Dark green plants

[Roger Mann]

When I visit Supermarkets many have a wide selection of plants including succulents. However I notice that all the plants whatever they are all have very Dark Green leaves stems the lot. Yes I mean extremely Dark Green plants
Question , what are they being fed with ? I feed mine with Epson Salts (magnesium Salts) and Miracle grow and have used a drop or two of vinegar. I do not suffer with yellow plants but they are not Dark green.
So what's going on ? What secret are the growers up to? you may not want dark green plants but how do they achieve this?
Roger Mann

[Liz M]

They may have been kept in low light conditions and gone dark.

[ChrisR]

Doesn't that have exactly the opposite effect Liz? Usually plants grown in the dark etiolate with pale green growth.

(Spellcheck gave me titillate for etiolate )

[Phil_SK]

Could it be that they appear dark due to the lighting in the shop but would look more 'normal' in daylight?

[daniel82]

As far as I'm aware most of these plants are grown in large greenhouse under a "soft" regime. In other words lots of fertiliser, water and warmth with not too bright conditions. They can produce saleable sized plants pretty fast that way, but they don't look much like the plants we grow under our harder conditions. I certainly notice on the odd occasion I pick up one of the garden centre plants that they have to do a lot of adapting to my conditions and they lose that slighty bloated over green look and start to produce the tighter more densely spined (usually cactus for me) natural look.

[Acid John]

I have just seen one of those blue Phalanopsis and the leaves were really dark green. So the growers must be watering with a blue dye making the flowers blue and everything else dark green.

[Bosenoge]

I thik something like this happened to me. I bought a cactus from a big hardware store and first it looked like this:



Firstly i schorched it into something like this:



And couple of moths later, after stading mostly in shade it looks like this:




Can someone identify it for me? First I thought it was some Gymno, but now Im not so sure...

[Keith H]

.............

Can someone identify it for me? First I thought it was some Gymno, but now Im not so sure...

Yes it is some sort of Gymnocalycium and a fine looking one at that but which one I know not, sorry.

[Phil_SK]

Perhaps G. schickendantzii.

[Roger Mann]

Thanks to everyone who has answered my question. Acid John I do agree with you that the growers are doing something to get a good looking plant quickly............but what ? To my mind the plants are drinking some enhancer. What would do this ????????? Thanks Roger.