I'll give you a definition given by an Agnote of the Northern Territory of Australia: Suckers are offshoots from the corm or parent plant and make excellent planting material provided they are large and vigorous enough, and retain the narrow sword leaf until they are 35-40 cm high. They should not be taken from an immature plant prior to bunching. Suckers from immature plants or stools are usually soft and watery and thin at the base. They are likely to result in poor establishment unless weather conditions are very favourable. Broad leaf suckers with spindly stems and small bases are often referred to as water-suckers and should be discarded. Care must be taken when separating the sucker from the corm to avoid damage to the butt as suckers so damaged make poor planting material. Here is a link that might be useful: Northern Territory of Australia

You don't really need a piece of the parent corm - but you need to get the whole corm of the pup. Each variety is different. Some, if you cut straight down, that is fine. Some you need to angle under the parent corm a little bit. You will have to experiment a little. Start by taking one that is 12-16" tall. If it has good root development, then that was a good size. If not, pot it up and it will look terrible for a while but will almost surely survive and grow. If there weren't many roots, wait till the next one is a little taller, say 2' and try again. I have had pups that were 3 inches tall that had so many roots that they barely fit in a 15 gallon pot. I have had 3-4 feet tall pups that would fit in a one gallon pot, because there still wasn't any root development. Experiment and get to know your variety. Also, the first pups from a Tissue Cultured plant tend to have little or no root development till they are more than 3' tall, but the second generation is more normal.

>go to the citrus forum and click on the thread Citrus/Banana fertilizer,Thanks for the link Gary. That's sure some different and interesting info! Sounds like Dr. Manners advocates leaving four pups, but there is a catch - he says that there are 2 kinds of pups (suckers): "sword suckers" and "water suckers" and that you should get rid of all water suckers and only save the sword suckers. Well, according to his descriptions I don't have any sword suckers, all of mine look like what he describes as water suckers, (pups that start making leaves while still quite short.) He describes sword suckers as growing tall rapidly, "but which don't make leaves until they're several feet tall". Several feet tall?! Anyway, from what he says ALL of my pups should be removed and none of them are worth saving. Somehow I don't buy that. Anyone else ever heard about 2 kinds of pups? And that one kind is worth saving and the others aren't? Anyone ever had a pup that didn't get any leaves on it until it was "several feet tall"? Pat

I have a feeling we're going to get a lot of contradictory answers here, because it really does depend on growing conditions, among other things. Andrew, I would have said just the opposite of you! Fosperior Perfection NEVER pups for me, mainly because in all the years I've grown it I've never seen it bloom. The only way I've ever been able to propagate it is to kill the meristem with a screwdriver. Then it will give quite a few pups, but the amount of pups is directly related to how big the plant is when I screw it. N. pauciflora, on the other hand, pups like crazy-- both the large and small forms. Go figure. My general feeling is that the stoloniferous types tend to be the best puppers. Fireball, compacta, ampullacea, olens, etc., and many of their hybrids too. Maybe that's just an illusion because they tend to pup earlier. I've never done a pup count on any particular variety to test it out. How many pups you can get will depend on several factors. As mentioned before, the more mature the mother is when she blooms, the more pups she can support because there is simply more leaf mass there to produce food for them. Heavy fertilization can have the same effect. If you leave them attached, however, she'll reach her limit and just take care of those. On the other hand, if you remove them as soon as they're big enough to take off, Mama will keep pumping them out until she keels over. This is where growing conditions figures into it. In more temperate regions, not only do broms grow slower, the seasonal change will often force them into bloom before they've had a chance to put on much size. In the tropics we get pretty even growth year-round, and some varieties rarely if ever bloom. Neo. Fireball is one of these, and it's also one that doesn't have to bloom in order to pup, so what this means is that a single mother plant can just keep producing pup after pup, and as long as you keep removing them she'll continue to do it. I've seen them form tall stalks with 10-15 stubs where pups have been removed over time, but if you don't take them off, then you'll only get one or two.