skip to main |
skip to sidebar
The photo above shows the Kalamata olive seed I placed into culture on January 26, 2014. In less than a month it has begun to grow, however, it looks nothing like any seedling I have ever seen.
It looks more like an ugly green slug with yellow eyes and green eyeballs than it does like an olive seedling. Perhaps I got carried away with the hormones.
Well, in any event, it is growing, and that is fine with me. Four weeks is much better than waiting for a year and nothing happening.
The photo was sent to the Tissue Culture expert who has been giving me advice and she replied that it appears callus is forming on the tissue.
What is callus? According to my book: "Callus is a mass of undifferentiated cells. The callus mass can contain embryoids capable of developing into whole plants or it can contain shoot or root primordia. (the earliest developmental stage of an organ or cell)"
Who knows? I may get more than one plant from this seed. Only time will tell.....
The GA7 vessels I purchased from Kitchen Culture Kits are really nice to work with. Being larger vessels they allow you to work with larger explants. Positioning the explant in these larger vessels is a breeze.
The above photo is my first real attempt to use a woody cutting for an explant. The cutting was taken from my stubborn Manzanilla olive. The plant is finally beginning to put out some new growth, so I removed a growing section from one of the top branches for this trial.
After cleaning and sterilizing the cutting I scoured the base of the stem before placing the explant in the protocol. The protocol contains an abundance of a rooting hormone, IBA
As misting traditional cuttings to maintain humidity is a real problem without automatic misting equipment,
my thinking is that the GA7 vessel may solve the humidity problem.
If you look at the cap on the vessel you can see small ribs that allow air exchange, and, they do a great job of controlling the humidity also.
The Arbosana olive tree was too tall and needed to be cut back, so I decided to remove about six inches from the top of the tree to be used for a micro-propagation test. This would be the first time I have used woody material rather than soft green growing shoots.
The section removed was surface sterilized in H2O2, cut into several single node explants which were placed into a variety of protocols.
There are things going on with the current tests, however, at this point, I do not have enough experience with the process to interpret what is going on.
For instance, five Kalamata olive embryos were placed into culture on January 6, 2014. On the morning of February 2, 2014 I looked at the embryos and could see swelling. That evening one of the embryos had burst and white tissue was protruding from the blunt end. As of today the tissue is growing in a downward direction and growing quickly. Normally, you would expect a single radicle, pointed like a finger, but this mass of tissue looks nothing like a radicle. I have no idea of what is going on at this point. There are four other Kalamata seeds in the same vessel which are swelling as well.
Previously, I have tried to propagate olives by germinating seeds, but even after trying for a year had no luck. To actually see something happening in eight or nine days is exciting, even if I don't know what is happening.
Time will tell.....
A small single node section of Gardenia Veitchii was placed into culture on January 9, 2014. Today, the section was transferred from the unicorn vessel to a glass baby food jar with a polycarbonate cap.
The glass vessel contains a standard MS medium with BAP.
After only three weeks in vitro, four new plantlets are developing on the explant. To say the least, micro-propagation is a fascinating process.
Yesterday I separated the Redwood explant that I received from California. The single plant has turned into four plants in only a month. The separated new plants have been placed into culture to make even more plants. The Redwoods are in the small vials on the right in the clear protocol.
Doing the math, at this rate, the process would produce three or four thousand trees in about a year.
Today I took a branch tip from the Pendolino olive tree, sterilized it and cut it into three sections of equal lengths, each with two nodes. The sections have been placed into three different protocols each containing different constituents. As all three vessels contain sections of the same branch this should be a very interesting experiment.
The more I work with this process, the more I find I like and enjoy it. It really takes up very little space, needs very little light, and, needs practically no maintenance. Each plant is in its own little self contained environment; needing only to be moved to a new vessel every four to six weeks.
A day or so ago I read an abstract on micro-propagating olives that stated they rooted easily in a protocol containing one half MS with vitamins and a hormone, NAA. That got me really curious, as after all I an not so much multiplying them by the hundreds, but rooting them reliably.
On 1/24/14 I prepared a protocol with 16 ounces of distilled water, half strength MS, .5 ml NAA, .5ml PPM, 1.5 teaspoons sugar and 1.5 teaspoons agar, coloring it yellow. A Manzanillo cutting with two nodes was placed into that protocol as a test.
On 1/25/14, after reading a recipe on homemade protocols, I decided to go for broke and brew up a small batch of my own to test. To that end I used 1/2 cup distilled water, 1/2 cup coconut water, 1/2 cup of a stock solution of Expert Gardener plant food, with added Super Thrive and .5ml of Vita Grow, plus the following vitamins straight from the pharmacy: 1/4 tablet each of: Inositol, B-Complex and multi-vitamin. That protocol was colored green and a similar Manzanillo cutting was placed in that protocol as a companion test.
It should be interesting to watch, as my homemade protocol has enough vitamins and nutrients to grow hair on a brass doorknob.
Of all of my olive trees, the Arbequina olive, shown above, deserves to be genetically duplicated. This tree, although less than a foot tall, has flowers developing nearly every branch. I doubt if every flower will set an olive, but even if a quarter of the flowers set, I fail to see how such a small tree will be able to support them.
The buds are starting to open and I am finding small patches of pollen on the leaves below the flowers. When the flowers first open the stamens are closed, but open a short time later and apparently spew pollen out. Using an artist's brush I am daubing the tip in the pollen clumps and transferring pollen from flower to flower like a bee. That is probably not necessary, but I really want to see how productive this little tree can be, so I am taking no chances.
Today I removed two sections of growing tip, each about 2 inches long, surface sterilized them and placed them into culture. As I wrote above, this little tree deserves having its superior genes replicated as many times as possible.
Posts
