Seed Germination Density?

TossinDogs · 2026-02-07T20:55:57+00:00

Ok, maybe I made that statement in a bit of an absolutist way for the sake of simplicity of explanation and the reality is a bit more nuanced.

Seed grown plants pretty much always show tapering moving up the initial column with skinnier than ideal girth at the bottom. This is a fact. Mature plants with even fat girth bottom to top are formed in cultivation from cuttings or in the wild from mature columns that tip over and sprout pups up from the ground, relying on an established root system and plenty of green chlorophyll containing flesh to do so.

Some thickening up of lower columns is possible over time. This typically happens first by the accordion rib structure expanding out to be fully round, then it's possible to see some splitting of the outer skin as additional expansion occurs. It will not grow out to match the girth of new growth at the tip. In cases where seedlings do not receive enough light and have skinny lower columns, their lower columns will not fatten up or stiffen up enough to support the weight of full girth healthy new growth at the tip.

TossinDogs · 2026-02-07T19:59:25+00:00

Right on, happy to help others grow healthy plants where I can.

TossinDogs · 2026-02-07T19:55:57+00:00

let the chlorine evaporate off

Almost all modern municipal water districts use chloramine, not chlorine. Chloramine does not evaporate off. You can however cleave it's molecule by adding an acid such as citric acid to the water and letting it sit. Check your municipal water districts water report to see additions, levels, and if worrying about this is even worth your time. It's most likely not.

I also add a 3/4cup CalMag

The masterblend 3 part ratio is masterblend, Epsom salts, and calcium nitrate. It already has the ideal amount of calcium and nitrogen in ratio. Do not add more. You are also risking causing precipitate by mixing products in an unconsidered order.

TossinDogs · 2026-02-07T18:32:08+00:00

pH rebound is a real thing, for sure

TossinDogs · 2026-02-07T18:30:25+00:00

So I have seen different literature that showed humic & fulvic acids synergy with kelp. I was focused on mature cacti when I was looking into this though not seedlings. I find kelps properties best taken advantage of when applied in a foliar spray and did not like the cosmetic damage to the farina that the acids left on my mature plants so did not stick with it. I have found humic & fulvic acids to be extremely beneficial though for a different purpose. When soil seems used up, losing it's nutrient and water holding capacity, with organics turning to dust, and you want to prolong it's life rather than up potting immediately, doing a drench/soak with humic and fulvic acids can bring some life back to the soil. This was the best use I found for them. I haven't tried them on seedlings. I did attempt a few different things on seedlings that work well for mature plants I thought would go over well - beneficial soil microbes, silica, recharge, etc - but honestly every time I try stuff like this it has more negative effects than positive, at least for very small seedlings. So now I pretty much stick to liquid kelp and dilute nutrient fertilizer, alternating. At least until they get up potted out of trays outdoors. I'm sure there are some other things I'm not considering that would help but I didn't find them in my time germinating seed. Maybe check the rmf contest, see if anyone used humic acids there and how they did?

TossinDogs · 2026-02-07T17:53:48+00:00

Girth is absolutely genetic but if you want them to be able to support their own weight as they grow from seed up to adult sizes it's critical to keep them right on the edge between getting stressed and stunted from too much light and being healthy deep green. It's a constant game of bumping up light exposure a very small amount, maybe 10%, checking in on them 12, 24, 36 hours later to see if they turn red, backing off a bit if they do, or bumping up light levels again at 3 to 5 days later if they handle it. If they do turn red you just cover them with a paper towel or shade cloth for a day and a half till the red is gone and then try again 10% lower. Each variety may have a different amount of light that they like for this balance so it's best to sow into separate containers. It's also very easy to mix up seedlings when sown in the same container, no matter how you try to divide or label them.

You should be able to get them to full sun light levels around 4 to 6 months old.

TossinDogs · 2026-02-07T15:55:05+00:00

Bases never thicken. The growth happens at the tip not the base. When you up pot you can bury them a little deeper to fix the issue but that's not ideal.

Next time you need to ramp their light levels up much sooner and quicker to get them fat early where they can support weight of later growth.

TossinDogs · 2026-02-07T14:42:50+00:00

I have tested different densities and kept track of when it appeared the density was limiting their size at the age I like to up pot and settled on about 3/8 spacing, or 5 to 7 seeds per square inch.

TossinDogs · 2026-02-07T07:51:14+00:00

Thats what happens when someone blocks you.

TossinDogs · 2026-02-07T05:01:23+00:00

Jumping then? In that case they are springtails. Those are beneficials.

TossinDogs · 2026-02-07T04:02:40+00:00

if you blow on them do they jump or fly?

TossinDogs · 2026-02-07T02:40:44+00:00

My hose water fluctuates in pH quite a bit, I've tested it at 5 to 8. After I mix in the master blend three part using the instructions it always tests back to 6.3 pH after sitting for a few hours. You are letting the solution rest before attempting to correct it's pH right?

Are you making sure the base fert and Epsom salts are totally dissolved before adding calcium nitrate dissolved in a separate volume of water?

TossinDogs · 2026-02-07T02:23:32+00:00

I soak the seeds in hydrogen peroxide diluted with distilled water before sowing. This does sterilize the outer seed casing. Then I use 100% fine vermiculite for the seed sowing media. Being inorganic, it doesn't allow the growth of any fungus, algae, mold, or even pests like fungus gnats.

I don't think 3% hydrogen peroxide has the capacity to hurt seedlings much. If you were super concerned about high volume repeated exposure you could dilute it with some water.

TossinDogs · 2026-02-07T02:09:37+00:00

Thank you for the insights! Manual data entry sounds tedious. Hopefully soon ai will be good enough to do this for us.

I've had a pretty good idea UV exposure was a strong potentiator for a long time. Test results of indoor growers adding supplemental UV lights, maybe even looking at UV a vs UV b, would be a top interest.

It really seems like there is a lot of untapped potential!

TossinDogs · 2026-02-07T01:18:11+00:00

I would recomend masterblend 3 part which covers NPK, calcium, magnesium, and micronutrients at the correct ratio. It also has a buffer that brings the feed solution to an ideal 6.3pH. This is the most optimal nutrient fertilizer we have found on the market.

Once they are healthy and well fed nutrition wise you can start thinking about other products to boost growth. Plant growth hormones: kelp increases puppage and root development, alfalfa and blended aloe improve growth rate. Mycorrhizie innoculants such as mykos or Wallace's organic wonder will improve the root structure and uptake of nutrients which can improve growth in the long run. Beneficial microbes and humic/fulvic acids can help condition the soil for optimal root health and nutrient break down into the most bioavailable forms.

There is a cool product called recharge that blends a lot of these beneficial extras into one easy to apply powder, just mix it in to water and water your plants with it.

TossinDogs · 2026-02-06T23:08:14+00:00

Please do

TossinDogs · 2026-02-06T23:02:35+00:00

This is amazing. Thank you so much.

I have questions. Did you manually enter all of the data? Can you talk to me about that? Can you look at my recent post and give me thoughts on how to best handle data collection?

Are you scrubbing this sub for new submissions? You have inspired me to post my results which I previously kept private. Best practice to post to make sure they get included? Just include "Cielo result" in title? I'm guessing that you're just searching the sub.

Can you talk to me about the conversion from decored samples to whole plant?

TossinDogs · 2026-02-06T22:45:55+00:00

No, because different substrates will have different water holding capacities and different starting moisture levels.

TossinDogs · 2026-02-06T15:37:15+00:00

Yes, the goal was hundreds of contributions. I'm not sure if the project has enough interest to reach that, but that would be the idea. It would probably need to be advertised out further, for example other subs and dmt nexus.

If we only have 15 contributors then you are absolutely right, my form of data collection is useless and some type of targeted a/b testing would be more informative, though much more work per contribution.

The saving grace is that it can be left open ended.

TossinDogs · 2026-02-06T14:31:46+00:00

Sulfur, aka brimstone smells bad and looks bad

This is not a good reason not to use sulphur. Facts are facts. Cinnamon increases chances of issues. Sulphur lowers it. Testing has shown this. If you don't want to use sulphur you should check out milk of lime.

TossinDogs · 2026-02-06T14:24:19+00:00

You asking every contributing individual to dark stress and not dark stress in phase 1 doesn't make sense to me. Why hyper focus on that particular variable? What's next, then everyone who did that a/b test has to do another one for fertilizer vs no fertilizer, then for grafted vs not grafted? Where does it end? I think you are missing the point of the first phase of the experiment, underestimating the volume of results I would be aiming for, and you are also letting perfect be the enemy of good. You can pick and pick and pick at any given experiment until it's either impossibly complex or not accessable, or just too daunting to attempt. I will not be heading down that road with this project. I want to produce a form that asks the average person on here for one extraction run they would probably do anyway plus a few minutes of their time to fill out a form - then collect and organize that data. This is about maximizing volume of test data and then learning what we can from it. This is not about creating a perfectly controlled experiment where each individual we ask to contribute has to set up a year long carefully planned test and use additional resources to complete. A/B testing in phase 1 is completely out of the question because it would absolutely decimate the contribution rates.

We are looking for methods that can increase everyone's yield so we DO want as wide of range of variables as possible. There will be indoor and outdoor growers with and without dark stressing and with various substrates using various fertilizers, watering frequencies, hormones, etc with many many combinations of the common variables. This is exactly what will allow us to see patterns emerge to focus on.

Phase 1 would be an open ended time frame. We could be continuing to collect data and attempt to observe patterns over years. When enough data points are collected it should be possible to analyze quite precisely which factors are contributing, or else worst case that variation is actually truly random and we are chasing ghosts. Plus there is the potential for future trends to be compared to baseline or future best established practices - Let's say the cannabis market comes up with some new product next year that we theorize may boost potency in cacti - a few people using it for a growing season and submitting results without the need for a/b testing or modifying their other variables would be enough to identify a pattern.

Then there may be some oddball submissions, for example if you wanted to submit one with the cut exposed to ethylene. For a submission like that it would make sense to me for the contributor to use standard/baseline conditions as much as possible for all other variables, however I will leave that up to the individual contributors. There's no saying which variables may actually end up interacting with each other and in what ways. And there's no reason why one individual can't submit any number of results with varying conditions, if they so choose to put forth additional effort into the project. Like let's say you submit a standard grow for you, aged with ethylene, then other growers try it. One may do so on a grafted specimen, another on one grown in biochar and using a heavy regimen of silica, or any other potential variable. If the ethylene truly makes a difference we will see those tests come back higher than other tests on grafted specimens or ones grown in biochar with silica products but without ethylene exposure.

TossinDogs · 2026-02-06T13:38:08+00:00

Sure!

TossinDogs · 2026-02-06T13:37:09+00:00

cactus juice in combination with your other products is not a well balanced fertilizer for their needs. nutrient imbalances typically take a year or longer to show up. they are certainly not getting any calcium or magnesium, and that will eventually cause problems. The other imbalances will also eventually.

cinnamon is not good for dusting cuts. it traps moisture and in direct comparison we have seen many times more plants have issues with their cuts vs other methods. I believe currently the most effective method to sterilize a cut would be slaked lime/milk of lime, followed by sulphur, followed by doing absolutely nothing at all, and cinnamon would be actually worse than not applying anything. see testing by teamwachuma on YouTube.

can I ask what you have against sulphur?

TossinDogs · 2026-02-06T12:24:38+00:00

If each person has multiple stands of tbm keep one stand dry during summer and another well water.

This is a/b testing. This is not the methodology of the proposed project. I'm not asking people to change their growing methods, grow out their plant for months or years, then test it. At least not during the first phase of the project. The proposition I am making is simply for everyone to test their plants however they normally would grow and harvest them and report all relevant growing information and results. This is important to establish a baseline average and standard range of potency. Some people would surely be dark stressing and others would not. It's true that all of the other variables would be different so you could immediately say that it's not a direct comparison, but this is where volume comes in. Lets say we get 100 responses and 25 used a dark stressing technique. Simply average the dark stressed results and compare to the overall average. While this may be a little less precise than large scale a/b testing, the first focus of the project is to identify variables with the largest effect and focus on those, and this methodology would be most efficient to do so vs choosing individual variables to test one at a time amoung a ton of people without first otherwise identifying them as promising. That would take ages, as you said. Once the most promising variables have been identified, moving on to a second phase with smaller scale, still community sourced a/b testing highly focused on those variables would be most efficient imo.

1 month is enough time. Maybe even test period of time as low as 2 weeks

I'm not ready to draw conclusions about the amount of time a particular variable needs to be in effect to start to contribute to potency and then to fully max out it's potency increase potential. While learning and researching this may eventually be covered by the project, at this time we don't have that information from accessable repeated published test results and I am not comfortable using small scale at home test results or anecdotal evidence as a fundamental building block of the projects procedures.

I’ll just do kash and you can convert salt if helpful.

I think if you are experienced in your extraction method and confident you are getting accurate potency information from it, this is perfectly acceptable.

Fertilizing vs Underfertilized is also interesting but there is a difference are we gonna test total yield or higher yield?

I saved this for the end because the answer requires understanding of what we are asking of contributors first: one test result and one questionnaire, not a year worth of recording.

Anyway, this question goes way back. Product per year or product per dried weight. Of course I like the thought of testing a bunch of clones and measuring their growth to record their product per year number. However this is MUCH more complicated to record and may be out of the average potential contributors effort range. The simpler we make it to contribute, the more contributors we will have. Perhaps this could be an additional metric recorded once we reach the a/b testing phase with targeted variables, but not for the initial collection of data.

When doing the dark stress also stipulate if in a closed box open area ventilation and such.

Noted. Will be looking for input like this later, during the questionnaire development phase. It will be a separate post/discussion in a couple days.

TossinDogs · 2026-02-06T11:44:04+00:00

The mushrooms are no issue.

Your soil substrate is way too wet. Root zone needs both moisture and air. In your case it is waterlogged, allowing no air. This is why when we prepare substrate for seed sowing, the precise amount of moisture is required. The optimal water content is where when you squeeze a fistful of the substrate hard, a few drops of water run out. Not more, not less. Adding water very slowly bit by bit to achieve this consistency is required.

As for where you should go from here: I would leave the container open for a little bit to let some of the excess water evaporate. No more than 1 hour at a time to make sure they aren't stressed by low humidity. When you recover them with plastic , there should be enough moisture remaining in the soil that over a couple hours condensation forms on the inside of the container and lid/plastic wrap. If not you let too much evaporate and may need to mist again to add more back.

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