Crissytal
What is and what should never be
A friend recommended that I make a thread explaining how I successfully got a couple of D. kennealyii leaves to strike floating in water. Here are some shots of some successful leaf pullings from my D. kennealyii.
Setup on glass aquarium top under T5 lighting.
A small D. kennealyii strike
Showing both strikes and a leaf that hasn't rotted nor struck yet. The picture didn't turn out too well.
Newly taken D. faloneri cuttings. They somewhat curled up on me. I don't think it will affect anything though.
I took the leaf cuttings in a very scientific way, I plucked the leaves right off. I made sure to get part of the petiole like you do with VFTs and Ping pullings. If the Petiolaris complex is anything like Pings in regard to pullings, stressed plants have a higher fail rate than acclimated plants (in my experience and in my conditions). By this I mean when I get new pings I try to get leaf pullings from them while potting them up. If the plants are real stressed, wilting leaves etc, only a couple leaf pullings strike for me while a healthy happy plant, almost if not all of the pullings make it. I think that's why only two leaves struck from the kennealyiis. I took all the pullings before potting them up after receiving them. I just took some from my D. faloneri a couple days ago. It's a more established plant. I'm hoping to get at least one strike from the 4 complete pullings that I took. I say 'complete' because some of the leaves broke without taking the petiole, but I went ahead and got the rest of the leaf anyway. I can see tweezers making it a bit easier to help prevent the leaves from breaking. Once pulled, the leaves went into a little container of rain water. The water gets changed about once a week, or if I start to notice algae particles it gets changed sooner. The container is not covered. The lighting is by the T5 fixture that's over my 55 gallon aquarium. The container is elevated a little by two small pot saucers. The container is almost right up against the top of the light. The light puts off quite a bit of heat, the temps are around 97-100 degrees. Night time temps drop down to room temperature, somewhere around 75 when the lights are off.
I potted up the strongest strike just a couple of days ago. The other strike began to decline. I'm not sure if it's rot or if it's being attacked by algae. I rinsed it and placed it back into a cleaned container of rain water.
Here's a shot of the entire tank:
D. kennealyii finally starting to make some dew. My camera washed out some of the color, my apologies.
D. paradoxa hybrid, same with this one, it's much more pink.
D. falconeri doing something. I moved it out of the container into the 'dry' side because I thought it was going dormant; it stopped growing. A few days later it was putting off leaves again so I moved it back.
That's my small woolly collection.
Enjoy,
Crystal
Setup on glass aquarium top under T5 lighting.
A small D. kennealyii strike
Showing both strikes and a leaf that hasn't rotted nor struck yet. The picture didn't turn out too well.
Newly taken D. faloneri cuttings. They somewhat curled up on me. I don't think it will affect anything though.
I took the leaf cuttings in a very scientific way, I plucked the leaves right off. I made sure to get part of the petiole like you do with VFTs and Ping pullings. If the Petiolaris complex is anything like Pings in regard to pullings, stressed plants have a higher fail rate than acclimated plants (in my experience and in my conditions). By this I mean when I get new pings I try to get leaf pullings from them while potting them up. If the plants are real stressed, wilting leaves etc, only a couple leaf pullings strike for me while a healthy happy plant, almost if not all of the pullings make it. I think that's why only two leaves struck from the kennealyiis. I took all the pullings before potting them up after receiving them. I just took some from my D. faloneri a couple days ago. It's a more established plant. I'm hoping to get at least one strike from the 4 complete pullings that I took. I say 'complete' because some of the leaves broke without taking the petiole, but I went ahead and got the rest of the leaf anyway. I can see tweezers making it a bit easier to help prevent the leaves from breaking. Once pulled, the leaves went into a little container of rain water. The water gets changed about once a week, or if I start to notice algae particles it gets changed sooner. The container is not covered. The lighting is by the T5 fixture that's over my 55 gallon aquarium. The container is elevated a little by two small pot saucers. The container is almost right up against the top of the light. The light puts off quite a bit of heat, the temps are around 97-100 degrees. Night time temps drop down to room temperature, somewhere around 75 when the lights are off.
I potted up the strongest strike just a couple of days ago. The other strike began to decline. I'm not sure if it's rot or if it's being attacked by algae. I rinsed it and placed it back into a cleaned container of rain water.
Here's a shot of the entire tank:
D. kennealyii finally starting to make some dew. My camera washed out some of the color, my apologies.
D. paradoxa hybrid, same with this one, it's much more pink.
D. falconeri doing something. I moved it out of the container into the 'dry' side because I thought it was going dormant; it stopped growing. A few days later it was putting off leaves again so I moved it back.
That's my small woolly collection.
Enjoy,
Crystal
. They are so hard to get a hold of!
