Sequoias and Bitcoins

Since the white patch needed patching with a few more samples I started a new germination run. The idea was to keep a solid influx of new seedlings.

This time I decided not to measure the number of seeds exactly, unlike previous times when I started with 100. I threw a number of seeds that looked about the same quantity on a wet paper filter second week of October 2013. Today I counted all germinated and non-germinated seeds with this cycle now being complete and no new germinations anticipated.

The tally is as follows: 25 out of 78 now stand with green leaves. I also started moving October 25 geminations into 3" containers.

New batch Fall 2013

Just for fun, I placed current Bitcoin price in the same shot :) Let's see what grows faster and longer term.

White patch is complete again, sort of

I have moved the last seedling into 6" container today, #111. I will now have to decide which one is COMPLETELY dead before moving any more.

I have used lightest soil to date with #111, with plenty of perlite and  small river rock. here is a view of the top two inches of the container before I filled it with more cactus soil and perlite:

I also placed it even higher than previous samples in the container to avoid the trunk being exposed to water:

#111 November 10, 2013 at 10 months.

The brown patch looks extremely healthy with vast majority of the seedlings liking careful water management:

New batch happy update

The new batch is doing surprisingly well. First of all, the germination rate was on a higher end with 21 out of 80, with a few more coming, pushing it towards 30%. Not exceptional but really healthy.

Second of all, daily watering and occasional spray of chlorothalonil seem to work very well. I look for areas near the root for signs of dryness. If it does not look somewhat wet (dark) then I inject 5 ml of water. It's a bit of a fuzzy science but works well so far.

Out of 21 germinated in the last 10 days, 12 are confirmed to form seedlings:

It's actually even  better than that - only one germinated seed has clearly failed to form into a seedling. There is a total of 20 viable samples at this time.