What is Tissue Culture, and why are TC plugs so expensive!?
Tissue culture is "a laboratory technique to propagate plants from small amounts of starting tissue," writes PhD botanist Alex Rajewski. "[It is] often used to create large numbers of identical plants for sale... or as a way to propagate infertile plants or seeds."
Tissue samples from the ideal plant chosen for propagation are collected first. Lab workers use these cells to induce callus, a mass of undifferentiated tissue capable of producing many other tissue types, on sterile nutrient media.
Much in the same way clumps of perennials are divided, the callus clumps are divided and transferred to new plates of media. Shoots are induced with phytohormone Benzyldenine, then Indole acetic acid is added to induce rooting. The resulting plant babies are genetic clones with all of the superior qualities of the parent.
Your florists will know what tissue culture Statice (Limonium sinuatum) is, but until now it has been hard for smaller American growers to track it down.
These superior Limonium strains are vegetatively propagated using tissue culture techniques rather than grown from seed. Why? Because they are bigger, taller, fuller flowered, and FAR more productive than seed-grown strains. When happy, you can expect up to 50 marketable stems per plant, depending on growing conditions. The higher price per plug compared to seed grown strains is offset by the volume and quality of blooms each plant produces.
All types of Limonium appreciate a cool start to life and prefer to be transplanted into cold soil under short day conditions. Your plugs will receive a chilling period before they ship so they will be hardened and ready for transplant. A light frost will not bother these tough crops. Cold is necessary to initiate bud formation. Remove early flowering shoots to allow the plant to grow a large rosette of leaves that will support heavy flowering later in spring. Once they start flowering they can go on for months. Statice types will slow down in hot weather, but the finer textured filler types will keep producing all summer and may even become perennials. We make no hardiness guarantees but many of the parent species used in Limonium breeding will easily survive in zones 4 and 5.
Statice ‘Tessa Purple’ (pictured above) was grown from a tissue culture plug by Rebecca Kutzer-Rice of Moonshot Farm, who also took the photograph.
Many thanks to Alex Rajewski for giving us permission to share his Plant Tissue Culture Infographic, originally created for the American Society of Plant Biologists blog, Plantae.
