24 Lemon Cherry Cookies

Northern_Ent May 26: second try worked. Will keep inside on heat mat in peat pot for a week max and then plant into 4 gallon grow bag. May 28: seed #2 is dead. So it goes. I think it overheated under the grow light. I’ve had a bad run of luck with my autos this year. Previous try was too cold to germinate, and these were too hot and got cooked. I had put foil loosely over the light to dim it for the new seedlings. What I forgot about was heat, apparently, and she and the auto opium both got cooked pretty fast. I waited a day to see if it would recover, but no. Started third and final seed in water today. Try again - still lots of time to start autos for this outdoor season. June 1: seed into soil with an apple slice on top of soil to provide some ethylene gas in the dark at 25 C. June 2: warm enough to be out in greenhouse where it is a nice 22 C this afternoon. Want to avoid using my grow light after having cooked the last round of auto seeds. Natural but diffuse light in the greenhouse will work. June 7: so, wtf? This one died too. That means 6 of my last 10 auto starts failed once placed in the soil. The soil itself is fine cuz none of the other plants are having problems. The only thing I can think of that is different from previous years is using an apple to provide ethylene gas once in soil but before the first application of light. For the photoperiods (plus tomatoes and peppers) I used an entire apple which seemed fine. For the autos, or at least the last four that failed, I used an apple slice. This might be too much of a good thing. That was my last Lemon Cherries Cookie seed. Ugh. Well, I started a Fast Buds Chemdawg on June 6 so please check out that diary. Chemdawg isn’t trendy but it has always been a personal fave. So it goes. Update: I may have just had the soil too dry to start seedlings as I was trying not to have the soil so wet the roots would be hindered. Will go back to my usual pre-moisten the soil first method. But I still go with a whole apple being better than an apple slice. In future, I won’t be using an apple slice. Maybe the browning (oxidation) of the apple gave off the wrong kind of gas. Anyway, it’s not science but it is helpful to still document failures. Adding an apple to the germination stage seems to be a good idea, but an apple slice is not a good idea. E. Brenya, et al., PNAS Nexus July 2023 for the science paper https://academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/article/2/7/pgad216/7221976?login=false Explained here https://phys.org/news/2023-11-exposing-unusual-chemical-early-bolster.html