I’m confused. Last fall I carefully cleaned several seedlots of mostly OP rugosas, then planted the cleaned seed in flats. The flats were put outside over winter, covered with wire mesh but otherwise unprotected. One flat had room left, so I dumped in a lot of hips to fill out the flat. That particular lot was Hazel Le Rougetel/Corylus, and some seeds were cleaned. They and the other cleaned lots of seed were up about a month ago. The uncleaned but slightly mashed hips of Hazel germinated later, perhaps two weeks ago. They came up much more thickly, but then, I dumped in the hips that were left so there were probably more seeds. Now however, there is a very noticeable difference, with the cleaned seedlings having grown very little while the mashed hip seedlings are growing vigorously, and are twice the size of the row of Hazel beside it. This is the opposite of what I was expecting from all the posts on this group.
Would some kind soul care to enlighten my ignorance? Do I need to fertilize the cleaned–and, slow growing seedlings?
No, I don’t want a lot of these OP seedlings, I was doing this to find out how to handle rose hips, and am now trying to figure out what I should be doing. What little past experience I’ve had is that rugosa seedlings need at least
two years to flower, and there simply isn’t enough room to
plant out all of these OP seedlings.
I did take a couple pictures, but don’t know that posting them would help.
Ken, Oregon Z 7-8