Staghorn Ferns - Visually stunning and easy to grow!

Hi everyone, Byron Martin here at Logee's Greenhouses, and today we're going to be talking about the staghorn ferns, or platycerums, as they're known botanically. There are quite a few varieties of this, or species of this, in the trade, and there are many that are not grown because of the difficulty of their culture. But the three that I'm showing you today actually are quite easy to grow, and they're plants that can go on for many, many years with the proper culture. The common name staghorn fern comes from the fact that these look like staghorns, like the horns of a deer, or an elk, or something like that. And, of course, platycerum elephantotis kind of looks like an elephant deer. This is an African species. It used to be called angolens. You see it has a sterile, the sterile fern is that back plate, and this is the fertile frond that comes out that we see here. It's a unifoliate frond, rather than bifurcated, like many of them. And this is about mature size on it. As you can see off to the side here, there's some pups that are starting to come out. Most of them, not all of them, but most of them will do that in terms of reproduction, and that's how we propagate them here. Or they can be done with spore, and I can actually see the spore on the leaf right here. This one here is a variety we call wilinkii. You see a very, very fine frond. It's kind of a silvery gray texture to it. It's a hybrid of limonii, and this has been in the collection longer than I've been alive. It was probably something my grandfather got in back in the early 1900s. It's very easy to grow. This is a good strong grower. We mount them on plaques, but they can also be grown in containers where you put them in pots. Make sure you keep your sterile frond upright. And you see the browning on the back side of this, that's perfectly normal. There's the browning of the old ones. As those fronds go out, they build sort of a nest that collects duff and litter from the trees in the jungles, and that gives a place for the roots to grow, and the plant to get nourishment from. And this one is called Bifurcatum platycerum bifurcatum, and this is probably the most common one grown. It's probably one of the easiest to grow, and it pups like crazy. You see all these pups coming off the side of it, and you can find specimens of this in greenhouses, or in the south, in Florida, where they're monstrous balls of nothing but these fronds coming out, and the back plates on them, and they can weigh hundreds of pounds. People sometimes get them so big, they don't know what to do with them. But they can be divided and reproduced, as I mentioned, through the cutting off of these plates, and then remounted. As far as culture goes, they can get very large, so you do need to repot them or remount them periodically, and cut the plates off. You certainly can pass them around to friends, or remount them, and give them away. And in terms of watering, they're epiphytes. So, they grow up into the tops of the trees, and they actually grow high enough up that they do get quite a bit of sun, even to the point of direct sun. So, they're not what we think of as a fern, or terrestrial fern, that would be growing down under the canopy. And that's really critical, in terms of growing them well, is to make sure you give them enough light. Now, they don't always have to be mounted. They can actually be potted. And that may be, for somebody with a small growing area, that may be the way to grow them. You just have to make sure that this plate is not flat to the pot, but is actually sticking up. And then, the pot is where the roots actually go down into. The reason being that, that plate will cover the top of the pot, and then you're not going to be able to get water to it. So, in terms of water, being an epiphyte, they need a dry period between waterings. They like it drier in the winter, and much wetter in the summertime. And we have found that they really like, as long as you have an open mix, we use long-fiber sphagnum moss for their media. And as long as you have a good, well-drained substrate in the back of them, they're happy being quite wet during the summertime. And, as I mentioned, make sure during the wintertime, no growth, you slow that down. Because, being epiphytes, they go through a rainy season in the tropical jungles, and they also go through a dry season. And they'll tolerate both very well, as long as you time it to when the temperatures are warmer or cooler. We do not have too many problems with insects with these plants, although scales do love them. If they happen to connect with something that has scales, usually the small brown greenhouse scale that we see on them, you need to treat them. And fortunately, our mother plants have not really had problems with that for many years, but they do get that. There really aren't too many other issues with insects. These plants have been grown in a fern house. We have them up against the wall. We actually put drip lines in them, where they're turned on every day, or every other day in the summertime, and they really thrive on that. As well, as our drip lines have quite a bit of fertilizer going into them, so they thrive on feed, too. So, you want them not high. I mean, most ferns don't really like high levels of soluble salts or fertilizers, but we just give them a little small dosage, almost constantly, and that creates abundant growth in these plants during the summertime. So, if you're interested in some really wild and crazy looking ferns to grow in your home, or greenhouse, or conservatory, the Platycerams are a great choice, and they're a lot of fun. If you'd like more information on these plants, or others that we grow, visit us at Logees.com.