Re: [aroid-l] Amorphophallus FAQ part 3

From: Riley2362 at aol.com on 2002.10.03 at 12:56:37(9482) Hi Randy, I'm a little confused about your perspective of classifying anything as indoors or outdoors, even though that may make perfect horticultural sense to a specific grower in a specific climate. Basically, they were all born outside ... someplace. +More The exact reverse perspective, that some of us face is that we grow everything indoors. In an apartment, with natural window light and fluorescent lights, amorphophallus wake up when they want and go dormant when they want and basically when they are growing you give them light and water, and when they are dormant you stop watering and put them in a closet, or some such place to rest. I know many people that have successfully grown amorphs for years with this routine, although probably only the more common species such as A. konjac and bulbifer. Now that some of us grow more uncommon species with the same culture in mind, we find one of the major problems is not dormancy or season, but whether they want or need a wet or dry dormancy, so people tend to lose their tubers from drying up or rotting. Given the above basic premise, some of us do employ other horticultural options such as putting plants outdoors (back yard/rooftop/fire escape) in the summer - we call this "sending our plants to summer camp". However, that implies that they are growing in the summer and dormant in the winter which we all know is not the case for many of the "tropical" growers where season are erratic. It would never occur to us that people in Florida or California would have a problem growing anything because they have more cultural options than we do, although I know many people in both states who would not dream of growing a plant indoors. Just a slightly different perspective for your FAQ's. I was once asked to edit a horticultural encyclopedia where 90% of the information was geared to growing in a "stove house" in England and I was to translate that to horticulture in the US. They gave up on the project because it made no sense unless I did a complete rewrite. Good luck - Michael

Note: this is a very old post, so no reply function is available.