Fiddling with ferns

Mostly dull today after some very light overnight drizzle. I had intended to do some work in the garden, but somehow I didn't get round to it! 
 
I'd recently received some seeds and fern spores from Logan Botanic Garden, so thought I'd sow them. Sowing fern spores is a tricky business and takes a fair amount of preparation. Sorry if this Blip sounds a bit technical! 
 
First I thoroughly cleaned a pair of 5" seed pans, then riddled some three year old leaf mould, so well broken down that it's as good as peaty compost. I then put some of that through a fine sieve. 
 
Then I almost filled the two pans with the riddled leaf mould, topping them off with the sieved material - my Blip today. Then comes the tricky bit, which involves cutting circles of several layers of kitchen roll to fit the inside of the pans over which is very gently poured boiling water in several instalments. This is to totally sterilise the compost to make sure that nothing will impede the germination of the fern spores, which are exceedingly tiny. Without sterilisation you tend to get a layer of moss covering the compost.
 
The pans are then covered to keep out any passing bad guys and left for several hours to cool down, after which the spores are carefully trickled over the surface. They're not covered up, but the pans are put into clean plastic bags and sealed up.
 
Then all I have to do is to put them in a warm, shady place and forget about them for a couple of years! With luck they will germinate - a complicated process in itself - and can be left in the pans until they're big enough to prick out into pots. Quite often it can take several years before they're large enough to plant in the garden!
 
My extra today is the contents of one of the packets - I can't imagine how many spores are there, but I only sowed a fraction! 

These two ferns have always been known as Blechnum palmiforme and Blechnum cycadifolium, but as you’d expect, their names have been changed and they’re both now to be known as Lomariocycas.  L. palmiformis is endemic to the Tristan da Cunha island group in the South Atlantic and L. cycadifolia endemic to the Juan Fernandez archipelago off the coast of Chile. I'll Blip them again in a couple of years!