Sunday, February 26, 2012
Germinating Rose Hip
I found this sprouting seedling the other day ago while cleaning out some of the pots of old leaves and other debris. As seen in the photo below, the seedling is sprouting right out of the hip. It reminded me of the time when I experimented planting whole rose hips directly into seedling flats and stratified them like that in the refrigerator. I had wanted to see if there was something about the hips that would inhibit the seeds from germinating. The hips had come from 'Avandel', a miniature rose, that I had learned many years ago from Carolyn Supinger of Sequoia Roses, was a good miniature rose seed parent. My experiment proved that rose seedlings are happy to germinate directly from the rose hips. The problem came when trying to separate one seedling from another because they all germinated together from the hip. It was difficult to separate them without breaking the fragile roots. This seedling too had a broken root, so was not transplanted, but it made me think again about how much living things are made to live.
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Jim you can actually save that broken root seedling. Because I have had such great germination this year, I have had to pull some out of the dirt because they are to close but some didnt want to release from the dirt and I snapped the top off with no stem at all, so it was just the two cotyledons. So I applied some rootone to the end where the stem use to be and planted the leaf half way into the potting soil and put it in a humid environment and four out of five of them took and developed roots and then a stem developed and began to elongate.
ReplyDeleteHi Dave,
ReplyDeleteThat's great to know! Since this was an "OP" seed, I didn't try to save it, but rooting a seedling from an important cross would be worth the effort.
Thanks!
Jim