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[FewTrueSeed]

I am familiar with micropropigation techniques and sterile culture especially when it comes to fungi. My attempts at inducing callus tissue with plants however only yielded contamination. I Will soon be attempting this process again. Perhaps with antibiotic medium. Baby steps.

I have two orchids I cross pollinated and I have seven fully developed pods. I intend to sprout them in vetro.

Does anyone have experience in germinating orchids?
I have read of several recipes for agar medium and will do several variations to test their effectiveness.

I would like to leave this open to discussion to discuss agar recipes and Micropropigation in general. Any advice is welcome.

[BubbleCat]

For beginners and if you want to avoid its best to just buy sigma aldrich medium, because it covers a wide variety of orchids, many have different needs, dont forget "orchids" is a very general group of plants.

Also for beginners its best to take the capsules off when green, as you can assume all inside is sterile so all you need to sterilize is the capsule itself... obviously you can just give it a rough time without harming seeds. But they should already be mature of course so it need some experience with the ripening of the pods.

When it already cracked open youll have to sterilise the seeds themselves where you need to experience with concentration and exposure time to be sure you are in between killing apl seeds and introducing contamination.

Ask more if needed.

[FewTrueSeed]

These are moth orchids I have. I was planning to use the pods long before they dried out. Is there a specific time I should remove the pods yo ensure the seeds are mature? It would be best I imagine to just buy medium. Thank u very much for the wisdom.

[BubbleCat]

In my experience the time for ripening spreads widely from species to species and maybe even breed to breed. Id say in general you will notice it turn a little paler or more yellow and maybe shrinkle a bit... thats the time when they sure are ripe and its going to split any time soon.

You can safely assume the seeds are ripe long before something happens and the orchid then spends time on producing pressure or tension in the pod to make it split.

So yeah I think thats where experience does it, but since you found a way to keep your plants alive and pollinate them I'd just advise on experimenting a bit and maybe keeping track of things on paper. Also consider just leaving one on until it splits, just for the record and experience, also as said, spilled seeds arent wasted just more tricky.

The seeds are very small, just check it out.