Haworthia tissue culture tips for beginners, a must-read for succulent newbies

I've been in the Haworthia rabbit hole for two years now, and I've grown quite a few varieties myself, some tissue-cultured, some not. I come to the forum every day, and from time to time I see posts analysing whether tissue culture is good or bad! I keep mulling over this question too. On the plus side, it lets everyone have Haworthias to play with; on the minus side, it disrupts the market order. (Thanks to jpw214 for the material)

So next let's analyse the market first. The general situation is that there are plenty of enthusiasts who like Haworthias, or plenty of speculators making some money by selling Haworthias. Apart from that, are ordinary people interested in Haworthias? Can I say their level of interest is basically zero? I feel ordinary people are the main consumers of an industrialised operation. Leaving ordinary people aside, factory production will far exceed market demand! Making money selling them for ten or eight yuan? Is that the theory?

Let's simulate it: say a certain variety of Haworthia maughanii, extremely rare, very few people have this variety. Whenever one plant appears, a huge crowd comes out to fight over it, and the more money you pay, the better your chance of grabbing it! This is called the tycoon effect. The first batch of tissue-cultured plants appears, and most enthusiasts keep fighting over them; the price drops a lot, but it's still reasonable. The tycoons are no longer interested, and nobody bid up the price anymore. Next, the second and third batches of tissue-cultured plants keep entering the market. Most enthusiasts already have one, and very few people will take an interest in this variety of maughanii again. And because of the large volume, many enthusiasts dump theirs back on the market, the price crashes past the bottom, and this variety of maughanii becomes trash. What to do then? Enter the ordinary flower market. Can it sell there? Basically impossible! Because most ordinary people don't accept Haworthias, and are even worse at growing them! In the end, all Haworthia varieties become trash in the mouths of ordinary people! This will be far below your notion that selling them for ten or eight yuan can still make money

Second: I see many freshly deflasked plants also get snatched up in the forum (very unethical). I can only say that's foolish people with too much money. If you want one to experiment with, fine, but don't rush to grab it just because you think it's cheap. I have three or four Haworthia truncata, and they refuse to grow no matter what. I bought them when I first got into the hobby; the size they were when I bought them is the size they still are now. Like they ate gold beans, they won't die, they just won't grow. I don't know if they're tissue-cultured, but they're definitely abnormal. Anyway, they're all single-strip variegated, bought for over a hundred yuan each! The bean-sprout seedlings from the same period are now several times bigger than them.

Third: can tissue-cultured plants be bought? Sub-adult plants can be bought. I bought a few sub-adult Haworthia truncata and maughanii, and they're all growing quite well now! Will a factory tissue culture grow them to sub-adult size for you? I think that would be quite a struggle. If they can let you tell it's that thing at all, that's already good! Because a factory needs commercial operation, and behind that needs capital flow. Keeping these things sitting around for a year or two, or even longer, growing them to sub-adult size for you, I reckon if the factory only had this one line of business, it would basically go bankrupt. (In a factory environment, I really have no idea how long Haworthias take to grow to sub-adult size; I can only write based on the growing time in my own ordinary environment.)

Haworthias themselves are oddballs, and their market positioning is different from tissue-cultured orchids. And there are super many Haworthia varieties; going through them one by one playing tai chi with you would take several years. Can the tissue-culture army take down the Haworthia market the way it took down the orchid market? Unless factories start tissue-culturing varieties at the level of 'Feiniao'! Otherwise, they basically can't hurt Haworthia's core. To protect the Haworthia market, the more cautious the tissue culture of high-end Haworthias, the better! All you big shots, in order to make the Haworthias in your hands depreciate a bit more slowly, please protect the genes of the high-end goods in your hands.

For many varieties, I'd rather look up to them than see them mass tissue-cultured by factories. What what what? You want to use tissue culture to study seed-grown plants? Stop kidding yourselves. Look at whether people behead them or pollinate them once they get their hands on them! Damn, they're even sub-adult plants, and their heads get chopped off with a howl.