Monday, January 08, 2007

Buddleia - It Worked!

I figured that since I was pretty bored with my clematis experiment (Yeah, I know, sometimes it can take years, but why do they have to be so darn slooooow?) that I'd do a bit of messing around with my buddleia davidii seeds to see what color I'll eventually get.

Holy crap! All I can say is - it worked. Maybe too well as I now have hundreds of sprouts, and 144 going strong in peat pellets.

I thought I'd give it a few different treatments to see which worked best, so I WSed some (outside now), put some on moist seed starter in a sealed container in the fridge (following the chill for 4 weeks method), and the third was to plop some on a moist coffee filter in a baggie and leave them alone at room temp (they only got the least bit of natural light as I wasn't expecting much).

I won't know about the WSed ones, of course, until spring.

The '4 week chill' came out of the fridge on the 30th. No signs of germ as of today.

The coffee filter experiment was started on December 30th, and there were sprouts as of the 5th of January. (I should say I noticed germ on the 5th) I couldn't believe it! It only took 6 days for them to germinate - probably less as I hadn't checked them and they were quite a ways along when I finally did, so I'm saying 5.

5 days! Unbelievable! (I should specify that all the information I've read has stated 20 to 30 days or more)

Guess which method I recommend to the impatient among us? Though it is a bit of a pain to transfer them to soil, it wasn't all that bad as they didn't really stick to the filter and just sort of 'slid' off with a tease from the tweezers and some extra water added.

It's so wonderful to see something new and green at this time of year! :)

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