Spider Plant Seeds
I don’t see much information on plant genes when it comes to spider plant SEEDS on the internet, which I chop up to being because baby clones are so easy to get not many people dabble in them, so I wanted to share my own experience so far. For extra information, I collected my seeds from reverse variegated spider plants; variegated spider plants are chimeras, so they have two different sets of genes, and I’m unsure how it’s decided what genes the ovule or pollen will carry, but seeds will only get one set of genes, making it impossible to get another variegated plant without a mutation, but in a perfect world where both halves of the plant get an equal chance at reproduction, and with the theory that the white genes are recessive (purely my speculation based on my experiment so far), in a large enough study I would expect ~75% to be pure green and ~25% to be unviable white plants that die shortly after germination (But this is an extremely rough calculation not taking into account so many things about its genes I simply don’t know)
I planted 121 (one cell got a second seed because I thought the original seed was so small and disfigured it had no chance at surviving, but surprise! it sprouted too)
typically my shelf maintained 80-85°F and ~40-50% humidity, but sometimes the temperature was higher during the day and lower during the night
It took 15 days for the first few seeds to germinate, and I am currently on day 26. I just surpassed the halfway mark and have 64 greens and 1 white. In my purely speculated theory, I would aim for ~90 green and ~30 white, and I would expect the white ones to germinate in a similar timeline as the greens, but slow down immediately after sprouting and die off relatively quickly, but to my surprised today was the first day getting a white. Maybe in addition to the lack of color the genes responsible for the white color (or lack of color) also make them have weaker roots or store less energy in their seeds? either one slowing down their germination speed. I’m unsure but I will update as the days go by. Here is my day by day account of how many sprouted and the total:
3 - 15 days -3
2 - 16 days -5
2 - 17 days -7
2 - 18 days -9
6 - 19 days -15
6 - 20 days - 21
12 - 21 days - 33
13 - 22 days - 46
3 - 23 days - 49
7 - 24 days - 56
2 - 25 days - 58
7 - 26 days - 65 (1 white)
if anyone has their own stats or any additional information on spider plant seeds I would love some comments!
I do not yet have any variegated spider plants to collect seeds from, only reverse variegated spider plants, but I would be soooo interested to know if the determination for which genes are in the ovule and pollen had to do with which half of the plant is white vs green, if I end up with too many green plants compared to what I expected, I wonder if I would have the opposite problem with regular variegation producing too many white. from there maybe one is more likely to have green/white genes in the ovule and the other type of gene in the pollen and cross pollinating between reverse and standard you could control the rate? I want to experiment so much more!!