Dear Paul,
I was the one that mentioned the TC guide. It will be a conversion
of a slide-show talk that I gave last year at the SF Bay Area CP club.
The status is that the slides are now at Kodak being scanned onto
a PhotoCD. They should be back in a week. After that, I will add
a running textual commentary and install the whole thing onto the
web.
Here's a high level outline of the talk:
Why bother with TC?
Some Definitions:
Totipotency
Meristem
Auxin, Cytokinin,
Role of each component of TC growth medium
Inorganic nutrients
Organic Macro/Micro nutrients
Simple Home Recipe and Suggested Commercial Media
A demonstration of Kitchen Technique
Media preparation
Sterilization of plant material
Sterile technique
Culture Maintainance and planting out cultures
Bibliography and list of suppliers
I'm shooting for having this on the WEB within a month.
Also in the works is a slide show titled: "Pings: care and cultivation",
which was another BACPS talk. This slide show has pictures of flowers
and rosettes of perhaps 15 common ping species, and discusses cultural
requirements for each. The whole talk very heavily leverages Juerg
Steiger's classification of pings into four groups:
Tropical/Homophyllous, Tropical/Heterophyllous, Temperate/Homophyllous,
and Temperate/Heterophyllous. Hopefully, this talk will give you
an insight into how to grow each type of ping that you may encounter.
I also encourage others who have CP slide shows to submit them to me
on PhotoCD along with a text-script of the talk. I will be setting
aside a new section on the CP WEB page that will be just for educational
slide shows.
There is also a possibility for someone to do an "Intro to Nepenthes
culture", or "An overview of Utricularia", etc. These talks are free
to use and leverage the already existing pictures in the database, but
they would simply draw on the existing pictures and tie them together into
an interesting narrative.
I think that such simple overview slide-shows would make the CP database
much more accessible to the non-technical visitor.
Best regards,
-- Rick Walker