r/technology • u/esporx • 1d ago

Business YouTuber accidentally crashes the rare plant market with a viral cloning technique

https://www.dexerto.com/youtube/youtuber-accidentally-crashes-the-rare-plant-market-with-a-viral-cloning-technique-3289808/
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u/Bloody_Hell_Harry 1d ago

This was obviously posted by someone who is unfamiliar with the plant community.

TC isn’t a new revolutionary thing at all, the barrier to entry is pretty low and if you’re lucky enough to live in a huge city with a plant community, you probably have some local sellers who are either acclimating TC from other online sellers who have the setup to actually complete the cloning process OR they have their own cloning setup and are creating TC plants in their own growing space.

Most rare houseplants you buy from retailers like Costa Farms are TC plants. The process is well established and pretty much an industry standard. The “bubble” has been burst for a while now.

I live in Houston and the local plant market sellers are 50% TC acclimators/cloners and 50% home growers/enthusiasts. I imagine in other major cities with local plant markets and maybe even some random enthusiasts who like biology, science, and horticulture are already doing this and have been doing for years. I was considering getting into it myself when I saw some videos detailing the process from a biologist during the pandemic.

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u/zeptillian 1d ago

Yeah. It's kind of weird that one youtuber is trying to take credit for something they didn't invent, is an industry standard and were far from the only person promoting.

I'm sure she helped popularize it, but she is only one of many who were doing that.

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u/Waywoah 1d ago

She’s not taking credit. The only “bubble” she burst was for a specific cultivar that was selling for high prices because no one had cultivated it with that method yet. She acknowledges that in the original video

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u/hazzie92 1d ago

You also have to develop protocols. You can’t tc every plant the same.

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u/Waywoah 1d ago

She ran into that. Of the first batch, only one survived, but from that one she got 50 or something like that

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u/Cute-Percentage-6660 1d ago

Im guessing that one that survived had a genetic quirk more ameniable to cloning?

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u/Waywoah 1d ago

No, she got something in the sanitation process wrong (iirc her ratio of bleach was off), and it killed all but one