Germinating now- - photos of seedlings

[Gene Mirro]

Gentianella detonsa superba, sown 1/1/15:



Phyteuma sieberi, sown 1/8/15; these start slow, but really take off:

[johnstephen29]

Cheers matt thanks for the advice.

[Maggi Young]

John:  a tip that works particularly well for bulb seedlings  ( but you can use it for other things too, like meconopsis) is to repot a pot  of seedlings   all at once into a slightly  bigger pot and keep on doing that as needed  until the babies are really big and strong enough to survive the shock of transplanting. We  find fewer babies are lost this way and it often means the seedlings grow on for a longer period each year, which of course means they get bigger and are likely to flower sooner.  This method disturbs them very little but gives them more space and compost to grow into.   
I'd recommend that course of action to Matt who has got a very full pot of baby crocus shown in the previous page!

[Matt T]

Thanks Maggi, I've already done just that with a very full pot of Cyclamen seedlings and was planning on doing the same with these Crocus in the summer. In the meantime, they're getting a bit of gentle feeding.

[Maggi Young]

Perfect baby care, Matt! 

[johnstephen29]

Many thanks as always for the great advice maggi

[Maggi Young]

Only great if it works for you john, though,  eh? !!  You're always welcome 

[meanie]

John:  a tip that works particularly well for bulb seedlings  ( but you can use it for other things too, like meconopsis) is to repot a pot  of seedlings   all at once into a slightly  bigger pot and keep on doing that as needed  until the babies are really big and strong enough to survive the shock of transplanting. We  find fewer babies are lost this way and it often means the seedlings grow on for a longer period each year, which of course means they get bigger and are likely to flower sooner.  This method disturbs them very little but gives them more space and compost to grow into.   
I'd recommend that course of action to Matt who has got a very full pot of baby crocus shown in the previous page!

I use that a lot for tiny seedlings. Let the seedlings grow for two or three months and then take the mass rootball out and dunk it up and down in a container of water. The medium starts to break down and you just tease them apart. Really useful where space under cover is limited early in the year.

[Maggi Young]

Especially with seedlings of *bulbs* ( in the widest sense) we  may do the "en masse" repotting for a year or two - with  good results - these can be pots of healthy  babies that grow on happily without disturbance for  several seasons and get a good start in life that way- and it doesn't take lots of pot space as  individually potted up seedlings would.  If they're growing really well you might  sometimes need to repot more than once a year to keep up with them, but it's still easier and has fewer losses than pricking out tiny seedlings.

[meanie]

Maggi - a slightly different take on it.................


It's a pot of Solanum laciniatum seedlings which I germinated on cotton wool using the baggy method and then potted up en masse for a couple of months. By April I can shift things from the greenhouse freeing up space and I'll pot these up individually. By the end of the 2015 season they will be large plants of two to three metres.

[Maggi Young]

Sounds like a good scheme for plants like that, meanie.
The seeds we  sow are, as you might imagine,  predominately of alpine and rock garden subjects .

[meanie]

The seeds we  sow are, as you might imagine,  predominately of alpine and rock garden subjects .

Absolutely. The point that I was (ineptly) making was that it can also be applied to herbaceous seedlings for far longer and in far more cramped pots than the accepted wisdom if a little care is taken.

Back on message with your point I found that Albuca shawii performs far better if simply moved to a bigger pot as a clump than if I separate and space the bulbs even after a couple of years.

[johnstephen29]

Only great if it works for you john, though,  eh? !!  You're always welcome 

True Maggie, but all advice is greatly appreciated all the same

[johnralphcarpenter]

This is an interesting topic. The conventional wisdom is to transplant seedlings as soon as the first true leaves appear, but maybe that needs reexamining.

[Maggi Young]

Yes Ralph, it's what we were taught and what we always used to do - "prick out as soon as the seedlings are big enough to handle" - and we would do that with little Shortias, rhodos etc -  we advised as much ourselves - then we discovered that it's much better if you leave them be for longer.

As Ian always say, if a seedling has one ( or two for dicots) tiny leaves and the tiniest of root systems and you damage any of it during the process of pricking out, then the percentage of damage to the plant is much greater  than it would be if you do a little  damage to a much larger and more robust seedling when pricking out at a later stage.

I suppose that for nursery folks the need to get plants growing on individually as quickly as possible to a saleable size, with the minimum effort regards repotting in that time is a good reason for them to sticjk with the  early pricking out.  They will factor losses into their reckoning and will be working on a much larger scale anyway. But for private growers, I think the  pot on en masse for as long as possible is a good method.  We've found that, by this method,  bulb seedlings will often grow on for a longer period before going dormant , too.