African Violets and Gesneriads: Root Beer bottle Kohleria 'Jester', 1 by begoniacrazii

begoniacrazii wrote:
While visiting in Florida in March, I bought a Kohleria 'Jester' at Palm Hammock Orchid Estate and by the time the two of us made it home it was looking a bit stressed, so about a month or so ago, I cut an 8 or 9 inch piece off of the top and potted the cutting into my regular AV soil. I could see it was already crispy on the edges due to the low humidity, so I put it in a plastic 2 litre bottle 'terrarium' with the lid removed.

Today I wasn't feeling very patient with the whole experiment so I opened it up and was beginning to dump the soil off to see if there were any roots at all, and lo and behold I see a new rhizome forming at the second to lowest leaf axial. Actually it's a 'V' shaped rhizome with each side about as big as a pencil eraser (just slightly larger). So I apologized to it for disturbing it's growing and repotted up baby 'Jester' and put it back in it's root beer bottle and told it I'd leave it alone.

When I did the 'surgery' to it a while back I also took it out of it's pot and found at least three good sized rhizomes that I could remove (there were more, but I was a little hesitant to remove too many). So I potted them up in a 2.5" pot (same AV soil mix) and today I dug that poor little bugger up too and it's rooted nicely and starting to sprout a bit of green! Woo Hoo! My first attempt at Kohlerias!!

I showed this to Key & Anna, but here's a photo I took today, seems pretty happy! I didn't know it would make rhizomes before roots, but it did. No roots on the end of the cutting yet, but it has swollen to a horse hoof shape on the bottom. I've seen some AV's do this too when I'm potting them up from rooting in the perlite trays.