An orchid seed weighs about a millionth of a gram and carries no food. It is an embryo, a coat, and a gamble. One capsule can hold three million of them, and in the wild almost none survive. The reason is that an orchid seed has no endosperm. Nothing to burn. In nature it must be found by a compatible fungus, usually Tulasnella or Ceratobasidium, which threads hyphae into the embryo and is then digested from the inside. The seed farms its own coloniser for carbon and phosphorus until it can build a leaf. Lewis Knudson broke that dependency in 1922 by feeding seeds sugar directly on sterile agar, and orchid growing has run on that trick ever since. The home process is chemistry and discipline: - Harvest a green capsule before it splits, roughly 90 to 180 days after pollination depending on species - Sterilise the whole pod in dilute bleach, wipe it, then cut it open inside a still-air box - Sow the dust onto agar carrying sucrose, mineral salts and often coconut water, autoclaved at ...