2024 IHF Field Notes

Sown 3/31
Germination 4/4 (4 days)

Germination counts
4/4, 7pm: 2
4/5, 7am: 3
4/5, 5pm: 5
4/6, 9am: 7
4/6, 5pm: 11
4/7, 7am: 19
4/8, 8am: 22
4/8, 6pm: 25
4/9, 8am: 40
4/9, 12pm: 46
4/9, 6pm: 48
4/11, 8am: 56
4/12, 3pm: 58

3/31 -- Sown into a 72. Used FoxFire mix, covered seeds with 1/8" mix as per instructions. Sowed 83 seeds in total that were leftovers from last year, into 48 of the cells (used the rest of the space for some Salvia testing), so many of the cells got doubled up. Pretty uneventful sowing, seeds seemed fine to me.

4/5 -- So...these aren't doing what I expected, at least not yet. These germinated like gangbusters last year, I had a lot more of them five days in than I do this year. Could be the fact that the seeds are old? That hasn't traditionally been a problem for me but maybe it is for these guys. Or it could be just making this process slower. We'll know for sure in a few days time.

4/14 -- Looks like this did end up being a case of "old seeds". Week two featured much stronger germination, and while I'm not going to get the percentage of germination I did last year, these have done OK for themselves. Probably just a case where year-old seeds shouldn't be used for these. Suppose it could also be the growing medium but we'll do an overall analysis of that and see if there's a trend to be had.

4/21 -- Same as last time, really. These are doing fine, not great. Going to try to transplant the doubled cells into free cells this week and see what happens, hopefully that boost the transplant count.

5/11 -- No drama here. These look good, I have about 36 of them, and I'm hardening them off right now.