How to Get Into the Fern Business

It’s easy! At first.

A long time ago, when I lived in Miami, I was a partner in a fern business with a passionate expert who we called “Mike F______, the Short-Haired-Fern-Freak,” or, affectionately, MF the SHFF, because he sported a buzz cut when the rest of us were long-haired hippies. He kept a pygmy rattlesnake as a pet and considered “orchid people” to be demented losers. At the time, there was a fierce rivalry between the fern enthusiasts and the orchid aficionados. Although I didn’t get the point of the feud, I was on the side of the fernies.

You can start a fern business on a windowsill, with a half dozen Petri dishes, some sterile agar growth media, and some spores. How do you get sterile agar growth media, you ask? This, from Science Assist:

The most effective and suitable method of sterilizing agar is by using moist heat in the form of steam under pressure i.e. 121oC for 15 minutes at 15 pounds per square inch (psi). This method will denature & coagulate enzymes and other cell constituents in the bacterial cell.

So far, so good. Buy an autoclave.

Acquiring spores.

But where do you find fern spores, and how do you harvest them? You will soon learn that this is the only easy part, and all you’ll need is a paper bag, a pair of scissors, and your city’s botanical garden. Find a fern you like in the tropical greenhouse and turn over the frond. The underside will be covered with sporophytes. Unless it isn’t (see below). Look under the skirts of other ferns until you find one that has brown budlike things. These are the sporophytes, which contain quadrillions of spores— enough to keep your fern business going for millennia. Surreptitiously snip off a frond, assuming other nascent fern growers haven’t beaten you to it and you are not under surveillance, then slip it into the bag, and sneak out of the facility.

Fern Reproduction

If you think dating in the current era is complicated, the following should give you hope. The reproductive strategy of ferns can be summarized as follows: using a multi-step, complex, and extremely fragile process, they attempt to ensure that the species cannot possibly produce offspring. And if that doesn’t work, use one of three others (see also below) that are equally unlikely to be successful.

For this explanation, we are exploring reproduction by spore. Using the frond you previously stole from the taxpayer-supported botanical gardens, leave the bag in a cool, dry place for a week, and the sporophytes will burst open, littering the bottom of the bag with spores. And, unfortunately, sporophyte debris, which must be separated from the good stuff. Fern spores are so small, they take their kids on vacation to see massive grains of salt. Once you have carefully separated them, shake the tiny particles evenly into the Petri dish, put on the lid, and wait.

Congratulations, you just screwed your whole summer. This would be a good time to bail on your partner.

Soon, the spores will germinate and form cute little heart-shaped gametophytes that contain both male and female reproductive organs. Some of them believe they are archegonia, egg-producing bodies trapped in an antheridium, the sperm-producer, and— just kidding. Ferns are not confused about gender. They know there are only two.

If conditions are consistently wet enough, the sperm will swim toward the eggs and produce zygotes, which will (eventually, after great expense and loss of free time) turn into ferns, which conspire to take over your backyard. But first, they need to take over your spare room, closets, garage, basement (if you have one, which in Miami, you don’t), and every square inch of floorpan, shelf, and horizontal surface.

If, in the decidedly non-rare instances where your fern of choice does not reproduce by gametophytes, it will do so using bulblets, fernlets, or rhisomes and you will need to provide appropriate growth media and varying amounts of artificial light for varying lengths of time and varying careful misting regimens at varying intervals, which you will only know how to do properly if you are a SHFF. It will also help if your parents pay the electric bill.

Before waaaayy too long, the gametophytes will take over the entire Petri dish and will need to be transgendered transplanted into larger containers until those are too small, and will need to be transplanted into larger . . . ad infinitum.

That is, unless you failed to properly sterilize the agar in Step 1, in which case you have a Petri dish full of Anthrax, which you must carefully— dial 911. Thankfully, this is not a total disaster because you only started with one Petri dish.

Right?

You made ten, didn’t you?

Shit.

Are they all contaminated? If Lady Luck is smiling on you, they will all be ruined, and you can consider another career. Perhaps in gain-of-function research.

If you are still in business, you’ll need to get very good at relocating tiny plantlets into bigger containers. To transplant the little tossers, you will need a laboratory tool called a teasing needle, which you will sterilize with a Bunsen burner, carefully lifting the delicate investments into their new homes. If you have failed to properly sterilize everything, you are screwed.

Assuming you did things right so far, your parents have moved away and left no forwarding address. Abandoned bedrooms provide the ideal environment for racks and racks of plastic containers under grow lights, while unused bathrooms can be utilized for germinating your next generation of hungry gametophytes.

Next, it’s time to prepare the yard. You will need 7,345 board-feet of non-pressure-treated lumber to build the framework and shelving of your shade house. Pressure-treated lumber will leach fern-killing nastiness all over your beautiful, time- and wallet-sucking crop of ferns, which someone, who is a SHFF, should have identified a retail market in which to sell the burgeoning harvest, but didn’t, and now he tells you.

Depending on the fern species you are growing, you will need one of seventy-two types of shade cloth, which you will know if you are MF the SHFF, and won’t if you are me. After countless hours of toil in the punishing subtropical sun, your shade house will be ready for newly transplanted ferns, now in propagation trays, plug flats, or form pots. If you are “successful,” you may have a few thousand plants on your hands.

(Note: even under 70% shade, Jamaican Red bananas can invade your growing space, causing untold havoc. They are delicious and impossible to get in Denver.)

You have now entered the FAFO phase of commercial fern growing, in which you sell the entire crop at a loss to the Sears Home and Garden Department and find new friends.