Tag: seedlings

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Scarlet pea process

Scarification of some kind is needed for quick germination of Indigofera miniata. I decided to nick each seed manually.
01/08/2024. The seeds swelled up ready to go within 24 hours! if you look very carefully you can see a few little roots emerging on a few seeds.
01/11/2024. More roots come out after a few days of light!
01/15/2024. These cotelydons (seed leaves) are opening in the container that had a clear lid! Two seed cases had fuzzy gray mold so I picked that off with tweezers the day before.
01/15/2024. This baby is emerging from the six-pack cells. It’s sort of yellow even though we have the grow lights right on them. For the open cells (no cover), I’ve been watering them by flooding the tray so the water soaks up.

I still have more of this species nicked. I think what I’ll do with the rest is plant them directly; they seem to imbibe water very fast which means they’ll probably sprout in spring rains. I forgot to inoculate them with any of the inoculum I bought from prairie moon nursery but I believe you can add it later if you disturb the roots a bit. If this species even needs it. Mysteries.

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12/23/2023 basketflower

Surprise! Seedlings!
The label
Has an adult leaf
Younger one
Several including one nibbled on
Basketflower seedlings have emerged! It’s an annual, so I assume they start now and then goes through summer. Hopefully they can survive frosts. Presumably they can though since seeds fall all fall in the wild too.

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11/18/2023 prairie verbena yay!

The deeply incised leaves of prairie verbena (plus some hitchhiking oxalis) against dark soil. I’m pointing at it with a gray and textured glove.
I think the seed from home being fresh helped, as one came up very quickly this summer. All of these happened after we bought two plants at the native plant festival haha.
I’m pointed my gloved finger at a little verbena seedling nested among bigger green leaves with many veins.
This verbena seed took almost a year I think to come up, and now two little seedlings are up too. So the many of them just want to take their own time. Its leaves are different. More like I expected for Verbena halei but I had it labeled where I thought it was prairie. We shall find out!
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10/15/2023 thistle rosettes in the wild

A fingertip sized baby thistle!
Bigger thistle baby!
Another thistle rosette
They apparently overwinter this way
This rosette I’m not sure if it’s texanum or undulatum. I haven’t seen any undulatum seeds up yet in my pots.
This is the same individual as to the left, showing the white closely hairy underside of the thistle leaves.
These five thistle rosettes are probably mostly or all texanum, based on that only my texanum seeds have germinated into similar size rosettes. These are all at my parents’ house, where I got the seeds. Yay!