I am going to post pix and discussion on the R.gigantea WEC RUN # 3 here.
See this link if you want to see how this run was started:
Link: www.rosehybridizers.org/forum/message.php?topid=33780&rc=31&ui=2829830532
Here are the R.gigantea embryos after three days water soaking in tap water (the temperature has now dramatically dropped from the 100F+ range to the 73F mark…finally!!!):
Their parts have thickened up, and some of them are starting to open up their cotyledons, slightly (these are all predictors of good embryo response to the water treatment, IME).
I am now messing around now with adding water to the packaged water crystals, and once they have swelled up for one hour, I’ll mix them with the perlite to make up a soilless sowing media (as per Michael G’s advice). I have never done this before, and I hope it works, as these are valuable embryos. The alternative for me here at this point in time, is to otherwise sow them in seed raising mix, and risk some total catastrophe with fungus gnat attack…I also suspect this seed raising media has been burning some embryos and seedlings!!!).
Yes…it has been a case of going “back to the drawing board” regarding sowing media for me!!!
ERROR…
LOL!!!
The above pic is of the embryos before their water soaking!!!
Here they are as of one hour ago (after three days of water soaking):
At least you can now compare the before / after shots, in this one thread…roflol!!!
Here is the final set up of this WEC run:
Sowing media = pre-wetted hydrocyrystal (1 part) added to perlite (10 parts).
The embryos were sown one to each pot, on the surface (between beads of perlite).
Then I sprayed the surface lightly with a hand water mister to settle it all in.
Then each pot was covered with cling wrap which was secured with elastic bands, to hopefully achieve 100% humidity.
I placed them in a tray with a water level.
Well… I woke up this morning and the cling wraps were not fogging up!!! Darn!!! I should have checked them last night, but I was too tied up with “life issues”… lets face it, roses and rose embryos are not the meaning of one’s life (I hope!!!)…LOL.
The elastic bands were not giving a reliable seal, and again humidity was escaping. I think I got to them in the nick of time. I removed the elastic bands and sealed the cling wraps onto the palstic pots using several rounds of adhesive tape. Thee embryos all looked ok, I hope they did not dry out too much overninght.
Thankfully the furnace-type heat conditions have gone, which helped minimize problems in this little “drama”.
It is not going to plan!!!
Despite the switch to adhesive tape from elastic banding, there is still no fogging of the cling wrap which covers these small blue pots!!
The h+p media was also starting to look gluggy!!!
I decided to abandon the whole idea of a water tray.
So about 6 hours ago I opened all 8 pots, removed the embryos and held them in a glass of tap water, whilst I reconfigured the WEC set up.
I recombined all the media from the 8 pots and added dry perlite to it, to regain some aeration.
Two of the embryos looked bad, so I threw them out.
Here are the 6 embryos which remain:
I switched from the blue nursery pots, to foam cups (with no holes in their bases). I then re-sowed the embryos on the surface of the recombined h+p media, one embryo to each cup, then sealed each cup with cling wrap secured with several rounds of adhesive tape.
Thankfully, this time the embryos tended to stay put in their intended sowing postitions, despite the movement of the cup sides during cling wrap taping.
I hope this works!!!
So here is the current finished WEC set up for R.gigantea:
Here is a bid’s eye view through the plastic wrap of the above cup…this R.gigantea embryo is greening up:
\
The one that greened up had hydrocyrystal stuck on it, and rotted…all the others have also rotted despite being good embryos and starting off ok…
Lesson learned…no more hydrocrystal. It is all in the name of experimentation, I feel ok about this. How else can we tweek these things?!
I am going to start this run again with a few of the spare R.gigantea achenes I kept, in case such a thing was going to happen. This time I will start them off in pure perlite, like Don Holeman suggested…I can’t get the fine stuff quite yet, so I will try with the coarser stuff, and secure the foam cups with cling wrap with very gentle taping and see if the embryos don’t shift around too much.
Here are the next lot of R.gigantea seeds to be extracted from their woody pericarps… Lord these ahcenes are as hard as the toughest hardwood!!! Several of them opened up, and the box cutter blade has laready gone blunt!!!
I did these just a few hours ago (I’ll soak them overnight and remove the papery coverings in the morning, and post pix of the embryos then).
I deliberately did not extract the last eight ahcenes, so they can be my last emergency reserve.
Only these two embryos appeared to me as being reasonable prospects out of the five seeds that are shown above:
SCALE : 1 GAP = 1/16 INCH
One of the original five was mushy (dead)…then the two biggest ones were very “hardened/sclerotic” and had fractured at some point during the extractions.
Remember that the pericarps of these achenes are like tough harwdood, and to remove them requires unusually hard forces to be applied. Such degree of force could possibly transmit shock waves which then fracture some of these harder less flexible embryos in the population, at certain points where they are weak. This is indirect injury, as distinct from direct tpye injury caused by the blade itself (which is a far more common source of injury IME).
I have left them to soak in tap water, but…something tells me an even lesser total water soaking time (to the three days maximum time) might be worth considering…perhaps 24 hours from the time they originally hit the water as seed with papery covering…it is hard to be sure what is optimal without doing several trials, and there is not enough seed to do many trials in this case!!!
As soon as these two extracted white embryos hit the water, they started to be surrounded by tiny bubbles… making them float to the top at times before I bounced them to the bottom of the glass… does anyone know what gas this is?? is this evidence of metabolic activity in these embryos??
It’s oxygen, George, a product of various peroxidase enzymes.
thx Don!
OK… I just sowed the above two white embryos (it is now about 24 hours after I first placed them in tap water as seeds without their woody pericarps). This is a shortened water soaking time by 2 days than what I would normally have done for pearly white embryos. I am not sure of my logic for doing this, it is mainly a gut reaction to having the frist lot of these all rot on me. Granted there was a lot of hydrocrystal glued to them causing a “suffocation” of sorts (the stuff glued on them like sticky gunk… ugh!!! and it could not even be rinsed off them properly with hard water misting/spraying LOL)!!!
These 2 current embryos were sown one per foam cup (no holes in base of cups), sitting on the surface of pure ordinary grade perlite (nestled amongst a few beads of perlite on the surface). After a few light squirts of water were applied to the embryos and their perlite surroundings, the foam cups was sealed off with cling wrap and several rounds of adhesive tape.
Here is a bird’s eye view of the inside contents of one of these two foam cups, as seen through the cling wrap. In the centre you can see the final sowing position of the R.gigantea embryo (pic taken ~12 hours after sowing):
Here are these two foam cups, all sorted and doing their thing (I hope…LOL):
This is what one of the very dried R.gigantea achenes looked like:
Even though the suture appears to have a gap, in fact it is firmly sealed further inside this gap…very well sealed !!!
George
I used a mix with water crystals for my seeds this year (actually 50/50 screened “Premium” potting mix and perlite) and I think that the water crystals are a menace.
After any reasonable rain (and we have had many) large lumps of wet “jelly” would force its way to the surface of the trays and leave a large hole when removed. This was only the movement I could see, there could be much more happening below the surface that would be enough to “swallow” a seed.
I think it is actually dangerous to small seeds or plants if the root sytem is not well developed.
Russ.
For embryo culture, and for small rose embryo-seeldings hydrocrystal addition proved a 100% catastrophic idea. Hydrocrystal stuck all over the embryos, I could not wash it off with misting, spraying even scraping it off!!! A total disaster.
I am trying to remain positive.
These two have been in the foam cups with perlite for about two and a half days…they are alive. I know this because they look ok, and because I also just removed both and put them in a glass of water and sure enough bubbles started to cover their surface, and their cotyledons opnend by a slight but noticeable fraction.
Something tells me they needed a bit more water than what their very humid cup environment was providing for their current state of “dormancy/dryness”, so I’ll leave them in the water for a few hours…
LOL…if you thought knowing when and how much to water some of the weirder type roses can be tricky, just try figuring out when and how much to water rose embryos o_O
Here they are at the moment:
In the water they open their cotyledons even a bit more, I wonder if this means they are wilted?? That would be a bad sign!! It is very hard to know exactly what to do at this critical stage, to get the water balance perfectly in tune.
These “water balance” complexities are not typical issues I have had with the robust white embryos derived from freshly harvested achenes. As you can see, these water balance issues are more prevalent with white (and even more so with waxy) embryos derived out of very dry-stored achenes.
This example of R.gigantea offers a classic “water embryo culture” model IMO.
I am going to leave them to soak in water for a further 24 hours, then review them…I am hoping by then they are going to appear more robust and less “pliable” overall by that time.