Hi Jim.
My experiment/demonstration with the remaining 69 OP Iceberg seeds (achenes) that were water soaked in a small baby food jar for 8 weeks in the fridge is still continuing so I can’t report the final outcome yet (yes, there were 69 as I lost one in the sowing somehow, or else miscounted the original 70 wateva…LOL?!). When I last checked there were 8 seedlings. They seem to be currently sprouting at the rate of about one every day or second day. This demo is in week 5 now, post sowing… I never keep records of such things, (or of much at all for that matter LOL) but having done quite a few embryo extractions on the OP achenes of these same Icebergs, I can tell you that I usually find one normal looking embryo out of searching through several normal looking achenes. So the germination rate I am so far observing in this water soaking trial seems fairly acceptable to me based on these previous embryo observations from the same source of seed (achene).
I’ll report the final result when I can see that there has been say 1 month without any new sproutings.
Yeah, when I started randomly writing this thread, over a year ago now, I was not a member of RHA and barely knew who was who (I became a member in ?Jan 2010). Back in 2009, after starting to write about my embryo extractions here on this thread, Don Holeman sent me a preview of his embryo work which was published very shortly afterwards.
So by coincidence, we had embarked on the same idea of rose embryo extraction and culture many years before, with no knowledge of eachother’s work. This is cool, as the differring approaches add collective power to the final “thinktank” of RHA.
The tap-water germination of R. multiflora seed (achene) PLUS the subsequent idea of using tap water in a baby food jar as a possible alternative cold stratification medium/system (ie. stratifying achenes in the fridge in a baby food jar filled with tap water instead of in plastic baggies with damp paper etc), are spin-off ideas that I thought about after realising that I was getting the best embryo germination rates when I continuously water-soaked mature rose embryos in tap water (rather than use my older idea of jar embryo culture where the embryos got their water from the high humidity stuck on the side of a very humid sealed baby food jar).
I found it especially interesting to observe that the more chemically dormant rose embryos were able to sprout radicles even several weeks into such tap water immersion, without rotting, and then go on to form normal seedlings when sowed in seed raising mix (just as you would sow a newly sprouting achene).