Peabody

Hello from England. are any Hellcats available ? is posting to the U.K. possible ? thank you :)

I am curious to know if it is a reasonable idea to boil Sphagnum peat in order to prevent carpet moss growth which swamps juvenile plants.

I was interested to see the orange heater pad. I had a look on eBay but stumbled across motor cycle handle bar heaters which are flexible and laminated and run on nominally 12 volts. I had an idea that the number of LEDs you are using would run quite warm. I am considering getting some of these LED strips which are relatively inexpensive apart from the cost of some kind of heatsink arrangement : https://neonica.eu/led-strip-neonica-growy.html

Discovered a company based in Poland that have an interesting range of LED lighting components. Particularly 5 metre strips of LEDs that are optimised for Vegetative growth that can be cut down into shorter lengths and joined to make a parallel strip arrangement. www.neonica.eu I might be making a purchase.

I have just ordered four of these 15 Watt COB LEDs from Aliexpress. I realise they won't be the brightest but they are cheap enough for an experiment. I have already got a suitable driver that has a display of both voltage and ampage so it will be easy to run them at a reduced level and easy to calculate the wattage. (Amps x Volts = Watts). https://www.aliexpress.com/snapshot/0.html?orderId=500862428457789&productId=32592009102 I have got a couple of polystyrene tropical fish transport boxes and a small aquarium that I am using for LED growing experiments.

The thought I have got on LEDs is that some plant leaves have colouration and are not "green". So presumably the colouration will have a filtering effect on whatever spectrum of light is shone on it.

I am going to try growing some Toad Lily's from seed very soon. I have got a packet of seed from Johnsons World Botanics. Has anyone had any success ?

I have bought some of these 10 Watt "Full Spectrum" LEDs to experiment with. I've bonded a couple of them to fan cooled heatsinks using silver loaded heat transfer epoxy. After a couple of weeks the plain bearing fan has gone noisy so I think I'm going to consider using second hand computer fans over the heatsinks. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01DBZK3V6?psc=1 I am using them over Cephalotus leaf pullings in a small aquarium I got from the charity shop.

How about buying an off the peg aluminium cold frame and having the components powder coated by a general engineering company ?

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B_qzBYl6_5kFOE1MLXVPYTdOcUk Hope my attempt to post a photo has been successful. I have done leaf pullings in live sphagnum this year. I have used small takeaway pots as used for minty yoghurt from the curry shop. I've melted a hole in the base of the pot so that when it is placed in the propagator on a layer of wet capillary matting the moss is kept wet. My plan is to plant up the entire contents of the pot so that the roots do not get disturbed. There are smaller pots available if you do some searching for them. One source is clear polystyrene sample cups as used for tasters in supermarkets/farmers markets etc. They should be easy enough to buy in craft shops.

I planted some seeds in October 2014 and only in the last fortnight I was going to throw the pots out because nothing had emerged. I had another close look and saw just one seedling. It must have germinated fairly recently.

One of my leaf pulling experiments is to make up a compost mixture and form a depression in the compost in the plantpot using something about an inch in diameter. I reckon less than an inch would be OK as well. Then I've filled the depression with live Sphagnum for the leaf to be placed in. This means it won't need to be disturbed when it sprouts.

I am on a learning curve but I've used small pots (chilli sauce / mint sauce from the takeaway) with a hole melted into the bottom with a soldering iron. Then I've filled the pots with live sphagnum and poked the end of the leaf pulling into the sphagnum. Then I've put the pots in a propagator in partly shaded sun getting up to about 37c. It's worked well. Got a few sprouting leaves.

The moss in a tray is in my greenhouse.

In my spare bedroom out of direct sunlight. It's in a standard sized propagator. It only a small scale experiment to see how things turn out.