PaulG said:
Good luck with the RockWool. I found them
pretty effective. I especially like how easy the
starts are to handle when growing in the cubes.
Thanks! After seeing some videos on YouTube of seedlings just pulling straight out to go into hydroton, I'm hoping it works well for my ridiculous little bottles.
A more substantial update, though it's mostly just incremental progress rather than anything particularly new.
My larger Sri Lanka Reddish is doing pretty well in his bottle. I killed about half of his foliage that was old, not doing that great, and blocking a lot of the new growth.
On the newbies, one SL Red candidate is looking OK, one lost pretty much his entire cotyledons to some kind of uber-helmet, and one germinated in the coffee filter but hasn't bothered to come up in the coir. The bottom red widget in this picture also has an SLR sprout, though it does not seem to understand rock wool.
The caribe in the middle back seems a little shaky; that's in one of the sponge things that came with these little Kratky plugs. The center middle is giant white habs in rock wool. I don't think they've been in there long enough to expect germination yet.
On the right and bottom are my possible hawk's claws, which are obviously happy. My luck with seeds from grocery store produce continues unabated.
These are the plants that got a serious haircut and had their entire beings washed to kill the bugs before going into coir+perlite. For once, the alma paprika is the slowest off the line, but they're all showing at least some new growth, in several cases quite a bit. So I'm pleased with this.
To their immediate right, the rain forest! Japanese bells, fish pepper, and white devil's tongue. I think all but one of these will go into planters outside when I decide to attempt that again.
Speaking of attempting things outside... the victims of my rather stupid attempt at hardening off are in the bottom of the tent. Most have at least a little bit of damage, but the CGN 21500 is the only one not showing any new leaves. I pruned the obviously dead stuff and am keeping an eye on it; if he doesn't make it, before I start moving them out when the weather improves, I'll replace him with one of the kids from up top.
Also pictured in the center is my new germination tray. I'm starting a whole bunch of Korean pepper seeds directly in rock wool along with half a dozen beets for my wife. Just started those, so no updates are likely for a while.
Rounding it out, the datil I started when I first found out about these little plug things is looking pretty good. Considering switching him out of his now-entirely-forest-green nutrient solution into a new painted bottle, though I'll need to make another large one before that happens (you can see the little ones in the back right). Hiding shyly behind his big brother, my bottled Zapotec jalapeno has his first true leaves after a blindingly fast... two months? Something like that? Speedy Gonzalez he is not.
On the right, in the blue and yellow uniform, my constant companion.
