Oh, My 'Ryllis!

We have amaryllis seeds!

This year, I cross-pollinated the red and white picotee amaryllis, and I was thrilled to get seed pods a few weeks later!

My previous experiments with pollinating my amaryllis plants has produced four babies that are still very small, but not dead yet! I also have one larger baby that grew as a second bulb from the parent picotee amaryllis. I broke it off last year and planted it in a pot of its own, and it seems to be doing fine.

One of the seed babies I've almost given up on three times because the single leaf it produces has yellowed and died all three times. But each time, it shoots up a new leaf a few days later! I just found its fourth seed last weekend!

Once the amaryllis seed pods dry and crack, I have to remove the seeds and put them somewhere they can dry without getting moldy. Living room window works great for this.

Then I have to plant them right away. First I sort them. The paper-thin seeds with a bump in the middle are the only viable seeds; the rest are discarded. Just because a seed is viable doesn't mean it will grow. I got four seedlings out of my last batch of about 24 seeds.

Too bad it can take up to seven years to grow an amaryllis from seed! I'm anxious to see what the new flowers will look like!




I also learned in researching this topic one more time that the white picotee amaryllis is expending all its energy making seed pods, which probably is why it has produced only two flowers each of the last two years. So next year, I will cross-pollinate the red amaryllis (perhaps I'll have a bit of fresh pollen from Phil and Maryann's pink amaryllis to play with, too!), but I won't ask the mama white flowers to make any more seeds. I'd love to have more than two white picotee amaryllis flowers again. Which can't happen until 2020 now, darn it!

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