Micro update - more germinations

In this batch there are 2013, 2020 and a few seeds collected from King Canyon in 2022. All seeds continue to germinate splendidly. Seeds were placed on wet coffee filters on Dec 6, 2023. After 10 days 13 seeds germinated and today after 15 days, another 15, for a total of 28:

Some of the seeds from last week cleared the soil and now have 4-5 green leaves standing vertically. About half were able to shed the light brown casing they were in. The other half was helped by gently pulling on them with two fingers. To have less manual casing removal it really helps placing newly germinated seed white root AND the casing in soil, forming a loop. As the seed tries to push up, casing has a much better chance of staying  behind in the soil:

Winter 2023/24 Update

 Long overdue update.

Last winter was bad for sequoias at this Iowa farm. All sequoias taller than 2 feet got destroyed. Shorter ones that fit under foam cones did pretty well but have not grown much during last growing season. 

A couple of them were cut down at about 1 foot height and eventually re-sprouted fresh shoots:

These new shoots grew fine, but the trees definitely look more like a bush than a tree. Essentially, any foliage that stays above mulch or snow cover during winter, dies. That's even with all tree being wrapped with burlap and plastic. I decided to try to use an extreme covering technique for 2023-24 winter. First I tie the branches tightly in one bunch:

Then I build cylindrical enclosure to hold wood chips:

And finally fill it up (and then some) with the chips:

All the chips would need to be removed in the spring. Having chips/mulch around tree base during growing season is certainly not a good idea since the feeder roots start to grow into it. 

The long term game here is trying to keep them alive as soon as practically possible, hoping that the root system expands wide enough to support water pumping during winter months. 

Additionally, a few sequoias were planted on a south side of the hill (rather than on top of the hill) with the idea that wind will have less effect on the trees. For this winter these 2 ft trees will still be covered with the foam cones:

And as always - more sequoia seeds were germinated and are going into containers:

Some thoughts ahead of the winter

Here is my reply to a comment under the last post:

"Buddy, you're awesome! I live in Nebraska (your neighbor) and I'm so scared to put my baby outside in the ground. She's 4 years old, I grew her from a seed. She's the only one that made it from the seed out of roughly 6-8.

What do you recommend? I'm incredibly attached to this tree so, yeah. Please help me lol"

One thing that you (and me) need to accept is that sequoias in Zone 5 is an indoors plant. It's an indoors plant that we expose to a hostile outdoors environment incompatible with its genetics. I can give you my best advice but the chances are slim for your sequoia to grow outside. Nobody said it was going to be easy though, so it's all good.

It appears that sequoias need to have more or less continuous access to liquid flowing water. They are 100% freeze intolerant for their root system. Any pot that had been frozen, they die. Last winter I had 6 sequoias in 2 gallon pots in an unheated shed. They were placed in a plastic tray with flat bucket heaters under the bottom of each pot. The tray was filled to about one inch depth with water. Water stayed mostly liquid during last winter since it was not a terrible winter like a few years back. However, a few times during the winter the temperature dropped enough to freeze the water completely for a few days in a row. I kept adding water and even placed a continuously blowing space heater directed at the tray. Being in a shed, they were protected from the blowing wind. However, they were not wrapped in any fabric or plastic. I could say that the soil in the pots got frozen out and only roots at the very bottom were exposed to liquid water throughout the winter. It was not enough. All 6 were dead by the following summer.

For the upcoming winter I am planning on protecting the trees with applying anti-desiccant to the needles with fabric and plastic wrapping, same way I did before. However, this time I will continue watering several select sequoias throughout the winter. My temperature sensor experiments from last two years showed that it's not terribly difficult to keep the temperature continuously above freezing at 1 foot depth with application of a thick layer of mulch. What was missing last winter was access to liquid water. I was hoping that enough snow would melt and trickle to the roots, but it appears it was not the case. My new plan is to water wrapped sequoias with excess warm water through a hose stuck in mulch a couple of times a month and especially during cold spells. I believe the trick is to keep feeder roots exposed to water continuously. Tap root alone is not going to do the trick. 

Long term survivability of sequoias in Zone 5 is questionable but one could imagine an engineering solution where water could be delivered under ground through some clever combination of heat pipes and water pipes that would melt the snow from above and deliver flowing water to the roots. Something to ponder about. 

My oldest surviving sequoias are 6 years old now. You would never say they are that old. They survive by being small, bush-like and fitting under a foam cone for winter. One overgrew the largest cone available at Menards but I forced it inside by folding the top. As a result it's still alive but many others that I was wrapping in fabric and plastic are dead. In general those foam cones work very well but by no means a guarantee of success. 

267, 6 years old, under 2 feet

My tallest but not the oldest sequoias are now about 7 foot tall. I have one that's 6'8" and another that's 7'2". 

365, 5 year old, 6'8" 

#365

A blast from the past: #365 in 2017:

#, 7'2"

2022 late spring update

It’s almost summer in Iowa and the life on the sequoia farm is slowly waking up. To be clear, life beyond sequoias woke up a long time ago. The sequoias took a hard hit from the last winter. The winter was cold but not exceptionally so. There were a few cold spells with negative 20F, but the trees were protected from the direct wind, some very well protected, in fact, with a layer of fabric and packing plastic film wrapped around teepees made from rebar around the trees. 

Here is the latest count of survivors and casualties. For simplicity sake, trees are classified as dead, alive and not dead yet (NDY). NDYs are those that lost most of the crown but have some new green shoots close to the base and in some cases, counterintuitively, on top of the trunk. There are a couple of these vertical poles with no live branches but with a small green bud on top. From my past experience with NDYs most of them die anyway but there were some exceptions. One such past exception was one of the oldest samples #220. It snapped back to life twice. Unfortunately, it is completely and irreversibly dead now. 

Patch 1: 2 alive, 1 NDY, 3 dead

Patch 2: 1 alive, 2 NDY, 6 dead

Patch 3: 1 alive  2 NDY, 9 dead

Patch 4: 0 alive, 1 NDY, 2 dead

Besides aforementioned dead #220 located outside of main patches, there were 5 random sequoias around the farm. 4 NDY and 1 dead .  This brings the total to 4 alive, 10 NDYs and 22 dead.

Even the ones that I call alive are struggling to produce any appreciable amount of new growth. Other conifers on the farm have lush deep green, powder blue and lemon green shoots between 6 and 12”. The place looks very lively, just not due to the sequoias.

It’s worth mentioning, that supposed cold hardy sequoias didn’t fare any better than the regular ones. No Exceptionally Blue sequoias survived. Over a dozen Hazel Smiths are dead.

Here is an example of the present day live sequoia:

  

Here’s an example of a not dead yet:

Velcro garden straps are not good for trees

I noticed a problem with one of my sequoias in August:

Aug 11, 2021 P2.OR8

First, I removed the pressure on the trunk by untying the velcro and several days later slowly pulled it off the trunk, trying to remove as little bark as possible.

Here is side-by-side comparison of the area on a sequoia trunk that was affected by a velcro strap. I use two kinds of straps to support young trees by tying them to bamboo sticks. The first kind is flexible, stretchable plastic straps and the second is half inch-wide velcro straps. Plastic straps stretch and eventually break, allowing the trunks to grow. Velcro straps are much less stretchable and strong enough to damage the growing trees. They do not break and instead the tree bark starts to grow around them. 

First picture was taken immediately after the velcro strap was removed. It clearly shows the bottleneck created by the strap.

Aug 15, 2021 P2.OR8

One month later the tree is showing good progress with fixing the damage. Some tree resin can be clearly seen on and around the wound. The area that was previously squeezed by velcro got thicker and the trunk appears to be recovering overall:

Sept 15, 2021 P2.OR8

 

More detailed sequoia update

It is getting a bit harder to keep track of the sequoias as the time goes by. The plastic labels occasionally get lost, trees grow and make it hard to get close to the labels. With a significant variety of sequoia sources and kinds it is also somewhat challenging to remember which one is which.  The goal of this post is to classify and record sequoias so it would be easier to track later.

Most of the sequoias are grouped into one of four patches. There are also a few individual sequoias spread outside of the patches. Here is simple numbering scheme.

HS - Hazel Smith, 2016-17, all from Crowfoot Nursery

EB - Exceptionally Blue, 2016-17, Crowfoot nursery

OR - Scenic Hill, OR 2016

Patch 1 contains 6 trees:

The info for sequoias on Patch 1 is as follows - 

1. P1.365 - 45". Germinated from a seed from JL Hudson 2013 batch in December 2016.
2. P1.HS1 - 15"
3. P1.HS2 - 15"
4. P1.HS3 - 41"
5. P1.Glaucum  - 36"
6. P1.EB - 46"

Patch 2 contains 9 trees:

1. P2.534 - 41"
2. P2.540 - 46"
3. P2.OR08 - 56"
4. P2.OR09 - 57"
5. P2.OR10 - 50"
6. P2.OR11 - 39"
7. P2.HS01 - 15"
8. P2.HS02 - 48"
9. P2.EB - 60"

Patch 3 contains 12 trees:

1. P3.OR01 - 40"
2. P3.OR02 - 22"
3. P3.OR04 - 54"
4. P3.OR06 - 30"
5. P3.HS01 - 29"
6. P3.HS02 - 24"
7. P3.HS03 - 38"
8. P3.HS04 - 15"
9. P3.HS05 - 34"
10. P3.HS06 - 24"
11. P3.HS07 - 16"
12. P3.HS08 - 31"

Patch 4 contains 3 trees:

1. P4.HS01 - 47"
2. P4.HS02 - 43"
3. P4.EB - 41"

And another view from above but a bit different angle:

Summer 2021 update

Hard to believe but it's already August. This year is exceptionally good for sequoias in Iowa. It is not very hot nor too humid to cause fungus. Elsewhere in the USA the weather is extremely hot and dry but Iowa so far has been spared. Several very warm weeks in the low 90s, interspersed with a few cooler rainy days so far this summer. 

All sequoias continue to grow at a fast pace. There are total of 4 "patches" with 3-12 trees per patch. Some are doing better than others, specifically Exceptionally Blue ones. The tallest one of them was 54 inches on July 20 as depicted below. Today, on August 1 it stands at 60 inches. It is the tree in the middle of the subsequent picture.

July 20, 2021

August 1, 2021

Some regular (not cold hardy) sequoias are growing very large volumes. The tree on the picture above on the right looks almost like a ball, with side branches going practically at 90 degrees to the trunk. Each branch looks like an individual sequoia only weirdly growing parallel to the ground. I have not seen it so clearly exaggerated before with other trees. This depicted patch is starting to look like a mini-forest. 

Here is a typical Hazel Smith. Not as tall or full as some others but still very very respectable growth.

All sequoias have irrigation system installed now. Water is turned on once early in the morning 4-8AM and another time 4-8PM. The 0.5 gallon per hours sprinkler heads distributed between the trees on the patches with roughly two heads per tree. Very roughly, each tree gets 8 gallons (30 litres)  per day. This seems high as compared to previous years of the experiment, but the results so far speak for themselves.

Blue 0.5 gal/hour sprinkler head

Here is a very nice bright orange bark of one of the sequoias 

All tree have been treated with Daconil once a month since the growing season started. 

Winter 2020/21 results

The 2021 growing season is about to kick in high gear. There are already hints of the new growth on the surviving sequoias. In this report I will talk about overall survival of the sequoias made up of several verities of the species, followed by the discussion on the underground temperature measurement and the heating experiment that was conducted this winter. Finally, an irrigation system is being installed around the sequoias to further super-charge the project, so will talk about that at the end.

Bottom line up-front - things went well this winter for the sequoia park.

Winter Summary

Overall, this was an average winter with warm December, moderately warm January and a very cold spell during the month of February. All temperatures in Fahrenheit, data taken from the Iowa Department of Agriculture.

The month of December started off fairly warm with a few days in the 40s and ended up with 7 days in the 40-degree range and 3 days in the 50s. Overall, the average high temperature for the month of December was 35.1 degrees, which was around 3.3 degrees above the normal high for December. Our average low for the month was also above normal. Two big snowfall events in Cedar Rapids ended our snowfall total at 13.5″ with a few trace amount reports. That’s 5.7″ above the normal amount of snowfall we see in the month of December.

In January, stations in Eastern Iowa reported average temperatures one to three degrees warmer than normal. January’s statewide average maximum temperature was 31.1 degrees, 2.5 degrees above normal while the average minimum temperature was 16.5 degrees, 6.2 degrees above normal. A majority of the state’s National Weather Service co-op stations reported near normal to slightly above average precipitation during January. Several winter systems moved through Iowa leaving behind measurable snow statewide. Over the month, a band of 15 to 20 inch total accumulation.

February’s statewide average maximum temperature was 20.7 degrees, 12.7 degrees below normal while the average minimum temperature was 4.4 degrees, 14.5 degrees below normal. The coldest period of the month was between February 7th and 16th when the average temperature was -5.2 degrees, 27.2 degrees below normal. Temperatures did not rebound to normal until the final eight days of February. A majority of the state’s National Weather Service co-op stations reported near to slightly below average precipitation in February.

Survival stats

All but two sequoias planted in the ground survived, some better, some worse. All sequoias kept in the containers in the shed perished. All containers had some heating at the bottom in the form of the ice melting electric blocks. The bottoms of the containers were in some liquid water with just above freezing temperature. Surprisingly, this was not enough to keep them alive and 100% died.

All in-ground planted sequoias had approximately the same level of protection. Taller ones had some unwoven fabric wrapped around individual trees and covered on top by the packing plastic film wrapped around rebar pyramidal frames. Shorter ones had foam cones providing superb insulation. Rebar-based "tepees" can be scaled for many winters to come, providing winter wind protection while the rest of the park made of the native spruce, pine, red cedar and fir species had time to grow up and provide a micro-climate for the site. 

Here is more in-depth data on specific types of sequoias and how they fared:

• HS is Hazel Smith
• EB is Exceptionally Blue
• OR are the regular variety (not cold-hardy) the ones from the Oregon Scenic Hill nursery purchase a few years back and 
• Regular are my own grown from J.L. Hudson seeds

Here are the numbers to represent how well they did:

• 0 - dead (no stats on container grown, since 100% perished)
• 1 - survived with significant damage
• 2 - survived with minimal damage, brown tips and occasional brown branches
• 2.1 - survived with no visible damage, entirely green

HS	Glaucum	EB	OR	Regular
0	2.1	2	2	2
2		2	2	2
2		2.1	2	2
2			2	2
2			2	1
2			2	2
1			2	1
1			2	2
2
2.1
2
2.1
1
0
2.1
2

Hazel Smiths: 2 are dead, 3 out of 16 had pretty bad beating, 8 did well and 3 did exceptionally well. Exceptionally well ones  had some new green growth already by May 1, 2021. All Glaucum and Exceptionally Blue had good or exceptionally good winter. All Scenic Hill sequoias fared reasonably well but all remain dormant so far. Regular ones did fine except #104, one of the original sequoias but it was not doing great going into the winter, so not much lost there. 

Here are some examples of 1s and 2s, starting with the ones that did best:

Hazel Smith with no damage after winter

And here is a zoomed in view of the same sequoia that shows new growth:

Hazel Smith showing new growth by May 1, 2021

Now for the majority of sequoias that had some damage and remain mostly dormant for now:

Hazel Smith  with some brown tips, dormant for now

And here is a zoomed view that shows minor damage:

Hazel Smith with brown tips and no new growth yet

Finally, a couple of examples of 1s:

Hazel Smith with major lead gone (cut off) but  some green side branches show new growth 

And another example with significant damage but still alive

Ground temperature findings

Here is a graph of the underground temperature:

As it was expected the temperature kept falling at 1ft depth towards freezing throughout December and January. With an extra 6-8" of mulch on top of the soil the gradual slide was surprisingly slow. However, the deep freeze in the beginning of February accelerated the temp fall and by Feb 15 it became clear that the ground was going to freeze within a few days. On Feb 15, the heating wire was turned on for the first time, which is clearly visible on the chart as a steep jump in temperature from 0.7C to 6C. The heat was turned off on Feb 21 and the temperature promptly fell to 1.5C. Another heating event started on Feb 27, leading to another jump to just above 6C. There were several power interruptions in the next few days and the power was finally turned  off on Mar 7 as the temperatures started to climb above freezing outside. The fluctuations on the right side of the graph are natural temperature changes as the snow melted.

One conclusion from this data is that the wire definitely works but it's unclear how much of the soil is heated around the wire. In this experiment the  sensor was placed very close to the wire, about 3 inches (5 cm) above it. For the future experiments another sensor will be placed another foot below wire depth to  measure the temperature gradient. 

Exceptionally Blue with soil heating wire. Arrow indicates placement of the temp sensor

The Exceptionally Blue sequoia that had the wire installed fared well as compared to other sequoias and there are no significant differences with most of other sequoias. 

Irrigation system

To be added. Literally, the irrigation system is to be added! Why?

Happy New Year 2021

The new year has arrived with a foot of snow. It's a great news for the sequoias.

This is a very short update with temperature reporting over last two weeks. Temperatures stayed significantly above normal through Dec 23, well above freezing during the day, reaching +8C on that day. However, they dropped to negative 15-16 Celsius by Dec 25. The red line shows air temperature from the sensor above ground under the protective cone near one of the sequoias. 

Underground temperature shown in blue tells the story of a very gradual temperature slide from 5C to about 1.5C, still clearly positive and never going below water freezing point.

Once the underground sensor shows 0C or below, I intend to conduct an experiment with the heating wire installed at 1 foot depth. It will happen probably in two-three days from now as the air temp will remain below freezing for the most part.

Christmas expansion

The project grew a bit larger this Christmas season.

How much larger? Here are two pictures for scale. One is a top down view of the current area of operations. The second is a zoomed out area with the first area inset for comparison. 

New total area outlined in red is now a bit over 12 acres, which is approximately 5 hectares. Magenta rectangle shows relative size of the sequoia patch within the larger area. 

The vast majority of the new land depicted with darker green is rough forested terrain. Several large hills are separated by deep creeks. 

The work to clear out space for the trails and new locations for sequoias will begin in the spring. There is also a plan to build a solar farm to supply the sequoia hill operations with energy.

In other news, Bitcoin hit an All Time High (ATH).