I hope to follow up on it.
It will probably be a couple weeks before there's much to see, though.
I have grown orchids from "seed" before, but my flasking days are long ago. Most varieties are hard to keep in my current dry climate, and I don't think I'd want to propagate them again without a proper clean room. Still, I hope to set up for mushrooms in the next year or two, and I might be tempted to put down some petri dishes with something more colorful.
I did a few cultures of bananas and ferns, too, until a much more experienced propagator showed me that she could reliably produce thousands of ferns from spore using nothing more than sterile sand and peat. Some experimentation showed that bits of banana corm would grow and differentiate on any sterile media with the right nutrition, and didn't need the rigors of classic tissue culture. And then I moved, and gave up much of my ability to grow these things.
Ensetes make great annuals around here because they grow so quickly and dramatically, and there's nothing like them that will overwinter (some of the non-edible musa and musella will pop back up from a well-protected corm/mat, but they're unreliable, much slower growing, and less dramatic). If we were in zone 10, I'm sure we wouldn't think so much of them.
The hope is to come up with a low-effort, inexpensive method of propagation that can give me lots of starts each spring. Also, to play around with the plant and better understand how it works.
