The two test germanations of the sea buckthorn seeds have been a big success. In the photo above, the row to the right are seedlings which are 27 days old. These were the seeds which were refrigerated for a week after planting then warmed up. The left row were not cold treated and these seaberry seedlings emerged after 13 days.
A very close look of the 27 day old seedlings will reveal the initial emergence of the first set of true leaves. Moving forward after these two experiments, I have planted an additional 214 seeds, for a grand total of 230 to date. I expect their emergence from the soil to begin on April 20th. Stay tuned!
The seeds recieved from OMC Seeds were decribed as "Hippophae Rhamnoides" var. angustifolia. Angustifolia loosely translated means narrow leaf. This isn't much help as I have found no reference to it on the internet. A little detective work is just beginning to lead towards some likely candidates.
These are Turkish varieties of sea buckthorn. Ürgüp, Trabzon, Sivas94. Sivas 96, and Ilgaz are pictured here. The seeds I received from Lithuania are pictured below.
My test seeds most closely resemble the var. Ürgüp. Ürgüp (Wikipedia®) is also the name of a Turkish town. As is Trabzon (Wikipedia®), Sivas (Wikipedia®), and Ilgaz (Wikipedia®). They do not, however look identical to any of these Turkish varietes. The exploration continues....
Tom,
ReplyDeleteI just planted my own batch of 96 seeds, so we'll see if the germination rates are the same.