I got the grow tent set up about five days ago. Having winter rose projects does wonders to stave off the blues. Last year it was just cuttings and OP seedlings, but this year I had a few potted roses with hips that weren’t quite ready before a cold front.
After stashing them in the garage for like a week I figured I’d try them out in the grow tent. I assumed the worst but lo and behold, not only has everything begun pushing out new growth but the hips turned orange as well.
Since no planning went in to this, it’s just a random assortment of seed parents, rooted and unrooted cuttings, some precocious seedlings, and Pink Clouds graft attempt that I have little hope for. I wanted it as full as possible as I learned last year that my cuttings didn’t root without good humidity. Whether that will cause problems for the bigger plants has yet to be seen.
I’ve come up with a few experiments I’m going to try out:
Indoor pollinations. If they’ll take and if they’ll grow to maturity
If the tent can be used to bring once-blooming roses out of dormancy and induce blooming. And if that process can somehow be used to get a second flush.
If the humidity helps or hurts graft success.
Success rates of rooting cuttings without callusing them first.
I swear there was another idea but I’ve forgotten.
Anyways, if you’ve made it this far and would be interested in some free 0-47-19, Basye’s Legacy, or Pink Clouds rooted cuttings let me know. I was gifted them last year and would love to honor that generosity by paying it forward (provided that those cuttings don’t all fail). And I’m going to have a bunch of r. arkansana seedlings to give away this spring. Would also be open to swapping or trading
i’ll be following this closely. i have a couple of these tents i love to experiment with. one of the pieces of gear i recommend is the acinfinity humidifer. it has a humidity probe and can essentially turn your tent into an automatic mist box if used with a controller.
i think the tents have a lot of potential, for, example, rapidly raising a seedling to maturity under intense 24 hour light and fertigation. obviously that wouldn’t speak to its garden performance, but if you had a really special seedling, you could raise it up a year or two faster instead of waiting for nature to take its course. i keep my seedlings under my lights on 24h light and there seems to be no issue. i have found that using a bottom-watering system and airpots really allows plants to grow robust root systems under indoor light, especially if you are dialing in the rest of the environment with watering, light intensity, and feeding.
one thing i’m planning on doing is growing a fussy performer under a hydroponic soilless medium and basically gorging it on salts, like florist roses, and then when it has a great big flush of buds tapering off the feed to see if it simulates the lean condition roses are supposed to like in order to set seed. the nice thing about trying this in coir for example is you can flush the residual nutrients out of the medium right away and get a reproducible hip-setting system that you could use as a guideline with different roses if you can figure out a protocol. you could also do like a flood tray, for example, with a bunch of 1-gallon potted roses that are willing to flower in that cramped of a space. the sky is really the limit with this kind of stuff!
In a couple years if I start doing more grafting that’s something I might look into a humidifier setup. I used to grow oyster mushrooms and had a humidifier and fan connected to a hygrometer that you could program to turn on/off in response to humidity levels and temperature. As it stands now I’m enjoying the simplicity of the low-tech setup. Between the heat from the LED grow light and the moisture from all the pots the tent remains quite humid. I’ll put a hygrometer in tonight to find the true humidity percentage.
I feel like the seedlings I had under 24/7 lights last spring performed better once I put them outside. Something about real sunlight just can’t be beat. But my setup was bottlenecked by the heat emitted by my lights. Could only make it so bright without burning the seedlings and cuttings, but of course I wasn’t doing anything in the way of fans or climate control to mitigate the temperatures.
Update. Without a fan running the humidity is too high for grafting. Surprisingly, a few of the grafts appear to have taken but the moisture has made it so that some of the wounds from debudding and grafting still hadn’t healed and had even started to grow mold on the sap. Operator error played a part, I’m sure. My first few attempts I struggled with the parafilm to get a tight seal, and that space is where the moisture caused problems.
I’ve lost no cuttings so far, and after harvesting the rest of the hips from that bigger rose it started pushing out new growth and will be the first of them to flower.
