Greeting fellow growers!
It's outdoor season here in South Africa and I'll be doing a couple of outdoor autos again this season. I'm hoping to do 2 harvests before winter.
I'm trying all new strains and I'm really excited to be growing out some highly anticipated ones from FastBuds, Royal Queen, Exotic Seeds and Dutch Passion.
Germination had me perplexed this time around. I usually get quite high rates but this time I had some failures and I can't figure out where I went wrong.
I store my seeds in an airtight, lightproof container in the fridge.
My go to method is to start by soaking the seeds for 12-24 hours in spring water, before transferring to paper towels. making sure they're damp not wet and after getting a tap root., then I transfer to jiffy pellets (soaked in trichoderma to innoculate against damping off) or small pots of the same medium I'll be growing in (Freedom Farms Organic Classic). If there's no sign of life after another 12-24 hours in the paper towels, I transfer anyway. Then I place a humidity dome over them and put them under lights until they sprout, then remove the dome, leave them under 24 hours LED tubes for a week or so then move them to their 40L pots outside.
This worked as expected for 4/8 of the seeds I germinated, but 50% of them died before showing face. It could have been the cold snap in weather while the seeds were soaking, or it may have been something else, but it's not breeder specific - the only common denominator between the seeds that died was....me.
Anyway, I try to not get too hung up on my losses and prefer to brush it off and move forward, but I would like to know where I went wrong to avoid it happening again.
Here's to a new grow season and hopefully some new friends in the comments. Follow along and let's see if I can get some monster autos outdoors!
Cheers for now 😎
Best of luck with the new season mate. It's interesting seeing quite a few guys getting germination issues at the moment... I'm wondering if there's a reason for it... I know since covid there has been a huge run on seeds, I'm wondering if some seedbanks may be down to some of the older ones, or 2nd rate ones maybe? 🤔
@Shooey, hey bro! I wish I could say that but the issues spanned accross breeders, strains, older seeds, newer seeds. All I can think of it being is our cold snaps in spring, when the temps suddenly drop, I never thought it, but temperature of the water that you soak seeds in could also be a factor - but who knows hey!