Aren't LED-grown Sarrs basically cheating?
Apr 24, 2020 5:01:04 GMT -5
greenthumb, calen, and 4 more like this
Post by RΛYCE on Apr 24, 2020 5:01:04 GMT -5
Ok guys, I wrote a book. The title is rhetorical, referring directly to my question. Hang in there.
After about five years of intensively growing Sarracenia I now feel established enough to share some of what I've been doing. Principally, I'd like to run by you my experiences growing plants in an accelerated way from seed under LED lights. Quite a bit of this post is actually a plea. I want to make a thorough introduction to my practice as I have found that growing and selling Sarracenia seedlings from under LEDs is something of a controversy. Feeling somewhat conflicted about this, I wrote a loooong missive about what I do, why I do it, and what I feel about it, and a little bit about what it may spell for Sarrs as a hobby as well. It serves as part introspection, part explanation, and part introduction to what I do.
Despite finishing this post after 3 days of drafts, I still feel like my feelings haven't been completely summed up by it. There are criticisms to LED growing that I agree with, but for many reasons I will still practice this way of raising seedling Sarracenia.
If you don’t care about hearing the reasons behind my setup, then feel free to skip to the parenthetical paragraph break, (Section on LED effects on seedlings!)
---
I'm a Sarracenia fiend who can't really grow much outside. I live in Portland OR, where it's cool and damp for much of the year until summer, when it suddenly turns arid and hot. I get about 7 hours' sun exposure at summer solstice where I live, and gain very little heat from that insolation. Nothing colors up for me and plants tend to recede in size over time, so I do not keep many plants here. I do have a satellite location in Portland where a friend of mine (incidentally not a CP enthusiast) keeps my collection of adult Sarracenia in full southern exposure against a brick wall. I’m able to get robust growth there similar to what Calen experiences, and this is also where I grow out select plants for evaluation.
But it's not enough.
My time working at a nursery made me familiar with many different Sarracenia clones under a multitude of conditions at all times of year. I worked with them outside in their pools, in a coldframe, and in a heated greenhouse (with and without supplemental lights, both fluorescent and LED). I propagated them by seed, division, and pullings in each of these environments. Valuably, nearly three years of observation showed me patterns and structures by which to assess Sarracenia growth and development.
I also learned quite a bit about carnivorous plants as a business.
OVERVIEW OF MY BASEMENT GROWSPACE
I want to grow Sarracenia from seed in an accelerated way. As you now know, I have no place outside to work with, so I must do it all in my basement. There’s no room for permanent adult plants in such a set-up, and without the time or space to keep them outdoors to evaluate them, I must sell off quite a few plants.
For three of the five years I’ve kept Sarrs, I’ve grown over a thousand plants a year in a space no bigger than a kitchen. I could never do this outside, not even in a coldframe. The sheer variety I get to enjoy year after year, 24/7, is astounding, enriching, and rewarding to maintain.
Basements are great places to grow plants. I used to keep South African winter-growing Drosera down there in the very stable, predictable conditions, where they thrived. Among those I was able to keep were Drosera hilaris, a species that is notoriously picky about temperatures. In a basement, growers never have to worry about external factors compromising my plants or contaminating the calculus of their decisions with vague external variables. It’s a laboratory.
Temperatures are always within 5 degrees of 70F, and the humidity stays at the 50-60% range, sometimes lower. I have a hose running straight from the tap that waters the collection, which is arranged on some 144 ft^2 of tray-bound growing space across several large shelves. My floor is concrete with a drain, so I am somewhat at ease to spill water down there too.
Shelf Setup and LED Pros & Cons
Each shelf is outfitted with several LED fixtures per level. They fit flush to the edges of the structure and require 0 maintenance once installed. There are several pros to using LED fixtures: they’re thinner than cardboard and just about as heavy, they run cooler than fluorescents, they’ll drain no more power than either, they’re cheap, easy to purchase in bulk, require no replacements for over 10 years, and won’t cut me with mercury-laced glass shards if cracked.
There are cons too. LEDs are not built to any standard, so the light they emit varies in quality and intensity from manufacturer to manufacturer – this makes predicting the effect of LEDs on various plants somewhat difficult. The diodes emit a single color of light – that’s it. Sometimes you’ll need blue or red or far-red light, and your white LEDs won’t cut it. This means that you cannot really grow some genera (and even some Sarracenia seedlings) under some LEDs, and with Drosera it is especially hit or miss. LEDs also have a very narrow spread, which means that plants even 1cm outside the light spread receive no ambient light. There may also be several colors of LEDs per model, choices that confound the buyer. Thankfully, my friend Patrick Quinn did plenty of lighting experiments for himself over the period of a year and he and I settled on a few models that performed the best per genera. Another awful downside is that you cannot really view your plants under LED lights, especially under red, orange, or blue light. Unfortunately, it is lights with these colors that tend to grow plants more successfully.
(Section on LED effects on seedlings!)
The effects of unnaturally bright LEDs on Sarracenia seedlings
This is probably the only controversial aspect of what I do (especially so because I have to sell my seedlings to keep this expensive system running!). Like greenhouse roofs, some LEDs cause plants to express color pigments in deeper and more various shades, more intense venation, and sometimes even produce more nectar than normal as well. When people see my seedlings, they see plants that have been absolutely bathed in bright light since germination. That they bear coloration that is usually not replicable outside has caused some, myself included, to question whether or not selling LED-grown seedlings is ethical.
Context is everything. When I market plants to people who don’t know what Sarracenia are, I regard my product as “greenhouse grown” and move on, mostly because I prioritize giving simple care instructions first. When marketing to growers online, I always provide a careful explanation of how I grew my plants.
When someone buys a plant fresh from under LEDs and puts it outside in full sun in Oregon, the leaves often suffer, sometimes senescing. When under lights 24/7, seedlings leaves don’t senesce. I’ve seen cotyledons on year-old plants, submerged in the soil and still yellow-green. But when taken outside, old leaves suddenly lose the elixir of life, and new growth is pale, often green, unshapely. Sometimes they shrink. Sometimes they stop growing until the next year. The plant basically experiences stress. It’s not the same stress as that of a division though. It’s the stress of an entirely new ambient atmosphere and photoperiod, while going through maturation. They’ve been taken from sterility and put out in the real world.
LED-grown Sarracenia are not so different from those raised in greenhouses (but they are more sensitive in some regards, as the restrained senescence of leaves would indicate). As an experiment, last year I placed a collection LED-grown plants in a coldframe with excellent southern exposure. They kept growing at a regular pace and retained most of their color and color patterning. The saturation decreased by some degree, but the difference was more revealing than depriving. After being acclimated to a coldframe, these plants originally from under LEDs were then moved outside without. They did not sustain any damage, from the sun or otherwise, and they sold in-person 3 weeks later.
Jeremiah Harris has shown that LED-grown seedlings can be just as satisfying to keep as any other greenhouse-grown Sarracenia. He keeps some of my now-grown seedlings in his greenhouse and regularly updates me on their progress. As with my experiment in Oregon, his seedlings of mine have kept beautiful color. Greenhouse-grown Sarracenia grow robustly, and they are almost exclusively grown that way in Europe; a few notable growers do so as well here in the US, including Jerry Addington. As with LED-grown plants, move greenhouse-tender plants outside and you may have to wait a few seasons before you see the same plant again. And let’s not forget that without artificial conditions, some plants, such as ‘Adrian Slack’, may not be worth keeping outside in some regions. Yet Adrian Slack is still exchanged, even if it’s usually hideous when grown in Oregon! So why not LED-grown plants?
The intense colors of LED-grown plants are still expressions of a natural capacity. Although it is not likely that you will achieve the same thing by growing them outside in a cool climate, they are not fake. If you grow known cultivars such as Judith Hindle, Reptilian Rose, Royal Ruby, or Adrian Slack under growlight LEDs, the results are plants you may expect to find outside in a warm, humid climate. Such specimens look like ordinary, picture-perfect examples of those cultivars. If my seedlings are grown with that kind of quality, then I am satisfied with them.
Seedling Maturation, Structural Inflation, and Distribution of Color in Adulthood
Leaf color patterns and density change on Sarracenia as they develop into adult plants. These changes in appearance can be understood as independent from influences of the light source, being part of the plant’s adult physiology. LED-hues on seedlings are definitely unrepresentative of what the adult will look like, but no matter how it is raised, no seedling is colored quite like the adult, and venders of LED-grown plants cannot take responsibility for the “fault” of a customer growing a plant into maturity.
The spread of color over their leaves follows the general constraints of leaf structure in Sarracenia. Young seedlings may bear dense colors on their leaves, and outdoor-grown plants are no exception. But as plants mature, the standard structures of the leaf remain constant. Veins on the left and right of the tube, as well as the ala itself, and the number of bifurcations of the main veins in the lid are traits that can be found in seedlings and adults of all Sarracenia, from purps to oreos to rubras to leucos. From what I’ve seen, mature leaves represent inflated versions of their juvenile predecessors, meaning that there is more room between the ever-present ventral veins and the ala for secondary venation, filler color, and with S. leucophylla, areoles. Jerry Addington once pointed out to me that as a plant develops, white pigment expands throughout a lid to cover more and more space, and this space to me seems to be the areas between the major veins of the leaf (which are usually heavily pigmented). I don’t believe this idea of coloration by inflation can explain the development of structures of the lip and lid, but it does appear to at least partially account for general adult structural and color traits. It seems to be a visible pattern across groups of siblings. Again, maturation involves new traits that a vendor of seedlings is not responsible for, but which can serve to exaggerate the difference between seedling and adult, especially when the same plant is grown first under artificial lights and later taken outside.
Despite what snark I have heard about LED growing, I do not modify my plants like cheap trinkets to become dysfunctional under the care of others. I grow them to the best of my ability because any less would be absurd. It's not cheap to run the setup and it takes time to market the plants. I do not photoshop my products either - what you see is what you get. Such colors can be maintained by anyone who invests in LEDs, which some of my customers indeed do, both out of spatial necessity and out of preference. But buyers should not expect such colors to maintain through into adulthood no matter what they do – though it cannot be doubted that photographs of LED-grown seedlings can be very attractive. Many will still prefer to grow the plants outside, where they can still thrive and be beautiful without being “fresh baked”.
There is a dearth of written experience (now rapidly mounting) on LED-to-outdoor horticulture for Sarracenia. I am sure that as the Sarracenia community becomes familiar with it we will also learn how to work with it, especially as more of us encounter LED-grown seedlings as the number of growers increases. Growing Sarracenia rapidly and in quantity as done indoors under lights is something that I feel the Sarracenia community is going to involve to a greater and greater degree. Beginning as a specialized technique among the most daring of us (Larry Mellichamp claims to have done it first in the 70s), maxroiding our seedlings into early adulthood is clearly preferable to waiting 3 years for traits. But now the secret’s out. This method makes it possible to keep unique Sarracenia collections in apartments on bookshelves, or in a basement, or even in an unlit room at a school as a prop. The LED technique makes Sarracenia portable and plentiful, and I think that that’s a real win for us all.
After about five years of intensively growing Sarracenia I now feel established enough to share some of what I've been doing. Principally, I'd like to run by you my experiences growing plants in an accelerated way from seed under LED lights. Quite a bit of this post is actually a plea. I want to make a thorough introduction to my practice as I have found that growing and selling Sarracenia seedlings from under LEDs is something of a controversy. Feeling somewhat conflicted about this, I wrote a loooong missive about what I do, why I do it, and what I feel about it, and a little bit about what it may spell for Sarrs as a hobby as well. It serves as part introspection, part explanation, and part introduction to what I do.
Despite finishing this post after 3 days of drafts, I still feel like my feelings haven't been completely summed up by it. There are criticisms to LED growing that I agree with, but for many reasons I will still practice this way of raising seedling Sarracenia.
If you don’t care about hearing the reasons behind my setup, then feel free to skip to the parenthetical paragraph break, (Section on LED effects on seedlings!)
---
I'm a Sarracenia fiend who can't really grow much outside. I live in Portland OR, where it's cool and damp for much of the year until summer, when it suddenly turns arid and hot. I get about 7 hours' sun exposure at summer solstice where I live, and gain very little heat from that insolation. Nothing colors up for me and plants tend to recede in size over time, so I do not keep many plants here. I do have a satellite location in Portland where a friend of mine (incidentally not a CP enthusiast) keeps my collection of adult Sarracenia in full southern exposure against a brick wall. I’m able to get robust growth there similar to what Calen experiences, and this is also where I grow out select plants for evaluation.
But it's not enough.
My time working at a nursery made me familiar with many different Sarracenia clones under a multitude of conditions at all times of year. I worked with them outside in their pools, in a coldframe, and in a heated greenhouse (with and without supplemental lights, both fluorescent and LED). I propagated them by seed, division, and pullings in each of these environments. Valuably, nearly three years of observation showed me patterns and structures by which to assess Sarracenia growth and development.
I also learned quite a bit about carnivorous plants as a business.
OVERVIEW OF MY BASEMENT GROWSPACE
I want to grow Sarracenia from seed in an accelerated way. As you now know, I have no place outside to work with, so I must do it all in my basement. There’s no room for permanent adult plants in such a set-up, and without the time or space to keep them outdoors to evaluate them, I must sell off quite a few plants.
For three of the five years I’ve kept Sarrs, I’ve grown over a thousand plants a year in a space no bigger than a kitchen. I could never do this outside, not even in a coldframe. The sheer variety I get to enjoy year after year, 24/7, is astounding, enriching, and rewarding to maintain.
Basements are great places to grow plants. I used to keep South African winter-growing Drosera down there in the very stable, predictable conditions, where they thrived. Among those I was able to keep were Drosera hilaris, a species that is notoriously picky about temperatures. In a basement, growers never have to worry about external factors compromising my plants or contaminating the calculus of their decisions with vague external variables. It’s a laboratory.
Temperatures are always within 5 degrees of 70F, and the humidity stays at the 50-60% range, sometimes lower. I have a hose running straight from the tap that waters the collection, which is arranged on some 144 ft^2 of tray-bound growing space across several large shelves. My floor is concrete with a drain, so I am somewhat at ease to spill water down there too.
Shelf Setup and LED Pros & Cons
Each shelf is outfitted with several LED fixtures per level. They fit flush to the edges of the structure and require 0 maintenance once installed. There are several pros to using LED fixtures: they’re thinner than cardboard and just about as heavy, they run cooler than fluorescents, they’ll drain no more power than either, they’re cheap, easy to purchase in bulk, require no replacements for over 10 years, and won’t cut me with mercury-laced glass shards if cracked.
There are cons too. LEDs are not built to any standard, so the light they emit varies in quality and intensity from manufacturer to manufacturer – this makes predicting the effect of LEDs on various plants somewhat difficult. The diodes emit a single color of light – that’s it. Sometimes you’ll need blue or red or far-red light, and your white LEDs won’t cut it. This means that you cannot really grow some genera (and even some Sarracenia seedlings) under some LEDs, and with Drosera it is especially hit or miss. LEDs also have a very narrow spread, which means that plants even 1cm outside the light spread receive no ambient light. There may also be several colors of LEDs per model, choices that confound the buyer. Thankfully, my friend Patrick Quinn did plenty of lighting experiments for himself over the period of a year and he and I settled on a few models that performed the best per genera. Another awful downside is that you cannot really view your plants under LED lights, especially under red, orange, or blue light. Unfortunately, it is lights with these colors that tend to grow plants more successfully.
(Section on LED effects on seedlings!)
The effects of unnaturally bright LEDs on Sarracenia seedlings
This is probably the only controversial aspect of what I do (especially so because I have to sell my seedlings to keep this expensive system running!). Like greenhouse roofs, some LEDs cause plants to express color pigments in deeper and more various shades, more intense venation, and sometimes even produce more nectar than normal as well. When people see my seedlings, they see plants that have been absolutely bathed in bright light since germination. That they bear coloration that is usually not replicable outside has caused some, myself included, to question whether or not selling LED-grown seedlings is ethical.
Context is everything. When I market plants to people who don’t know what Sarracenia are, I regard my product as “greenhouse grown” and move on, mostly because I prioritize giving simple care instructions first. When marketing to growers online, I always provide a careful explanation of how I grew my plants.
When someone buys a plant fresh from under LEDs and puts it outside in full sun in Oregon, the leaves often suffer, sometimes senescing. When under lights 24/7, seedlings leaves don’t senesce. I’ve seen cotyledons on year-old plants, submerged in the soil and still yellow-green. But when taken outside, old leaves suddenly lose the elixir of life, and new growth is pale, often green, unshapely. Sometimes they shrink. Sometimes they stop growing until the next year. The plant basically experiences stress. It’s not the same stress as that of a division though. It’s the stress of an entirely new ambient atmosphere and photoperiod, while going through maturation. They’ve been taken from sterility and put out in the real world.
LED-grown Sarracenia are not so different from those raised in greenhouses (but they are more sensitive in some regards, as the restrained senescence of leaves would indicate). As an experiment, last year I placed a collection LED-grown plants in a coldframe with excellent southern exposure. They kept growing at a regular pace and retained most of their color and color patterning. The saturation decreased by some degree, but the difference was more revealing than depriving. After being acclimated to a coldframe, these plants originally from under LEDs were then moved outside without. They did not sustain any damage, from the sun or otherwise, and they sold in-person 3 weeks later.
Jeremiah Harris has shown that LED-grown seedlings can be just as satisfying to keep as any other greenhouse-grown Sarracenia. He keeps some of my now-grown seedlings in his greenhouse and regularly updates me on their progress. As with my experiment in Oregon, his seedlings of mine have kept beautiful color. Greenhouse-grown Sarracenia grow robustly, and they are almost exclusively grown that way in Europe; a few notable growers do so as well here in the US, including Jerry Addington. As with LED-grown plants, move greenhouse-tender plants outside and you may have to wait a few seasons before you see the same plant again. And let’s not forget that without artificial conditions, some plants, such as ‘Adrian Slack’, may not be worth keeping outside in some regions. Yet Adrian Slack is still exchanged, even if it’s usually hideous when grown in Oregon! So why not LED-grown plants?
The intense colors of LED-grown plants are still expressions of a natural capacity. Although it is not likely that you will achieve the same thing by growing them outside in a cool climate, they are not fake. If you grow known cultivars such as Judith Hindle, Reptilian Rose, Royal Ruby, or Adrian Slack under growlight LEDs, the results are plants you may expect to find outside in a warm, humid climate. Such specimens look like ordinary, picture-perfect examples of those cultivars. If my seedlings are grown with that kind of quality, then I am satisfied with them.
Seedling Maturation, Structural Inflation, and Distribution of Color in Adulthood
Leaf color patterns and density change on Sarracenia as they develop into adult plants. These changes in appearance can be understood as independent from influences of the light source, being part of the plant’s adult physiology. LED-hues on seedlings are definitely unrepresentative of what the adult will look like, but no matter how it is raised, no seedling is colored quite like the adult, and venders of LED-grown plants cannot take responsibility for the “fault” of a customer growing a plant into maturity.
The spread of color over their leaves follows the general constraints of leaf structure in Sarracenia. Young seedlings may bear dense colors on their leaves, and outdoor-grown plants are no exception. But as plants mature, the standard structures of the leaf remain constant. Veins on the left and right of the tube, as well as the ala itself, and the number of bifurcations of the main veins in the lid are traits that can be found in seedlings and adults of all Sarracenia, from purps to oreos to rubras to leucos. From what I’ve seen, mature leaves represent inflated versions of their juvenile predecessors, meaning that there is more room between the ever-present ventral veins and the ala for secondary venation, filler color, and with S. leucophylla, areoles. Jerry Addington once pointed out to me that as a plant develops, white pigment expands throughout a lid to cover more and more space, and this space to me seems to be the areas between the major veins of the leaf (which are usually heavily pigmented). I don’t believe this idea of coloration by inflation can explain the development of structures of the lip and lid, but it does appear to at least partially account for general adult structural and color traits. It seems to be a visible pattern across groups of siblings. Again, maturation involves new traits that a vendor of seedlings is not responsible for, but which can serve to exaggerate the difference between seedling and adult, especially when the same plant is grown first under artificial lights and later taken outside.
Despite what snark I have heard about LED growing, I do not modify my plants like cheap trinkets to become dysfunctional under the care of others. I grow them to the best of my ability because any less would be absurd. It's not cheap to run the setup and it takes time to market the plants. I do not photoshop my products either - what you see is what you get. Such colors can be maintained by anyone who invests in LEDs, which some of my customers indeed do, both out of spatial necessity and out of preference. But buyers should not expect such colors to maintain through into adulthood no matter what they do – though it cannot be doubted that photographs of LED-grown seedlings can be very attractive. Many will still prefer to grow the plants outside, where they can still thrive and be beautiful without being “fresh baked”.
There is a dearth of written experience (now rapidly mounting) on LED-to-outdoor horticulture for Sarracenia. I am sure that as the Sarracenia community becomes familiar with it we will also learn how to work with it, especially as more of us encounter LED-grown seedlings as the number of growers increases. Growing Sarracenia rapidly and in quantity as done indoors under lights is something that I feel the Sarracenia community is going to involve to a greater and greater degree. Beginning as a specialized technique among the most daring of us (Larry Mellichamp claims to have done it first in the 70s), maxroiding our seedlings into early adulthood is clearly preferable to waiting 3 years for traits. But now the secret’s out. This method makes it possible to keep unique Sarracenia collections in apartments on bookshelves, or in a basement, or even in an unlit room at a school as a prop. The LED technique makes Sarracenia portable and plentiful, and I think that that’s a real win for us all.
Here are images of plant progress on 03/16/2023