Phleb grow log

[Sallubrious]

The last time I was fortunate enough to get some Phleb seeds none of them came up, I don't know if it was the way I did it or if the seeds were not viable. I scarified and then used the hot water soak for that unsuccessful batch.

So this time I thought I'd try a different method to try and germinate them that doesn't involve so much heat.

This time I used a set of vice grips to crack the seeds before I soaked them in hot water. The water was cool enough to hold my finger in it without any real discomfort. I didn't use a thermometer but I'm guessing the water was around 60 degrees.

I placed the seeds (one at a time) between the vice grip jaws and then closed them without touching the seed, then I wound the knob in until it touched the seed and I continued winding until it built up enough pressure to crack the seed. The seeds all cracked with an audible click so it was easy to tell when enough pressure had been applied..

After that I put the jar of warm/hot water in a brown paper bag on the rear parcel shelf in my car which was parked in the sun.

I checked the jar about 2 hours later and to my surprise the seeds have all swollen to almost twice their size and a few even seem like they are germinating (I don't think that they could germinate so quick but it does appear that way)

Here's a few pics after a 2 hour soak.

 

 

[Jox]

Nice work SallyD,

I haven't never "cracked" the seeds in this way & it will be very interesting to see how your germination rate goes.

Please keep us updated with your results!

[Amazonian]

I got my batch of seeds (that were handed out ages ago) looking the same as yours are now SallyD, but nothing ever came from them either . I didn't hear of any one having success?

I have a few seeds left and will do the same again, but remove the seed coat this time .

I expect you to be putting up some pics of seedlings here real soon. If anyone can do it, you can.

Good Luck.!

[Bread Filter]

If anyone can show me how to germinate these I'll have a lot of seedlings to give away for free on here.

[klip247]

I put the kettle on the boil and pulled it off just before the water started to boil, then soaked some of the seeds in a semi-thermos bottle for around 18hrs or so, had a floatie on top which cracked its shell, the others went straight to the bottom, apart from the one at the top they didnt look like they swelled up much. Put the seeds in regular potting mix about 5mm deep then misted the top layer with water, ill let you know if anything pops up.

[etherealdrifter]

didn't mean to hijack (don't send me any threatening pm's Sally we're all good right bro)... ........but i felt like i could contribute to an existing a.phleb thread rather than start a new one...anyway

we have lift off

PD

[Sallubrious]

No wuccas mate. Post away, it's good to see some action.

Is it just the one ?

How did you pre treat the seeds?

No movement with mine after 10 days so I'm thinking about digging them up and cutting the seed off like Gerbil did.

[etherealdrifter]

5 seeds in the fridge for a week or so.

took em out , poured boiling water on them, no scarring/sanding or snipping used on them.

a couple of hours later, 2 of the seeds had a fractured coat and were visibly swollen.

these 2 were put in coco medium( in an empty cotton tips box as a growbox) and kept moist on top of a heat mat with an aquarium light source. once they popped up, the coat was removed using a scalpel...with a steady hand.LOL. Actually the seed coat by now was pretty slippery.

a few days later i put them in the plastic pots with a thin top layer of searles premium propagation mix (5mm) and filled the remainder of the pot with a native potting mix.

i was surprised by the length of the tap root....maybe some fridge action and then hot stirs up some of the stronger little brains in some of the seeds. Dunno? keen to hear other methods.

pretty stoked

[gerbil]

A big pat on the bum to you eth.

As you've seen, there's often far more going on underground than above.

imo it's best to germinate them in something that they will grow in for a longer period of time and can get their roots down deep without disturbance, but horticulturally anything is possible really and variety is the spice of life.

Hope they take well with the very young transplant, best of luck with it all.

I like your thinking with the cold pre-treatment, you naturalist you. Nearly called you a naturist by accident

[etherealdrifter]

hey gerbil ....actually i defend the right to be both.

Yeah man, in retrospect, i'd germinate and grow em in the same container......a lot less hassle and way easier on the little critters roots eh.

Plus, i'm following your advice of keeping them where they only get some dappled sunlight in the mornings until they grow bigger(fingers crossed).

Hooray ,bum pats and high 5's all round, my shout.

[Sallubrious]

I hadn't seen any growth after almost 2 weeks so I went to dig them up today to remove the seed coat and they are all gone. I think they must have rotted away.

I don't know what went wrong, I'm sure I didn't crush them, maybe the seed raising mix stayed too wet.

[gerbil]

it's not unheard of for the seed to rot away completely, though leathery coats can sometimes be found or dried out with the appearence of a cockroach egg, Sometimes when they rot you'll just get a fuzzy mushy mess, but at the same time they are very easy to lose in seedmix. I thought I lost one through rot, so reset the soil and layed down some cactus seed, now i've got a tube with a phleb up the side and cactus across the surface.

To be honest I cringed when i heard you cracked them with vice grips maybe you ruptured the embryo, just guesses really.

Oh and you shouldn't have put warm/hot water on seed with a cracked coat, do one or the other, once you expose the embryo, it's all room temp water. Even the hot car was possibly a bit extreme.

Some Acacias won't even handle the hot water treatment due to lack of coat thickness, it's all context specific.

Edited September 17, 2012 by gerbil

[Sallubrious]

Yeah I read a post by Torsten the day after I did mine that they should be soaked in cold water if they've been nicked. I'd crawled the web for a few days before I did mine and a lot of the stuff I read said to nick them and soak in near boiling water. I guess I should have searched this site better before I looked elsewhere.

I suppose I could have bruised the embryo but the seeds didn't get compressed very much at all, either way it was a stroke mediocrity.

Now I'm even more envious of your success Gerbil.

[space cadet swami]

I was told I could be waiting up to 4-5weeks.

I've done a knick/cold water batch & a leave them alone/hot water batch, I'm still watching & waiting. A couple of acuminata's I put down a week or so before them have popped up their heads. The very 1st batch I put down, I nicked & hot water soaked & turned them to mush...10 wasted, I was very sad . So now I'm being patient & just watching.

Very good input guys...please keep the updates coming.

& may I say thank you to the brothers, who gave me enough seed to be able to sustain a loss...

[Bread Filter]

Can someone please put together a step by list of what is to be done with these if possible?

I have a terrible track with seeds and would like to try and germ my 20 Phleb seeds with the best results.

Thanks in advance.

[etherealdrifter]

hey travellors

Just to see....... i put one phleb seed in moist paper(after a hot water soak with no nicking/scarring of the seed coat) in an empty clean plastic, dips container and put it on my kitchen window sill.

I tried to remember to keep it damp but i did forget sometimes to water it and the paper went totally dry a couple of times over about a two week period but for

the majority of the time i just put the tap on watered the container and drained the runoff water and placed it back on the window sill.

Not once did i open the paperfolds that the seed was tucked into ..until this morning...........

the coat just slipped off. i planted it in a 50/50 mix of coarse, unpasteurized sand and el cheapo no brand no nutrient added soil mix.

[gerbil]

so how goes it eth?

[etherealdrifter]

hey

Ok, so far so good Gerbil.

I've coerced 3 seedlings to keep growing

the first one is the oldest, raised in the coco medium

the second one i sprouted in the paper towel then transplanted

and the last one popped up unexpectedly - bonus phlebby

When do you suggest is an appropriate time to feed them some blood and bone? how much and at what ratio? I know feeding them is a while off but what signs tell you to give em a dose.

I've always been careful to not od natives on nutrients , so i'm a bit wary of feeding them too early.

cheers

[Khala]

Wow this is really cool. I'm going to have to acquire some Phleb seeds now, would love to see these guys be a bit less in trouble than they are already.

Awesome progress eth, you are a grow log parasite haha!

[gerbil]

beautiful eth, really healthy lookin', nice and thick stems with vigour.

I've found this quite insightful and try to read it somewhat regularly to re-interpret and solidy my understanding a bit better.

http://asgap.org.au/APOL1/mar96-2.html

I too have been quite scared of feeding natives, but often it's just been from the old message that natives don't need a feed which really is total bs that just keeps being parroted, that said I don't have a proper understanding of it all and of course there are no hard and fast rules as plants differ, even within a genus, like a lowland acacia in a nutrient rich floodplain on silts or heavy clays would react differently to say an alpine species in quite a mineralistic sandy soil.

I held off as long as I could, and seed to seed it differed. Without feeding (besides innoculant), I had one particular plant that grew much larger much quicker than the others and generally showed no need for a feed, whilst at the other spectrum one or many plants stayed small and showed signs of needing a feed quite early on.

Monitoring the cotyledons allowed me to see when each specific plant was chewing up it's reserves, with the drawing of Nitrogen from them and consequently turning them yellow, grouped with that or simply alone I noticed a slowing of growth and or complete stunting, with lack of stem thickness and a general redding of stems being present and distinct lack of axillary shoots / reluctance to produce axillary buds/shoots.

Don't confuse yellow cotyledons/lower phyllodes yellowing due to overwatering with need for feed though, generally that could be communicated by backing of the frequency and the yellowing would stop or slow and you could see vigour be reinstated.

I started small, with a general light sprinkling of the 'native blood and bone based 'protea' fertiliser' (I think it's called and it's a brown bag from memory) with just enough to cover the surface lightly which was watered in. I had these indoors and did notice the surface start to fuzz up with fungal issues, presumably from them being indoors with lack of airflow, I rectified this by simply lightly digging/fluffing the surface to avoid a stagnant surface crust and the fuzz and smell went away in a day or so.

I plan on doing some experimenting with other species that I can afford to lose, and see how far I can push things at different ages with normal blood and bone and the native blood and bone, and then apply it slowly to species which I have relatively limited seed supply of.

I did apply a mycorrhizal innoculant early on and before their first feed, but even then I felt that small amounts of additional nitrogen would potentially aid the development of the nodules and or simply feed the plant until nodules where better established, I could be talking bollocks on that though. I do plan to reinoculate upon potting on, and will still be fertilising with the native blood and bone on a gradual basis, with less rather than more.

So I simply started small and saw they reacted really well, so next time I had more confidence and upped it a little, but still only about a small flat teaspoon max per tube (if that!), and generally only when I saw a slow in growth. They are due for another feed and this will be their 3rd feed I think.

Your pots are really big for their size, so be careful not to overwater as it will be very easy to do so and can be easily confused as nutrient issues which it's related to, but not a sign to feed.

Don't be afaid to let them dry out a bit, although i've heard alot about how they don't like to dry out much, i've let mine go to somewhat floppy phyllodes at stages, but have rectified it very quickly; as long as there was a little moisture in their base I was fairly content and no dramas with them yet.

I still prefer to underwater than overwater, and under feed than overfeed, can always up things, but can't really take back whats been put out.

Thanks for the update

Khala they aren't really in trouble, it's a common misunderstand/misinterpretation, they are isolated and have pressures put on them, but not something that really needs humans to come and save the day, if anything we will just make it worse. My goal is more so just to have these available in backyard circulation so you don't get every man and their dog 'needing' to go and visit them, fungal transfers would be my major concern in regards to population decline, I think people get a bit ahead of themselves and feel the need to visit them just because they've read about them once or twice, I find it funny people would 'need' to go see them when they probably haven't even had a walk in their local bushland areas.

Not that seed isn't available, but I urge people who don't really have any experience in growing plants especially acacias, to get their protocol down with highly abundant species and then request seed of such species. I'm not thinking badly on anyone, but I find it frustrating that people who gave out the seed often requested (but not all the time!) people who knew what they were doing to only request it, but it seems a heap of people snagged them and then asked how to germinate them, again no ill feelings or anything like that towards anyone, experience is great and so it attempting things, I just found it all a bit odd.

Edited October 12, 2012 by gerbil

[Khala]

Hey gerbil fair enough that's cool that they aren't so badly in trouble. I've grown acacias aplenty in my short gardening journey, currently got a happy healthy obtusifolia (gave all the other ones away to friends to plant and grow, council appears to have ripped out pretty much every acacia near where i live) i grew from seed a few years back.

but I get where you are coming from totally, it's like giving a panda cub to a suburban household heh.

[gerbil]

cool i'm sure in a few months time there'll be more opportunity for seed to be spread to interested parties, and in the coming years we will see this plant more frequently in peoples collections and tube stock on offer which is really exciting, if I run into any i'll keep you in mind. At the same time, imo it's important for people to not get too caught up in it as there are plenty of other species around that are in need of attention and have similar things happen, seed distribution, tube stock availability etc. lets cast our nets wide hey, we have a fascinating country with so much exploration and hard work to be done

Edited October 12, 2012 by gerbil

[etherealdrifter]

beautiful eth, really healthy lookin', nice and thick stems with vigour.

I've found this quite insightful and try to read it somewhat regularly to re-interpret and solidy my understanding a bit better.

http://asgap.org.au/APOL1/mar96-2.html

I too have been quite scared of feeding natives, but often it's just been from the old message that natives don't need a feed which really is total bs that just keeps being parroted, that said I don't have a proper understanding of it all and of course there are no hard and fast rules as plants differ, even within a genus, like a lowland acacia in a nutrient rich floodplain on silts or heavy clays would react differently to say an alpine species in quite a mineralistic sandy soil.

I held off as long as I could, and seed to seed it differed. Without feeding (besides innoculant), I had one particular plant that grew much larger much quicker than the others and generally showed no need for a feed, whilst at the other spectrum one or many plants stayed small and showed signs of needing a feed quite early on.

Monitoring the cotyledons allowed me to see when each specific plant was chewing up it's reserves, with the drawing of Nitrogen from them and consequently turning them yellow, grouped with that or simply alone I noticed a slowing of growth and or complete stunting, with lack of stem thickness and a general redding of stems being present and distinct lack of axillary shoots / reluctance to produce axillary buds/shoots.

Don't confuse yellow cotyledons/lower phyllodes yellowing due to overwatering with need for feed though, generally that could be communicated by backing of the frequency and the yellowing would stop or slow and you could see vigour be reinstated.

I started small, with a general light sprinkling of the 'native blood and bone based 'protea' fertiliser' (I think it's called and it's a brown bag from memory) with just enough to cover the surface lightly which was watered in. I had these indoors and did notice the surface start to fuzz up with fungal issues, presumably from them being indoors with lack of airflow, I rectified this by simply lightly digging/fluffing the surface to avoid a stagnant surface crust and the fuzz and smell went away in a day or so.

I plan on doing some experimenting with other species that I can afford to lose, and see how far I can push things at different ages with normal blood and bone and the native blood and bone, and then apply it slowly to species which I have relatively limited seed supply of.

I did apply a mycorrhizal innoculant early on and before their first feed, but even then I felt that small amounts of additional nitrogen would potentially aid the development of the nodules and or simply feed the plant until nodules where better established, I could be talking bollocks on that though. I do plan to reinoculate upon potting on, and will still be fertilising with the native blood and bone on a gradual basis, with less rather than more.

So I simply started small and saw they reacted really well, so next time I had more confidence and upped it a little, but still only about a small flat teaspoon max per tube (if that!), and generally only when I saw a slow in growth. They are due for another feed and this will be their 3rd feed I think.

Your pots are really big for their size, so be careful not to overwater as it will be very easy to do so and can be easily confused as nutrient issues which it's related to, but not a sign to feed.

Don't be afaid to let them dry out a bit, although i've heard alot about how they don't like to dry out much, i've let mine go to somewhat floppy phyllodes at stages, but have rectified it very quickly; as long as there was a little moisture in their base I was fairly content and no dramas with them yet.

I still prefer to underwater than overwater, and under feed than overfeed, can always up things, but can't really take back whats been put out.

Thanks for the update

Khala they aren't really in trouble, it's a common misunderstand/misinterpretation, they are isolated and have pressures put on them, but not something that really needs humans to come and save the day, if anything we will just make it worse. My goal is more so just to have these available in backyard circulation so you don't get every man and their dog 'needing' to go and visit them, fungal transfers would be my major concern in regards to population decline, I think people get a bit ahead of themselves and feel the need to visit them just because they've read about them once or twice, I find it funny people would 'need' to go see them when they probably haven't even had a walk in their local bushland areas.

Not that seed isn't available, but I urge people who don't really have any experience in growing plants especially acacias, to get their protocol down with highly abundant species and then request seed of such species. I'm not thinking badly on anyone, but I find it frustrating that people who gave out the seed often requested (but not all the time!) people who knew what they were doing to only request it, but it seems a heap of people snagged them and then asked how to germinate them, again no ill feelings or anything like that towards anyone, experience is great and so it attempting things, I just found it all a bit odd.

 

wonderful, thank you for the information and the link Gerbil

yeah, the pots are oversized for sure ......i'm being vigilant on the rootrot aspect

i'm planning on following this particular grow with interest. .............just like any other

melb meet is coming up i heard

[gerbil]

pm me your address khala, i'll send you the 2 seeds i've left.

Have alot going on at the moment so am not too sure about the meet eth, but am giving it thought.

[incognito]

Hell yer if there's seed going round I get em

Up and goin pretty good