Off to America!

Finally the time has come to send the plant material under investigation to the US for a much more scientific and rigorous investigation with a hope that this will lead to a reliable and accurate test for the two main virus plaguing Pleione growers at present - Poty-Y and PlFBV.

The testing for me has been really interesting and has raised a few good, but sad points - we are all likely to have 'sleeper agents' in our collections regardless of how fastidious we have been in the past, it is clear that there are more factors than at first maybe thought which can influence if a plant actually shows the virus symptoms or just lurks in our collections silently spreading to others. I have binned a few old friends from the collections which when tested did not come out as negative, that does not mean they were a solid positive but I am not willing to take the risk at present.

Paperwork for sending suspect material to the US was interesting to say the least and it involved several people here checking, and rechecking that all forms were present, sometimes in triplicate, and in the correct envelopes for USDA and then for the Lab afterwards. FedEx proved challenging as paperwork needed to be completed electronically beforehand as well and the paperwork to accompany the box on its trip and I am not exaggerating when I say there was a HUGE sigh of relief when I saw the FedEx van heading up the road, away from the house with the parcel on board.

Leaves ready for packing into double ziplok bags, inside a third double ziplok bag.

Just SOME of the paperwork

Check, check and check again.....

right, where is it going first.....

Ready to go - finally......this had been repacked three times by this point.

So, the plant material will hopefully arrived and the good and very complex scientific work be done at the Lab, what does this mean for Pleione and us growers? Hopefully a reliable, quick and accurate test will become available for us to use in our collections and we can start and weed out infected plants without having to guess if they are infected or not. If we, as a growers community want to eradicate this problem we all need to embrace this and see what we have, this will I am sure include finding some of our favourites may be infected and the horrible truth is that these have to go, straight to the bin or incinerator as keeping them will only risk your other plants.

I cannot express my thanks deeply enough to those who have supported this work so far, the team at Agdia have been amazing and so very patient with me, and those who offered to supply material for testing.

Lets see what comes back, watch this space.....

happy growing and remember the Autumn flowering plants are just round the corner now....I have seen a photo showing Liz Shan 'Pretty Girl' already in bud!