Neofinetia updates and spikes

April has brought us some unusual events, full lockdown, life threating pandemic, and oddly enough on top of that nice sunny weather. Its nature’s tongue-in-the-cheek i think.

In the growth space there is a few interesting things happening, the biggest one is that neofinetias woke up and are growing rots like mad. Because the living room plant stand where they are, doesn’t get sun till after 3PM, I’m having the LED lights on through most of the morning. However, i have completely unplugged the heat mats as they were drying out the sphagnum moss way too fast and I was really worried it may be more damaging to the plants than actually doing any good.

Neofinetia, at the end of the day are intermediate to cool growers I don’t want to push my luck. And there is so much to see, the three (now four) no ID neofinetias are growing like mad. One was growing so vigorously it split itself in half as the new roots were pushing the other fans away, which is interesting and I never saw behavior like this. Now I have two plants out of one.

The largest clump has muddy root tips – now I’ve been told its actually not a negative description of the color. In Japanese the Doro-ne, 泥根, also known as mud roots are the standard color for Neo roots, and are the most common. Mud is basically any color root that combines both anthocyanin pigmentation with green pigmentation for a range of muddy greens to burgundy to deep dark brown. Mud roots don’t always have to be solid or even in color





The color is really nice, it starts very bright and then it darkens once the root tip is getting longer and longer, making a lovely rainbow display. The other three NoID neofinetia have pale green/yellowish roots. In general they are gorgeous plants that bring me a lot of happiness.

There is a lot of new growth activity, new leaves and new growths coming out on many plants. One of my variegated neofinetia that’s unfortunately a NoID is showing a huge spur of growth sending out big fat roots which makes me very happy since it had literary one root when I got it.

Now I have 3 plants in spike, which is WOW! I don’t know if its my doing at all or because the plants were in a fairly ok condition anyway. First spike is on a large clump NoID neofinetia, in fact my first one I got. Second is on neofinetia Onami Seikai and the third is on the NoID variegated one that I thought is going to die, but it’s not and it’s kicking hard.







Because I only know how Seikai looks I’m very excited to see the other flowers. Neofinetia are so varied in their mutations that it can be any shape and any colour!