Exactly 8 weeks ago I placed 73 fresh Iceberg XOP achenes in a baby food jar, filled it half way with tap water, and sealed the lid and left it in the fridge to cold stratify.
I have never cold stratified any seed and sowed it before. This is my first time!
I did it in water becasue I thought if this method worked, it would be a whole lot easier for me to do it this way.
Today, after the 8 weeks of water soaking+chilling was complete, I randomly picked out three achenes and opened them up to see what was really going on inside.
Firstly, the achenes had only very minimal mould, and were very clean looking, most of them were a golden/straw color.
Secondly, unlike my R.multiflora water-soaked achenes (see further up this thread), these Iceberg OP achenes remained as hard as they were the day I plonked them in the water! Getting the seeed out was NO EASIER in this case!
Here are the rose seeds, extracted:
NONE of the extracted seeds showed evidence of rotting.
The rose seeds to the left and middle in the above picture are both typical dead iceberg seed, which I have seen countless times in freshly picked achenes. When touched the dead seed coverings were slighlty damp, but otherwise did not feel different to the same thing from a non-water soaked Iceberg equivalent.
As an aside, the seed on the left also has a much smaller sized dead twin seed attached to it, which is not too easy to see in this pic (but is there at the pointy end if you look carefully for it).
The seed on the far right looked and felt normal, so I embryo extracted it and found this:
Yes!! another bizarre Iceberg embryo!! LOL. Its radicle end is actually placed where you would normally expect the cotyledon rounded leaf end to be given the overall shape. HOWEVER, note that it has the normal shiny pearly sheen one expects from a healthy embryo (ie. it is definitely not rotted).
Now to get stuck into some rose achene sowing, I have 70 remaining to sow!!
I dont expect many germinations out of these 70, because my local Iceberg OP achenes often seem to contain dead seed and/or highy bizarre embryos, but I will see how many do germinate, and will let ya’all know, here!