Progress Report

Seasons Greetings fellow growers.

I am sad to report that my project has failed. I am down to three seedlings. The only seedlings left are the cedars, the ones I recently planted. I was forced to up root the cedars to a different container and take the tray and dome lid outside. There were just too many flies in the tray. They were starting to effect out house. Also a huge mold growth was covering the soil. I still plan on growing the rest of the the cedars and the other seeds I have in my fridge. I hope that you can learn something through my errors. I believe my biggest problem was I did not have enough air getting to the soil and it could not fully dry out and that cause a perfect breading ground for mold and bugs. I only poked a couple holes at the top of the dome, were I should have had a 3/4 in hole or two. Also my soil was not the greatest. Take the time to create the proper soil mixture. I rushed the project.

It is almost time to pull out the seeds I have in the fridge and plant them. What I think I am going to do is get a tray that holds individual containers and put one seed in each container and place them outside, instead of indoors. The whole reason I created this blog was to grow indoors. I will be growing indoors, but I will not be growing trees.

My next post will be in the middle of January 2013. Feel free to leave a comment, I would like to hear from someone. Thanks for reading.

Progress Report

Just want to start off by saying thank you too everyone for reading my posts. We are moved into our new house now and I am just trying to finish up the final touches so I can move on to setting up a bigger growing room in the garage.

I am in a bit of a rut with my first original three tree species, Royal Azalea, Hinoki Cyress and the Japanese Zelkova. I think I picked the slowest growing trees, for a beginner. I know that it takes years to grow a proper bonsai from seed but I would like to see something happen With these photos you should be able to see the full indoor nursery. I have not given up on the original 3 but I have some what moved on to newer and faster growing trees. As you know from reading my previous posts, I have started to grow two species of Cedar trees. This is now one month from when I planted them, and they are doing great. The Dawn Redwood has two growing right now. The other the Coastal Redwood have one growing and another one still trying to break free of the soil. So that packaging was right. I am seeing about 10-20% of the seeds actually work.

If you have not started your own indoor growing setup yet and you would like too, I recommend you get started sooner than later. The one piece of advise I would have to say is, pick a tree that grows a little quicker for your first one. Its cool and everything to grow trees from seed, but man can it get a little discouraging looking at the same thing everyday with no change. Also I would not use the type of soil that I did. Make your own mix that does not hold water and is made of more fine substrates.

In the coming months I will be taking my other tree species out of fridge to plants in a new tray. This time its game on 100%. So keep checking for updates on that.