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April 6, 2003

Spring is finally here but this is the forecast in my area for Sunday and Monday. Mother Nature can be SO fickle!

All is well and it appears I will get to enjoy the experience of having Victorias this summer. I have been contemplating whether to allow maximum growth or to bonsai the Victorias in my pond. I am leaning towards having two big and two mini Victorias but that may change. I'm already anticipating just what it will be like when I actually place the Victorias in their final home for the summer.

After experiencing the problem with the leaves several weeks ago, and now thinking it was due to temperature fluctuation between water and air, I am sure the same will occur outside in my pond, OH NO!

The larger and older the plants get, the tougher they get, better able to withstand changing weather and other variations. Having been grown inside, it's probable that your biggest concern will be protecting them from sunburn when you first put them outside.

	My biggest leaf has reached 7 1/2 inches on this 'Longwood Hybrid', very exciting!
	I did have to do a little leaf rearranging today to keep them from overlapping. And the amount of turbulence has also been adjusted down to keep leaves fully floating on the surface.

They really do adjust to changing water levels, as they must have to do in the wild. My water exchanges must make them feel at home :>)

I have wondered how my experience and success rate with Victoria has compared to others'. When I look back, I have had a pretty poor success rate -- from so many seeds to now only 4, possibly 5 plants. I am very thankful for that! After all just what would I have done with SO many plants?

You have been phenomenally successful! If we did a tenth as well, we would be very happy. Not many records are available, if they are even kept, to get an idea of the success rate in a variety of locales and conditions. We have heard of those who grow Victorias fairly easily but no actual data is available. We hear far more often about people like us who have great difficulty getting them going.

As an example, of those seeds that we tracked on the 2003 Germination pages, we have no survivors. We started 480 seeds, had 178 sprout, some didn't develop from nubs. Only 27 were strong enough to plant and only one of those made a floating leaf. Granted we were looking at the most difficult as well as some easy ones but that's a pretty abysmal record. With improving weather and longer day length, we are doing a little better than that now but it's still pretty terrible.

So congratulations are in order! With four plants "over the hump" from a total of 38 seeds, you have beaten all the odds. On top of that you have let us all watch - a brave thing! We have to admit we were holding our breath a couple of times waiting for the next update, hoping you still had seedlings to work with! Thanks from all of us for sharing this experience!

Alan will now provide these updates every several weeks instead of weekly or as an unexpected crisis requires. Watching Victorias grow is extremely exciting to the parents but the changes for the next period of time are small. We will of course have complete coverage of the installation of the plants and, without doubt, their flowers!