Spent some time in my garden last night, and was pleased to note that the Season Red tomatoes and garlic chives I had sown recently had germinated. I only achieved mixed success with my attempt at cutting propagation, while the bell peppers mentioned in both posts above seem to be doing well. The store-bought garlic also shows signs of life!
Tomatoes
They germinated quite quickly; saw the first sprouting about three days ago already! They haven’t yet formed real leaves, but on inspection some roots were already testing the lower limit of the small pots I had started them in. I transplanted them in 10cm pots using more Master Organics Super Premium Potting Mix. Sqeezing the pots followed by a quick flip into my hand (with the seedling poking out through the gap between my fingers), again followed by a reverse flip into the new pot (that had already been mostly filled with mix) seemed to work quite well. Initially I thought only 3 of the 4 seeds had germinated, but the one seems to simply be growing much more slowly than the others. It does, in any case, seem like I’ll have some seedlings to donate to interested parties soon.
Bell peppers
Since the peppers were started from seeds that I had saved from a store-bought red-pepper, I wasn’t expecting a high germination rate and planted about 3-4 seeds each in 4 tray pockets. In fact seven of them germinated successfully, and were looking quite strong! Interestingly one of the tray pockets had no germinated seeds, while one of them had three.
In keeping with the low-cost re-use of store-bought things, I transplanted them into various (yoghurt, feta, other) plastic containers of between 500ml and 1l, again with the Super Premium mix. Since there were more than one seedling per tray pocket, I carefully removed each seedling from the tray, taking care not to damage the roots. Made a hole in the new potting mix that was deep enough to take all the roots, and planted the seedlings by suspending them in the hole with one hand while filling the hole with the other.
Garlic
About a week ago I noted that the store bought garlic I planted a while ago had finally sprouted. Since it was probably getting a bit to wet in the self-watering milk-just I used to start it in, I re-planted it in a feta container of about 1l. Several fibrous roots had sprouted from the garlic bulb, so all seems to be well.
Origanum and Thyme Cuttings
I initially took 6 cuttings each of thyme and origanum. None of the thyme cuttings seem to have sprouted roots, and they were all dead or looking quite close to dead. Don’t know if I kept them too wet, took cuttings from the wrong part of the plant or was simply unlucky, but I decided to cut my losses and throw them all out.
Of the origanim cuttings, two at least sprouted roots, and I re-potted them in 7.5cm pots. I’ll be keeping one for my dry-herb container, and will give the other to a colleague.
I decided to try again with the thyme propagation, and took four fresh cuttings from a different thyme bush. On two of them I applied a rooting hormone. I used Effekto Dynaroot powder no. 2 which contains 3g per kg 4-indole-3-butyric acid as an active ingredient. I only treated two of the cuttings to see what effect the rooting hormone has. Supposedly thyme doesn’t really need rooting hormones, so I’m curious to see if the untreated cuttings work this time!
The End
Well then, that brings this exciting episode to a conclusion. All the best to my faithful readers…. If I have any ;-)
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