2024 IHF Field Notes

Sown 4/7
Germination 4/9 (2 days)

Germination counts Tray 1/Tray 2
4/9 6pm: 1/1
4/10, 7am: 12/15
4/10, 3pm: 27/37
4/11, 7am: 47/43
4/12, 8am: 53/46
4/12, 3pm: 57/50
4/13, 9am: 59/51

Tray 1 was 28 Double Click, 20 Rubenza, 30 Versailles Mix. Tray 2 was 36 Rubenza and 35 Versailles.

4/7 -- Sown into a 50 cell tray, covered seeds lightly as instructed. Sowed all three varieties in both trays - didn't have enough seeds to double up everything, so ended up with 79 seeds in Tray 1 and 71 seeds in Tray 2. Did another growing medium experiment as well - tray 1 was sown entirely with Johnny's 512 Mix, and tray 2 used 512 (40%), FoxFire mix (40%), and ProMix (20%).

4/14 -- A full week in, no drama here. Germination is going well - both trays are in the 70-75% range, and we know from last year that cells where nothing germinates can take a transplant from a neighbor, so should easily have 100 Cosmos for transplanting. Haven't yet done the growing medium analysis but will once germination stops.

4/21 -- Comnpared to last year, definitely weaker germination on the whole with these. They really stopped germinating on the 13th. 100 is still my prediction - I'll likely move doubles into empty cells sometime in the next few days and get a final count. Regarding the growing medium experiment - pretty definitely results there, I would say. 512 germination was best, at 24 germinated in 20 cells. FoxFire did well too, 16 of 20. ProMix performed worst, 6 of 10.

4/28 -- Moved the doubles around this week. Some of them were quite small so we'll see if they end up being OK. Ended up with 91 plants total.

5/11 -- These are growing fine. Getting pretty close to being able to go outside. Debating whether or not to pinch some of them this year - these got crazy tall last year, might be nice to keep them smaller and bushier.