What nutrients do Tillandsia get from air that they need to grow and what additional nutrients do they need to flower? How do they obtain these nutrients in the wild?
I have several cultivated species that have never flowered and I would love to try to get them to flower without a commercial product. I read that rain water or pond water might do that. But I don’t know how many nutrients they are getting from rain water and they certainly don’t have access to pond water in the wild. Do these plants need to be in close proximity to microorganisms or simply their metabolites?
If I don’t have access to either, could I just pick some grass, stick it in water for a few days, and then use that water?
Or if I am just looking for water with biological activity in it, how about just making and using water from mud, which is chock full of protozoa (and bacteria, fungi, viruses…)?
As for nitrogen, the air is pretty well full of it, I could imagine they get nitrogen from some symbiotic bacteria as do legumes via Rhizobia.
Phosphorous is hard to come by for everyone, and potasium, who knows.
The flowering has more to do with environmental conditions than with nutrients.
In the wild the temperature/ ratio of moisture from rain,dew,humidity/ light matter the most.
Rain water is often recommended for many plants because of it’s more nuetral/slightly acidic ph and doesn’t have minerals that would make it “hard” like many tap water does.
If you want your tillandsias to flower, try keeping them at a higher humidity, and water regularly them with water that is not bottled or from the tap and provide adequate lighting. Don’t bother with trying to make your own pond water, I am sure there is some natural body of water near you that you can grab a water bottles worth and mist it onto the tillandsia. Just make sure that this water body is not right next to a busy road or agriculture fields and that your local water isn’t “hard”.
And as already said:
Caution Sciency below this point:
The short answer is using absorptive trichomes, which absorb moisture that is already carrying nutrients.
Glad you appreciate it but this is just my brain on an average daily dive into a subject I sort of know and my curiosity leading to my researching of further resources and only an hour of my time :) I did more linking to further information than my own writing
But I don’t think I will share it as a journal post since:
I’m not a source for information on epiphytes or the genus Tillandsia
Everything I have linked is accessible online
with the right keywords forum posts come up in search engines and those looking for this will find it here
It would not fit the “theme” of my profile
Research is a skill that needs to be honed;
That being said I might make a journal post about how to find information/articles you are looking for and bypass scientific paywalls in the age of the internet.
