Weak. Compost!
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I’m curious to know how do you test for root growth? Do you gauge it when transplanting them or is it like pulling on cuttings to test rooting?
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Sadly there is no way to be sure what’s going on underneath the soil, but my plant-mantra has always been “without roots, ya got nothing!”, so it comes down to making an educated guess at the root-system beneath every seedling:
To cull, or not to cull.
Most of the time, a weak seedling will have a weak root system and a strong seedling will have a strong one, but that isn’t always the case. I have two seedlings that when pulled out for the bin showed surprisingly vigorous roots, so I ended up potting them up. #SecondChances
Conversely, sometimes I’ll mark a seedling for keeping and observation. Months later, when it comes time to break up the seedling box (which is pretty much NOW for me) and pot everybody up individually, I will be disappointed-to-shocked with its inability to grow on its own roots, and it gets composted anyway.
Same thing can happen as spring approaches and I check to see if the roots have filled the pot over winter (I live on BC’s Vancouver Island, z7b and we have mild wet winters typically), some do, and some don’t. I am wholly-uninterested in raising roses that must be grafted, so sometimes it hurts throwing a good flower away.
Without roots, ya got nothing.
But that’s just me.
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Actually, that’s an easy answer. My experience from the beginning and it holds true today is, if a seedling is a weak grower, it has junk roots. A vigorous seedling has GOOD roots. It doesn’t matter whether it’s an OGR, species, HT, floribunda, shrub, etc. offspring, if it is weak, has overly thin wood, sparse foliage it doesn’t have a decent root system. Emptying seedling tables to pot up those I want to evaluate further shows it constantly. There will be a massive seedling with an enormous root system and MANY twigs with one or two little roots and they have never developed into anything worth growing when individually potted. I won’t hold them until flowers can be forced from them for fear of raising another “pretty face” demanding budding because we’ve been damned with too many thousands of those cursed things over the past century. I refuse to add to the tsunami of garbage the market has promoted. If the seedling isn’t good on its own, it’s out.
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Do you think you are coming to the end of your germinations for the season. How many have you had now/ how many have you kept?