown variegation or have photos of, tissue culture plants where you can actually see what the pattern looks like. And then I've also seen laboratories sell plants for a discounted price, they say just from a variegated mother plant, but there's really no guarantee just because that mother plant that you put into tissue culture had variegation that those plants coming out of tissue culture will be variegated. So that's kind of one of the risks that you take if you want a very specific kind of variegation pattern. But as far as the acclimation process goes, I always recommend once you get the plants in the mail just waiting 24 hours before you open them, unless the jars came cracked and the plants have been exposed to air, in which case I would say you probably want to take them out of tissue culture right away. And then when plants are in these tissue culture jars, or maybe it's shipped to you in a bag, I've seen that sometimes too, the humidity inside the container is basically 100%. So when we're acclimating these plants and taking them out of these containers, we want to keep that humidity as high as we can for the first week or two weeks or so, just to make that kind of acclimation process as smooth as possible for the plant. So I just keep them in a closed container. And the substrate that I've found works the best for acclimating tissue culture plants, and I just talked about this in my most recent video, is basically a 50-50 mix of Fluval Stratum and perlite. And Fluval Stratum is an aquarium substrate that's used mainly for aquascaping, but I think the plant people have figured out that it works really well for terrestrial plants as well. I'd actually be surprised if most of Fluval Stratum's sales weren't from people growing plants instead of aquascaping, unless I seriously underestimate the fish hobbyists.

[15:51] Jane Perrone

Just going back to the jars, so just to sort of set a picture for somebody who maybe has never seen um a tissue culture jar, so we're talking about a literal glass jar and the plants they're not exactly bare-rooted, how does it actually look when you're getting that delivery?

Laur

It depends, it's not always a glass jar, it can be a, I use polypropylene deli containers basically for tissue culture. So it's not always glass, but it usually is when you're ordering from overseas at least. And the plants will be growing in tissue culture media. So that's made up of four components, usually a basal salt medium, the most common one is calledMurashige and Skoog or MS for short, sugar, some sort of gelling agent like agar or something similar. And then usually there will also be plant growth regulators, which are essentially hormones used by the laboratory to manipulate the plant to grow in the way that they want it to grow. So towards the beginning of the process, they want it to be multiplying, so they'll use more hormones to get it to kind of grow callous tissue and start multiplying into more and more plants. And then towards the end of the process, they want the plants to start to root in tissue culture, ideally, not always, so they'll use more hormones that will promote the plant to actually root. And hopefully the plants have some roots when they get to you, but if not, I just use a powdered rooting hormone that you can get at any garden store, Amazon, that usually contains IBA or IAA, which are rooting hormones essentially, to get the plants to root ex vitro or out of tissue culture.

[17:33] Jane Perrone

Do you need to remove that concoction? What is it like? Is it like a jelly type thing?

Laur

Yeah, it's like jello. It's soft if you touch it. But yeah, you do want to completely remove it. So I take the plants out of the jars and then I'll rinse them under my, usually just my kitchen sink. I like to wear gloves when I do it because sometimes in the media, they put like different antibiotics and it's really not good to touch the plant growth regulators because certain ones can break the blood barrier. Ideally, it's smart to wear gloves while you do it. The hormones are used in such low concentrations that it probably wouldn't hurt you anyway, but I'm always paranoid about health stuff, so I just tell people to be extra cautious and wear gloves when you're handling something that you don't know what's in it. Because the media contains so much sugar, usually like 25 to 30 grams per litre, you really want to wash all that gel off, otherwise you're going to have major fungus growth issues and it'll eventually kill the plant. So yeah, you want to make sure to wash off all of the gel.

[18:48] Jane Perrone

Yeah, okay. So the Fluval Stratum and the perlite is what you recommend for getting them potted up. And are they going into like little cell trays at this point? Are they small enough? Presumably we were talking about small, really tiny little weenie plants. So you're talking about maybe a cell tray to put them into at that stage?

Laur

Exactly. Yeah, I use cell trays that have kind of a clear plastic cover and the cell trays that work the best for acclimating tissue culture plants actually have a vent in the cover so that after two weeks you can open the vent to start to slowly reduce the humidity instead of just popping the cover off and going from 100% humidity to 40% or whatever someone's house sits at. So those are the ones that I prefer and I just get them on Amazon like everything else.

Jane Perrone

Is there a danger with this at this stage of just wanting to fiddle too much of like, I've just got to check them every five minutes like and actually at this point they just need to be kind of left on their own to get on with it until they're ready to kind of move to the next stage.

Laur Oh yeah you just want to set it and forget it just don't even look at them. I have all my lights on a timer so I don't even have to like interact with the plants at all But yeah, you don't want to mess with them too much. I see a lot of people on Reddit and Facebook asking questions like, oh, this leaf is starting to brown on this Monstera. Should I repot it? But really, unless there's mould growth happening, in which case you want to take it out and wash it off and repot it, I just wouldn't touch them, at least for the first two weeks while they're acclimating.

Jane Perrone

And how long does it take before you've got what's fundamentally a plant like any other that you can treat in exactly the same way? Is it a few more weeks or months?

Laur

Yeah, I usually take the humidity cover off around like completely off around four weeks in and at that point you could repot them into soil. I tend to wait until they're just a little bit larger. I probably pot them up in soil like in their own individual pots around six to eight weeks. And then I probably wouldn't ship them through the mail until they were at least three months or so out of tissue culture, just to make sure that they're hardened off enough to survive the trek.

[21:19] Jane Perrone

And what's the worst case scenario? How can this go badly wrong? Is it just mould and a complete plant collapse that indicates something's gone horribly wrong?

Laur

I would say the mould is the number one issue that I see people having issues with just from not cleaning the plants well enough. One thing that can help with that that I recommend to people is buying a fungicide and actually when you're deflasking the plants on the day you're taking them out of tissue culture, just submerge them in a diluted fungicide for five or so minutes.Very diluted, I just use a drop or two of GrowSafe fungicide and then rinse them again to get the fungicide off of the plants. And then I pot them, and I've found I think that helps with mould issues. I don't tend to have issues with plants like having mould issues. Sometimes, I mean, like any other plant, plants can just die to or fail to thrive. So in some instances, it's not even the person's fault that their tissue culture plant died. It's just kind of unfortunate. But I would say like 90% of the plants I take out of tissue culture and plant, maybe more, survive.

Jane Perrone

Is there a lot of variation in terms of the quality of tissue culture? Say when you're ordering plants from overseas from tissue culture labs, is it really variable as to what the success rate determined by how good they are and what they're doing?

Laur

I would say so, yes. Sometimes I've had, I've ordered tissue culture plants from overseas that I don't feel like were ready to come out of tissue culture. So if someone were to order them and try to pot them or acclimate them, they might just die because they weren't large enough to survive out of tissue culture. So I've had plants arrive like that. I personally will just subculture them into rooting media to try to get them to grow a little bit more. But for most people, they're not mixing up media and pressure cooking it and everything in their house. So I would say that's the risk that you take. And that's not just overseas sellers of tissue culture. I've had that happen with US sellers of tissue culture too. I don't know if if it's an unfortunate thing, but I have noticed a pattern of like Etsy sellers selling tissue culture plants that are clearly just ordered from overseas, and then they'll individually package them into bags and kind of like upcharge for them and just resell them, which I think is kind of risky because then you're dealing with a lot of like mould and contamination issues. But that can be kind of hard to spot. It's kind of like, are these people actually tissue culturing stuff themselves? And a lot of times they're really not, they're just kind of reselling stuff, which isn't the worst. I guess at the end of the day, I'm reselling plants that I'm buying from Thailand, but I just think you kind of run the risk of mould and contamination if you're buying from a tissue culture seller that's just repackaging another laboratory's tissue culture.

Jane Perrone

Absolutely. I guess this is the thing, you probably wanna be buying this stuff with money that you aren't going to totally miss if it all goes wrong. If you can, you know what I mean? Like you don't want this to be your kind of like fuel payment or something that you're spending on these plants.

Laur

I would say that for all plants. Like don't don't spend your your rent on plants. Yeah, exactly. And I guess this is always going to happen that, you know, people are going to see an opportunity to make money by buying in bulk and then selling on and maybe keeping a few for themselves. And so that's a money-making opportunity but not everyone's going to go into the, kind of due diligence in quite the same way. Yeah, exactly.

[25:03] Music.

[25:14] Jane Perrone

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[26:45] Jane Perrone

And now it's time for the question of the week. And this one is rolling back to a question we had way back in episode 201, which was from Graham. And Graham wanted to know about the everfresh tree. This was a new one on me at the time, but strangely this seemed to plant that was really popular in places like Japan, Singapore and Malaysia, basically Southeast Asia. There were lots of Instagram posts about this lovely plant, but nothing much in the way of information about buying it in the UK or North America or Europe.So Graham wanted to know if I had any info. At the time, I really didn't, but I do now. So let's just start by recapping a little about this plant. It's got, well, there's some controversy about the Latin name. I think I'm going to go with Pithecellobium confertum and I've, but I have seen various other Latin names applied to it. It looks a bit like Mimosa pudica, the sensitive plant, which is much more popular and available as a house plant. And indeed the ever fresh tree is like Mimosa within the legume family Fabaceae, but they are different genera.b It does make this beautiful little tree or a little tree when it's indoors anyway with these very finely cut leaves and you can, I think you can probably bonsai it. It's delightful, so no wonder Graham wanted to get hold of one. At the time I didn't know anyone selling them. Now though, however, I have recently heard from somebody called Alexander, who is @Sallonsax on Instagram and he managed to buy this plant. He had to import it from a company in Hong Kong who are called MyHomeNature.com and he had a good experience with them. I can't vouch for this company, I've not used them, but they do seem to offer you the chance for a photo sanitary certificate which is always a good sign in terms of getting the paperwork right. So if you are interested in that I'll put a link in the show notes to where you can find that and they do seem seem to export from Hong Kong to various parts of the world, including the UK and the US. And the reason why I'm bringing this up now is because I had a question from Esther on this. She'd heard the episode 201 and wanted to know if there was an update. So yes, there is an update, Esther. Myhomenature.com is where Alexander has sourced a plant. So maybe worth a try. I do hope this is a plant that starts to become more widely available here. Perhaps there's a company right now that is mass producing these for the UK market. And if you know about that, I'd love to hear about it. So that's the update on the Everfresh tree. I will let Graham know. And if you are looking for one or you've found one, I'd love to hear where you've sourced it from. And if this matter of ordering plants from overseas is something you're interested in, but have never tried, I will be having an episode upcoming in the next few weeks with somebody who sources rare plants for a living and who gives lots of useful advice on importing plants. So that will be a good episode. And if you've got a question for On The Ledge, do drop me a line - ontheledgepodcast.gmail.com is the place to send your queries. And if I can help, I will do my damnedest to do so.

[30:28] Jane Perrone

Right, back to my interview with Laur. More tissue culture tips coming right up. So we've talked a bit about the acclimation. Obviously, you've got these plants under grow lights. Do you have to be a little bit careful with the intensity of those grow lights? Are they generally tissue cultured in really high intensity LED grow lights? Or is there a chance that you could stick them under a grow light and they're going to burn because they're not actually used to that much light?

Laur They could burn. I use a light meter to just measure the light and then most tissue culture protocols and a protocol is basically a set of instructions for how to tissue culture a certain type of plant and in most cases if you find a good protocol it'll tell you what the light intensity should be. So I just kind of play around with it and I use the light meter to try to see like where I should put it, position it under the lights for it to be getting kind of the correct amount of light. But yeah, I think I would recommend full spectrum LED lights. A common question that I get asked on my channel is, I don't have growlights, can I set these in front of a window or on a window sill? And the answer is no, you don't want to do that just because of the greenhouse effect and it's in a closed container so it's just going to get super hot and overheat the baby plants. So you don't want to do that, definitely want to use LED lights. But they don't need to be marketed as grow lights. And I always say if you're buying something that's marketed as being for plants, you're probably going to be paying a premium for it. I always link people lights on my channel that are meant to like light garages and stuff, but they work just as well for plants. So I would recommend, yeah, to anyone like who has houseplants, I think the light meter is a really useful tool to kind of quantify your plant care.

Jane Perrone

[32:19]Laur You can definitely tissue culture cacti and succulents. There's another YouTuber, CactiFanatici, and he tissue cultures his cacti. And I used to watch his videos before I started doing tissue culture myself and learned a pretty good amount. So you can definitely tissue culture cacti. I don't know if it's used as much by cacti hobbyists as it is compared to the Philodendron Monstera type hobbyists. I have some fairy castle cactus in some temporary immersion bioreactors behind me that I've been growing, so it does work. I wonder whether it's to do, and this is a vast generalization, so I don't want the cactus, people coming out after me, but generally I would say that the age profile of the cactus people is higher than that of the aroid people, generally speaking that means you're less likely to, and I speak as somebody who's nearly at a half a century, we are less likely to want to learn a whole new thing. I don't know. That's a vast generalization, but it's interesting to hear there are, and that would seem a great answer for like any other plant set of species. There are vast numbers of cacti and succulents that are getting extinct, maybe this is the answer. I mean, it must be a great way of producing a lot of plants.

Laur

Oh, definitely. I would say I view orchid hobbyists in general as a little older group, at least in Florida, who are really into orchids. But the orchid hobbyists have been doing tissue culture forever because when they're trying to grow orchids from seeds, you can't just plant them. You have to grow them in aseptic conditions with the right nutrients because they have no endosperm or no power inside the seed to actually grow. I would say orchid hobbyists have been doing, micro-propagation at home too for a long time.

[34:49] Jane Perrone

Yeah, I really shouldn't be so ageist because you know what? I remember interviewing Gesneriad enthusiasts and them talking about introducing mutations via exposure to radiation, taking their plants to their dentist to get some radiation exposure. So I shouldn't really be ageist and say they're not trying new things because obviously if you've got the passion for it you're going to want to try these experimental procedures I guess. But you're right, absolutely orchids is a massive...and I mean that must be I guess I would guess that's the biggest like in, terms of grossing amount of money that's the biggest tissue culture industry but maybe it's It's being outstripped by aroids now, I don't know.

Laur

Yeah, someone told me recently that the orchid business is like a $2 billion a year business, not just tissue culture, but you know, selling orchids and cut flowers too and things like that. So orchids are huge. I grow some orchids, but they're not really like my, my passion.

[35:48] Jane Perrone

And you talked about questions that people ask you, are there any other really common things that people are like, tell me the answer, Lord, what am I doing wrong here?

Laur

One common thing that people will just I don't know if they forget, or if they just maybe think it's not that important to do. But when people are trying to make tissue culture media themselves, it's really important to adjust the pH. I get a lot of messages on Instagram of people trying tissue culture at home, which is so cool. But a lot of people will say, oh, I put this into this X plant or a piece of plant tissue into tissue culture, and it's not contaminated, but it's been six weeks and it hasn't grown at all. What could be wrong? And one of the first diagnostic questions that I'll ask them is, did you adjust the pH of your tissue culture media? And a lot of times the answer is, no, I skipped that step. And it's super important. Most protocols or instructions will call for the pH to be kind of between 5.6 to 5.8. And if it's not in that range, you'll just, it won't have any growth. And are there any plants where it's just not worth it financially to tissue culture them for some reason? I would say like for plants that readily produce a lot of seeds or are really easy to grow from seed it's probably not as necessary to tissue culture them to create a lot of them so things like anthuriums can create, you know, Tons of seeds and they're relatively easily hybridized at home by people so I would say for plants that either grow really slow or don't produce a lot of seeds That's kind of where the tissue culture sweet spot is I know you're always trying new things. What's the next kind of thing that you really want to find out or experiment with? So you can create synthetic seeds by encapsulating an embryo of a plant. And that's kind of the next thing that I want to try that I think is like a little more complicated. And I actually have a collab coming up on my YouTube channel, Plants and Jars, that I'm doing with a company called Plant Cell Technology, where they teach me how to make synthetic seeds. So I'm really excited about that.

Jane Perrone How fascinating. So would you be using that for, say, a plant species where it's very shy to set seed?

Laur

To be honest, I think one of the biggest uses for it, and this isn't something that I personally grow, but I think in the cannabis industry, they need feminised plants to grow into pots pot plants and I think that's kind of one of the big use cases for why they make synthetic seeds so they can like always guarantee the sex of the plant. But I'm not sure for people like me who just grow houseplants what the kind of use cases of synthetic seeds are but I'm excited to find out and I'm sure I'll share it on my channel.

[38:42] Jane Perrone

And is that a really big influence like more widely the cannabis growing industry? Is that like feeding in a lot of new technology and ideas into tissue culture generally just because of the the money behind it and the push for innovation?

Laur

I would say so. I'm always surprised by the amount of comments I get on my channel about people who are specifically trying to tissue culture cannabis. And again, it's not legal where I live or something that I'm super interested in growing or learning a ton about but I think that is one of the main reasons that a lot of people are interested in tissue culture, aside from people like myself who just want to sell plants. I think that's the same across houseplants generally, and I think it is a way in for a lot of people till they start growing cannabis and then realize there are other cool things to grow. So that sounds like a really interesting project.

Jane Perrone

If people are listening to this and thinking, okay, I was really not very good at science at school, but I wanna give this a go, is that a barrier to introduction if you feel like you're not a very science-y person? And what can you do to dip your toe into this world of tissue culture, or even just acclimate, you know, finding somewhere to buy tissue culture plants and start acclimating young tissue culture plants.

Laur

Yeah, I don't think that's a barrier at all. I'm not a sciencey person. I don't have any sort of, I mean, I have a degree in business, but nothing associated with life sciences or biology. And I always said, like, throughout school, I'm not interested in science. It's my least favourite subject, but I guess I did find a piece of it that I do find interesting. I think the best place to get started is reading this book, Plants From Test Tubes, from front to back. This book basically taught me everything that I know about tissue culture. It's written so that it's very accessible to not the non-sciencey people. Yeah, I would say watching videos. I make kind of introductory level videos and I don't always use like a Lemonar Flow hood. In a lot of my videos, I'll use a still air box, which is basically just a plastic tub, with two arm holes cut out, which helps reduce airborne contamination. And it's obviously a lot cheaper than building or buying a flow hood. So yeah, I don't think being a non-sciencey person is a barrier to entry. I think there's room in tissue culture for us.

[41:10] Jane Perrone Fantastic. Well, that's good to hear. And as you say, once you start going down the rabbit hole, I imagine that there's a whole new world of experiments and things to try, which is great. I mean, so you've got brilliant collabs going on. In terms of your social media and your YouTube stuff, how important is that in your overall strategy in terms of like driving people to buy stuff from you?

Laur

It's definitely important. I do get a lot of like Etsy sales and people will leave a message like, I love your YouTube channel. So I would say that YouTube definitely drives the Etsy sales. The only thing about Etsy is I'm, my goal is in a year from now to have it be only plants that have tissue cultured myself. Because right now it's a lot of plants still that I've imported. So I want to make that connection. I'm talking about tissue culture on YouTube, but I'm selling plants that I import. So there's kind of a disconnect there. So I'd really like to get it to be where I'm selling plants that I micro-propagated myself. So that's my goal for Etsy eventually. But yeah, I think that YouTube definitely drives traffic to the Etsy store.

Jane Perrone

It's been fantastic to talk to you. And I'm really interested to see how many listeners are going to be telling me about their tissue culture adventures. I know some people have already kind of dipped their toes. So thank Thank you so much for sharing all of that information with us, Laur. And just tell us where we can, if somebody does want to find you, I'll put this in the show notes, but just reiterate, where can people find you and your content and your plants?

Laur

My YouTube channel is called Plants in Jars. And my Instagram is at @plantsinjars_tissueculture.I'm working on getting @plantsinjars handle. And then my Etsy store is Plants In Jars shop, but it's linked in my YouTube and my Instagram.

Jane Perrone Thank you so much for joining me today. It's been a delight and I've certainly learned loads more about tissue culture and tissue cultured plants.

Laur

Thank you.

[43:09] Music.

[43:19] Jane Perrone That is all for this week's show. Thank you so much to Laur. Check out the show notes for a transcript and Lore's links to Instagram and YouTube. Have yourself a fantastic fortnight and I will speak to you soon.

[43:37] Music.

[43:51] The music you heard in this week's episode was Roll Jordan Roll by The Joy Drops, The, Road We Used To Travel When We Were Kids by Komiku, and Quasi Motion by Kevin MacLeod. All tracks are licensed under Creative Commons. Visit the show notes for details.

[44:08] Music.

Photograph: Plants In Jars.

I find out more about the world of tissue culture with Laur of Plants In Jars, and I answer a question about sourcing an everfresh tree.

This week’s guest

Laur is the presenter of the YouTube channel Plants In Jars and you can find her on Instagram as @plantsinjars_tissueculture. You can buy her plants on Etsy.

Chapters

0:00:16 Welcome to the show
0:02:56 Introducing Laur of Plants In Jars
0:13:27 Uncertain variegation and risks of tissue culture plants
0:14:25 The acclimatisation process for tissue culture plants
0:20:38 Timing for repotting tissue culture plants
0:23:14 Variation in quality of tissue culture plants
0:27:33 Q&A: the everfresh tree
0:30:15 Interview with Laur, part two
0:38:42 how the cannabis industry is driving innovation in tissue culture
0:43:51 Music Credits for This Week's Episode

Check these notes as you listen…

• If you want a general introduction to tissue culture, check out On The Ledge episode 161.

• Laur got her laminar flow hood from Air Science.

• Tissue culture media is made up of four components:

  • A basal salt medium, the most common one is called Murashige and Skoog or MS for short

  • Sugar

  • Some sort of gelling agent such as agar

  • Plant growth regulators, which are essentially hormones used by the laboratory to manipulate the plant to grow in the way that they want it to grow

• When you receive tissue cultured plants in jars, Laur recommends waiting 24 hours after TC plants arrive in the mail before taking them out of the jar: unless the jar has been cracked - in which case take them out straight away.

• When you do open them up, you need to remove all the tissue culture media from the plants to avoid problems with fungi: Laur suggests wearing gloves to do this job.

• Once plants have been removed from the jars, keep them at 100% humidity for the first week or so.

• Laur has found the best substrate for new tissue cultured plants is a 50-50 mix of fluval stratum and perlite.

• Laur usually takes the humidity cover off TC plants around four weeks in, and then reports them into soil once they have got a little larger, at around 6-8 weeks.

• The tissue culture YouTube channel Laur mentions that cultures cacti is Cactifanatici.

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Question of the week

Back in episode 201 of On The Ledge, Graham asked a question about where to source an everfresh tree. This species has some confusion about its scientific name, but seems to be most routinely called Pithocellobium confertum. It has finely cut leaves and looks a little like its relative in the legume family, the more commonly available houseplant the sensitive plant, Mimosa pudica.

At the time, this tree only seemed to be available for sale in Japan and other parts of SE Asia. Strangely, and for reasons I still can’t explain, the everfresh is not available via commercial horticulture in the US, the UK or Europe, as far as I know.

Recently listener Esther got in touch to ask if anything had changed in terms of getting hold of this species. The answer is yes and no - as far as I know, there are still no UK sellers of this plant. But listener Alexander aka @sallonsax got in touch recently to let me know he had ordered an everfresh tree from Hong Kong seller MyHomeNature.com. I can’t vouch for this seller myself, not having using it, but Alexander said he had a good experience: they seem to export from Hong Kong to various parts of the world, including the UK and the US.

Want to ask me a question? Email ontheledgepodcast@gmail.com. The more information you can include, the better - pictures of your plant, details of your location and how long you have had the plant are always useful to help solve your issue.

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HOW TO SUPPORT ON THE LEDGE

Contributions from On The Ledge listeners help to pay for all the things that have made the show possible over the last few years: equipment, travel expenses, editing, admin support and transcription.

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If you like the idea of supporting On The Ledge on a regular basis but don't know what Patreon's all about, check out the FAQ here: if you still have questions, leave a comment or email me - ontheledgepodcast@gmail.com. If you're already supporting others via Patreon, just click here to set up your rewards!

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CREDITS

This week's show featured the tracks Roll Jordan Roll by the Joy Drops, The Road We Use To Travel When We Were Kids by Komiku and Quasi Motion by Kevin Macleod.