I had asked on another forum maybe 2 weeks ago about seedlings with three cotyledons and if anybody knew what they would do since my experience in growing from seed is limited to cacti and a few other succulents. With cacti it made no difference but with some other plants I got true leaves that grew in triplicate rather than the normal pairs. One person told me that all their three-cotyledon adenium seedlings only produced paired leaves. So......I've got 5 adenium seedlings that came up with the three cots and right now four of them have three true leaves growing. This photo shows a seedling of arabicum "Desert Night Fork" sown on June 4 and you can clearly see the three true leaves coming in. The others are three seedlings of mixed Saudi arabicum sown May 28, two of which have three leaves, and one seedling of "Mixed Dwarf" arabicum also sown at the same time as the DNF and it also has three true leaves. I'll get photos of the others as they become more readily visible--right now it's easy for me to SEE them but they're still small and it's very difficult to get them to show in photos.

You will need magnifying glasses eventually, go ahead and buy some at the grocery store. And a regular magnifying glass, too.

Great about the three leaves. Like I said, mine never did that.

Magnifying glasses I don't need yet. Though I'm 56 years old and DO wear bifocals for ordinary vision, I still have perfect close-up vision when I take my glasses off. Which is how I paint normally since a lot of my painting work is extremely detailed and photorealistic (when I want/need it to be) although I frequently have to put my glasses back on and step back to "see the big picture" as I'm working. But....for really extreme magnification I have a couple of little lenses I use when I need to view seedlings VERY closely--I've had these for so long, since my growing cacti from seed days in the early 1990's, that I don't remember where they came from.....other than one was part of some sort of old instrument that was used in silk screen printing for checking or counting the threads per inch of the silk material itself--what a headache THAT job would be!

Mike in MN

Almost forgot--here's a photo of the dwarf arabicum with three cots and three leaves--just today the leaves have gotten big enough to see without my magnifier lens and could be photographed. By the way.....is anybody else using these coir fiber pots? I love them because they seem to allow a LOT of oxygen through the porous sides to get to the roots.

I didn't know they made coir pots, but then I live in a primitive place.