Tissue culture, for people who are not a laboratory
The gap between a $20 plantlet and a $60 plant is one skill, and almost nobody has written it down properly. This is that skill — the whole eight-week schedule, the mistakes that cost you a tray, and honest numbers about what you'll actually clear.
The four knobs
Four things change what a technique becomes: how much humidity you take away, how many plants you do it to, what you pot them into, and how long you wait. Everything below is one of those, turned.
Watch opens a search, not a single video. There's no one right way to do any of this, and the people doing it well keep posting. You'll get whatever's current, from several people who disagree with each other.
The same 36 techniques as one picture — five groups stacked top to bottom, each branch showing what it's built from. Rendered straight from the data, never hand-drawn, so it can't go stale.
What to do right now, sorted by how far behind schedule it's running — from the calendar, not a random draw.
Every batch you've logged, and how far off schedule it's running. Close one out with what actually survived and the number below starts to mean something.
Price it right
(true cost × 2) + your time. Ten plants at $200 with seven survivors is $29 each, not $20 — the arithmetic beginners get wrong.
Sixteen species, sorted by how hard they are to acclimate — not by price. A ● means it breaks the standard protocol; find that out here, not in week four.
Symptom in, cause out. A couple of questions, then a name for what's happening and what to do about it.
Here's the part most guides leave out, so let's do it first.
The numbers on this site are ranges, and yours will sit somewhere inside them. Fifty to seventy per cent survival is normal for a first batch. Eighty to ninety is what people get after a year. If your first tray comes in at forty per cent, you haven't discovered you're bad at this — you've discovered what everyone discovers, and the log is how you watch that number climb.
Six of the sixteen species here will die on the default protocol, and they're flagged. But the roster isn't the world. If you buy something not on this site, assume it might be a seventh exception and go and check before you seal it in a box for two weeks.
The import section is the only page here that decays. A dome is still a dome in 2032. Border rules change on a government's schedule, and every claim in that panel is dated and linked for exactly that reason. If the amber band is showing, believe the source and not us.
We can't promise this makes money. It can. It does, for people who are patient and keep records and don't scale before they're reliable. But your electricity, your climate, your local market, and how much your own hours are worth are all things we know nothing about, and anyone quoting you a monthly figure is guessing at four numbers they don't have.
And the plant is the grader, not us. That's the good news, really. There's no exam and no certificate — just a tray, in eight weeks, holding turgor or not. It's the most honest feedback loop you'll find in any hobby, and it doesn't care at all how well you thought it was going.
Everything you mark is stored in this browser, on this device, and nowhere else. No account, no server, nothing sent anywhere. Clear your browser data and it's gone; open the site on your phone and you'll start empty. That's the trade for not asking you to sign up for anything.
This describes how the US import process works. It is not legal advice, and where this page and the linked source disagree, the source governs.
One last thing worth knowing. Acclimatization — the eight weeks you just spent lowering a dome — is the final stage of tissue culture proper. Labs call it Stage 4. Everything before it happens in a flask, and everything you've learned here is the part most people find hardest. If you ever decide to make your own flasks, you're not starting over. You're starting three-quarters of the way in.