Minus four

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Over the course of just one day 4 newborn sequoias perished. It is not bad at all given how many replaced the fallen ones (five) but this case serves the purpose of showing two major threats that the young sequoias face at this age. But before that, here is a picture of the entire "operations" area for this winter:

Sequoia operations room January 2017

Two seedlings desiccated from lack of water and one caught a disease that very quickly damaged the connection between the root and the stem above ground. In the former case the plants became very thin starting with the tips of the needles.  The needles also changed color to grayish yellow. In the latter case the lower part of the stem turned dark brown and the plant "folded" to the ground with the top still completely green:

#344 Desiccated

#346 Damping off

#347 Desiccated 

Finally, the fourth case is somewhat of a mystery:

#383 Damping off ?

In the case of #383 it is unclear if this was the fungus or the lack of water. Maybe a bit of both, which sounds kind of counter-intuitive. Here is what it looks like when removed from the ground.:

#383 dead and removed from the ground 

The ground was dry, which indicates lack of water but the plant folded to the ground indicating soft tissue at the base. Although after careful examination it did not break in one place like the case with damping but instead bent over the length of the stem. Given that the entire plant looked somewhat shriveled, I would say it's probably due to the drying.

To address more potential desiccations and to avoid wet conditions tat the air-soil boundary causing deceases to take hold, I once again returned to the watering from below method. Since I watered half of the sequoias yesterday (from the top), I did this bottom watering only for the other half:

Bottoms up watering

If #303 was one of the first to germinate and develop first secondary needles

#303 January 15, 2017. A month and a half old.

then #394 is the fastest developing seedling being 3 full weeks younger than #303 but having twice as large needles:

#394 three weeks old on January 15, 2017

#394 has far fewer needles than the older samples but it stands out with the vigor of growth compared to the older ones. There are several more more recent arrivals that resemble #394, with one being visible (#387) just behind it in the picture above.

This weekend I started moving Norway spruce to the larger containers. The seeds were doing very well in the extremely porous  medium. I did not compact the peat moss at all. There was also a very generous amount of perlite. Removing roots from this mixture was extremely easy:

Norway spruce being moved to larger pots. Jan 15, 2017

I still keep 4 of them per container given the large number of seeds that germinated all at once. The growing medium mix is still just the peat moss with a little less perlite than in the original pot. It is also compacted a bit more but not very tight. It should be possible to remove and separate surviving ones in the Spring:

Norway spruce in larger containers. Jan 2017