Baby clones should be planted no more than an inch deep. If they are very small, an even shallower depth will do. They pull themselves down deeper as the grow larger. Once planted, water in well from the top--like a flooding drench, until water runs out the drain holes of your pot. Avoid using city water. I use purified water for this first time drenching. This normally keeps the pot moist for at least 2 to 3 weeks, so just set aside and wait for the noses to come up. If the surface gets a little dry, you can mist it a little but no more water. Some may come up in a week or ten days, others may take a little longer and a couple hold outs might wait a month or more before they come up, so be patient. About the end of 3rd or 4th week, water lightly from the top( no fertilizer yet). After about 6 weeks, several should be up and looking pretty good. Now you can start feeding with a dilute solution of liquid fertilizer such as 5-10-5, or 10-15-10, etc. What I do is make up a gallon using only one fourth or 25% of what the bottle recommends. Note: from here on all feeding and watering is done by soaking from the bottom. What I do is feed every 3rd time.

Thanks Lorn. I did plant them an inch down. I'll water once today and wait. You give me confidence in this matter, being an experienced master scaler.

Don't know about the master part, but somehow it always works for me. Mother Nature likes me, I guess! I forgot to mention, if you need to go out and buy a small bottle of that liquid fertilizer, you might as well get the version that has trace elements added. That will be shown on the side panel of the little box. There's very little difference in price. Also, make sure the number in the middle is the highest such as in 5-10-5. That's the one that's going to GROW STRONG ROOTS FIRST. In a couple months, a change over to 10-10-10 can be done to BOOST GREEN GROWTH, SECOND. Time release fertilizers are not recommended the first year.

Scales from Dr. Robert Griesbach's IMPROVED Tetra White Henryi called 'White Amber'.

Oh, Oh---a little 'wrong way Corrigan' in the pot. I just KNEW it---and a little exploratory found the little stinker headed straight for a drain hole on the bottom. There we go, gotcha; now what do I do with ya. Actually not so little, about 5 inches or 15 cm long. I gently ran the stem around covering it with a little than more than a half of soil leaving a about an inch and a half of the stem exposed. I've done 3 of these in the past and what happens, is, the exposed tip will now turn vertical, green up and grow pretty much normally. A certain amount of the buried stem will also rise up but never all of it. This is a scale bulblet started in May of 2014.
If you ever get into a situation like this and don't know what end to excavate, here are a couple clues. Notice the little white ring on the stem in the first picture. Stem roots normally form below that ring, not above it. Above that ring, tiny little sacrificial leaves form along the stem as it reaches for a surface. Look for them. An inverted stem will normally bend toward the sunny, warm side of the pot and then travel down the warm side. So, with all these clues, the end you select to excavate should be almost automatic. I hope this plant forms a lot of stem roots because it obviously has expended a tremendous amount of bulb energy that it now will have to rejuvenate.

I should have explained in the beginning of the above post that the 'wrong way' stem discussed was not visible to start with. Here's photos of the same pot taken a couple hours earlier. Upon reviewing these two pictures, it dawned on me that I had placed 3 good sized scale bulblets in this pot initially and there were 3 nice little plants growing in it last summer. That was how and when I decided to start exploring around in this pot.

Sometimes they do that, the tricky little things!

Roosterlorn said:I should have explained in the beginning of the above post that the 'wrong way' stem discussed was not visible to start with.

So that explains it! I was unsuccessfully trying to match the first photo with the others, in respect to the " Notice the little white ring on the stem in the first picture. Stem roots normally form below that ring, not above it."

Update on inverted stem--from previous post. As you can see, it made it's correction vertically and is beginning to leaf out. Doing nicely!

5 days ago


This Morning.







Now, my next question, since Asiatic cloning is not my primary area, what are the chances some stem bulblets might form on this unusually long stem. Or, is this plant just simply to small and too young to be thinking about that?

In my experience they have a go - there might be one or two small stem bulblets on a long, lost-its-way-looking-for-up, small stem. I frequently get stem bulblets from seedling stems that are so small they haven't even produced a flower.

A lazy man's way as an alternative to scaling. If you have just purchased an expensive cultivar with a nice size bulb, or, if purchased 3 or so as a group and want to speed up multiplication of any bulb, cut the sprouting stem off when it gets about an inch or two long before planting. Of course, you won't get any flowers the following year, but you'll get lots of new little plants which will bloom the following year next. All those sprouted bulbs being posted to the data base reminded me to post this. Below are some pictures of Johan Mak's of 'Morning After' which I inadvertently broke the stem off last year while removing it from the bag. For size comparison, the one next to it is another Mak Bulb, 'Sunnyside Down' As you can see, there won't be any flowers this year---but there are 16 little plants. It's a method I've used safety for years. Maybe tomorrow I put on a little demonstration with pictures on some sprouted bulbs I have that are still not planted and we can track those through the next 2 years.

Lorn, my 'Morning After' multiplied pretty well on its own. My one bulb is now coming up as 1+ 4-5 juvenile stems but no doubt your tactic worked!

A 'no-show' that I dug to investigate this morning. I saw nothing wrong with this bulb last fall at planting time. Hopefully some scales are large enough to grow some good size clone bulblets.

In my experience those L. lankongense hybrids need extra good drainage which I can't give them so I stay (mostly) away. I just "might" get a Karen North survival this year (after a good 10 years of trying from time to time. An Ed McRae seedling has done very well but other than that I have lost every one I have tried.

I hope you get some good bulblets, Lorn.

I looked through all 10 pages of Adventures with Scaling and saw nothing about "twin scaling."
It seems to produce a greater amount of baby bulbs. Check out the 3-sentence explanation at
http://www.grow.ars-informatic... or the longer explanation at
http://wwwlib.teiep.gr/images/.... The latter says it works
with Lilium, Amaryllidaceae, Hippeastrum, and Narcissus. Twin scaling involves cutting 1/3 of the
height of the scale beginning at the base.

Hope Descant grows...

Never heard of twin scaling, 3pete. Something new to try.

I could be wrong Pete but I think that is referencing bulbs that have layers but not so much scales like a lily.

Yes, that paper illustrates what many of us have already known:

1) Members of the Araryllidaceae family propagate better with the inclusion of part of the basal plate of the bulb. This is difficult to accomplish with single scales as most species in this family don't have scales that separate easily, and including part of the basal plate is thus even more challenging. So securing part of the basal plate is much more easily done with twin (or multi) scaling, especially with smaller bulbs.

2) With members of the liliaceae (Lily) family, inclusion of the basal plate is not really that beneficial (but not detrimental either). So lily propagators don't twin scale, since it requires the probable destruction of the mother bulb.

It was interesting to note that for lilies, the scaling media of peat, Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria) or vermiculite worked better than perlite or sawdust. Also, that they were incubated at 25°C (77°F).

3pete---have you tried twin scaling? My dad would do that with certain Asiatics and end up with lots of tiny bulblets, about 100 or more per bulb, some as small as a BB pellet and still survive. Bulblet size becomes a survivability factor, however, when it comes to large scaled lilies like Div. VI, Trumpets and Div. VIII, Oriental Trumpets and especially tetraploids. In those cases, your goal should be to obtain a few large bulblets over many small ones. They must be a certain size in order to make it through the first winter. But with certain Asiatics, even the tiniest will most likely survive.

So, if our goal is to obtain survivable bulblet size, we must therefore, use sample scales large enough with enough energy to produce them. Most scales on the inner 1/2 of the bulb are simply not large enough and are best left on the core to allow the mother bulb to grow on. Sample size is relevant in tissue culture of tetraploids also, where larger pieces are needed to grow the extra size characteristic with tetraploids.

I think this thread is centered around the average backyard gardener where wedging, twin scaling, slice and dice, and tissue culture are impractical and the old fashion way of scale cloning is more appropriate. Fear of failure is a factor to overcome with many who would like to try but are afraid to. For those, old fashioned scale cloning is the best, reliable approach. It's one I use often as a hybridizer, as saving the parent bulbs is paramount.

Thanks for sharing and posting the link to an interesting article. I think 77'F is a little high for incubation. And dusting the scales---I'd rather premix the captan into the soil media than dust the scales directly ( although, I do it both ways ).

It's great to hear your insights on this, Lorn.

Thanks!