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Growing potato seeds

March 9, 2016 tarzan Comments 2 comments

Sometimes, potatoes manage to produce tomato-like fruits in late summer and fall. When they get ripe, they start turning yellow and soft, but the fruits usually (well, I’d say always, but I kept one fruit 🙂 ) get discarded, because they are supposed to be poisonous if ingested. Potato propagation is usually done by planting small potato tubers, which means there’s no use for the seeds. Vegetative propagation by tubers allows potatoes to grow large during their first growing season, compared to tiny plants and mini tubers that can grow from the seeds. Asexual plant propagation also gives identical plants, compared to genetically diverse plants, received when growing from seeds.

Potato seeds are rather small. They can be found in ripe potato fruits

I never tried growing potatoes from seeds and even thought they would germinate poorly or not at all, so I decided to pick one of the fruits that were ripe, collected seeds, dried them and packed them into zip lock bag just to forget about them.

When I started to prepare for the spring and started germinating my chilli peppers, I have found the small bag with potato seeds, and threw most of them into the same pot with a couple of chillies. My expectations were low and I believed, that potatoes were already genetically manipulated to the point of no return – complete sterility.

After just a couple of days, I have noticed that practically all the seeds started sprouting. Extremely high germination rate came as a shock and I was kind of disappointed, because I sowed all the seeds on the same spot, which means only a few had a fighting chance to survive the transplanting. I decided to plant them into containers for the first year, and perhaps use their small tubers the next year and plant them with the rest of potatoes.

I intend to update this post on regular basis when the small plants start growing and when I finally get the tiny potato tubers.

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Growing Phyllostachys arcana ‘Luteosulcata’ from seeds

October 27, 2015 tarzan Comments 0 Comment

I received a pack of fresh Phyllostachys arcana ‘Luteosulcata’ seeds sent by strike88 from Lesbambous.fr – thank you!
Since I’ve already been growing several bamboos from seeds, I know how fun and rewarding it can be, so I decided to try the first ten seeds as germination test and as the first bunch of new generation of bamboo seedlings. I removed the seed cover and exposed the grains to prevent possible mold infection which was prime cause of my failed Moso seedlings when I first tried growing the bamboo seedlings.

Germination rate of first ten seedlings was very high with 80% success rate. There were no albino seedlings and all the seedlings appeared healthy, except two, that were growing rather slowly and appeared lighter green, one almost yellow. I planted the first seedlings together into quite deep pot made out of empty milk carton, so there might be some nutrient related issue, but as I still remember my Moso growing experience, I don’t think that is the case. Most likely pale color and slow growth is just the result of bad genetics and these two seedlings might be the first ones that will fail. I intend do my best to keep them alive for a while, perhaps they do have a potential.

2 weeks old seedlings. Pale seedling started to lag behind darker green plants

During fall, winter and most of the spring I usually keep my seedlings inside most of the time. I have really bad natural light conditions, so I have to provide them artificial lights. At the moment they are under 2 cheap 50W Chinese LED lights, one cold and one warm white. I think that I’ll toss the warm one and get another cool white, because I have a feeling it doesn’t do any good to the plants. They grow fast and strong though, so I think they should be good for a while, before they get larger. When they start growing their first shoots, I’ll divide them into separate containers.

First shoots appeared in less than 3 weeks.

The growth rate of young seedlings can almost be compared to Borinda fungosa seedlings – one young P. arcana actually started shooting almost a week earlier than Borinda seedlings, which were by far the fastest growing bamboos I’ve ever grown from seed. Faster shooting could be the result of most likely warmer conditions, because they are being grown in late fall, compared to Borinda, which was grown during the winter, Borinda seedling did grow leaves a bit faster though. Results should be considered with a grain of salt, because growing conditions were not nearly the same.

I’ll continue writing about their development in a couple of weeks, when they hopefully all start growing shoots.

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Blueberry seeds

February 4, 2015 tarzan Comments 13 comments

During early summer, I’ve taken several ripe Vaccinium corymbosum blueberries and kept them frozen for 6 months. During that time, they should become stratified enough to complete their dormancy. Without stratification period in the freezer, seeds would not become viable and would fail to germinate.

When blueberries thawed, I placed them into strainer and broke them into small pieces with my fingers. At the same time I was pouring cold tap water through the strainer, to clean the seeds and take out larger pieces of fruit without the seeds. I placed the seeds into paper towel and placed it on a drafty windowsill to dry. When dried, I started preparing peat moss for them to start germinating. The seeds are small, so I decided to use blender and shred the larger particles into small pieces.

Blueberries need a lot of light, moisture and slightly acidic soil. They can germinate slowly, so I had to make sure to prevent mold from destroying the young seedlings. I used microwave and sterilized peat moss, before I planted the seeds. I also tried fermenting several seeds for 2 days and started germinating them in wet paper towel.

One month after I started, I’ve already had mold issues in both, peat and paper towel. After that I placed peat out of it’s originally planned sealed plastic bag, so It could dry out a bit. It dried out… a lot. I then noticed peat is way too compacted, so I used a toothpick to make it at least a bit softer and aerated. After a month, there were no signs of germination and after all the issues, I almost gave up. Before throwing everything into compost bin, I finally saw one tiny seedling starting to break free. After only a couple of days, more seedlings appeared and at the same time, I noticed that seeds in the paper towel also started sprouting. Despite the fact that seeds were fresh and stratified, they took more than a month to finally start germinating.

One month after seedlings first appeared, I decided to give them more light. They immediately started growing faster and started changing color to darker green, with more red coloring in new leaves. I used very small containers so they needed watering every two days in intense light. Before, when I placed them into completely shaded location, they only needed watering every couple of weeks.

Placing the seeds into small germinating trays soon became an issue. As seedlings started to grow, they were more and more susceptible to drought. I placed some into well fertilized peat and they died instantly, as I expected they would. Remaining seedlings were placed in clumps into pure peat on May 2nd when sun isn’t strong enough to kill them, but can fasten up their growth.

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