Update on late seedlings of Fall 2012:
Last update on Jan. 27th, plants were to go into cold room to force dormancy ( see last post).
Plants looked like this:
Plants were placed in a cold room under light and the temperature reduced gradually from 52'F to about 36'F during the period 1/26/13 to 2/25/13. I could never get any lower than 35'F because I was cooling the room with outside air by open window and on some days the outside air temperature began to warm higher than the temperature inside the room. During that time period about 1/3rd of the leafs had turned brown, about 2/3rds were yellow and only an extreme few of the new inner leafs were still green.
Because holding the temperature down was becoming increasingly difficult and I saw suitable weather coming the week of the Feb. 25th with temps between 27'F and 34'F, I took the opportunity to freeze all the foliage (which didn't freeze until it got down to 28'F). All the foliage was then clipped and any remaining stems were dried a couple days, then dusted with Captin. They were then covered with a layer of about 1/2 inch of raw sphagnum moss and on March 2nd they were placed in a 50 gallon tub like the one pictured below and covered all sides, top and bottom with finely ground pine chips as insulation medium and the tub top cover locked in place tightly . A small remote thermometer was placed on the surface of one of the pots so I could monitor the temperature (which had one mininum extreme of 27.8'F and one Maximun extreme of 34.9') The average pot surface temperature was 30.9 for the period 2/25/13 to 4/3/13. The pine chip media did an excellant job; by far the greatest number of data was clustered tightly around the average. These were then pulled for inspection yesterday (4/3/13) and repacked for another 3 or 4 weeks of chill and the finally rejoin in sync with the rest of their 2012 companion seedlings. An exploratory showed the little bulbs to be in great condition. Here, then, are some pictures from yesterday.
I don't have pictures of the intermediate steps of freezing, clipping, powdering and packing to show. I did take pictures using a new SD card but they aren't even on that suspect card.
