Ficus trunk fusion

It's time to try some trunk fusion on my Ficus Religiosa seedlings. Currently I have 7 larger 4-month old plants I grew from seeds since last November, and they're looking ready for some training. The tallest plant in 20cm from ground to top leaf node and the thickest trunk is 9mm at just above ground level.

I choose 3 largest ones to work with this time:

First, I mixed some soil. It's my first time soil mixing, so I can't certify it's the best proportions, but I took 45% akadama, 25% pumice, 25% compost mix (it's actually kind of premixed soil, but I believe it contains mostly compost) and 5% sphagnum (because why not, a have a bag of it and some people say it's arguably the best organic soil).

I sieved and washed akadama, it had a lot of fine particles and dust because it's pretty fragile and breaks apart from slightest impact, and surely during transportation.

I din't sieve pumice because it looks much stronger. I washed it though, and there were a lot of dust.

I din't wash compost, because fine particles are basically half of it anyway. That's how the final mix looked like:

Now back to seedlings. They looked somewhat pot bound and deserved repotting anyway. I was not going to root prune them this time, but I had to remove soil out of roots, so some finer roots were lost during this operation.

Combed

After washing

I kept roots in water while working with other plants to make sure they don't dry out:

After stripping roots and removing some bottom leaves, I found optimal way to connect 3 plants and cut all leaves that were looking inside. Then I used 0.5mm steel paper-covered wire to connect first two trunks:

And then added third one. I used pliers for twisting to make sure trunks are connected tight enough.

Then I connected them higher

And higher. At the top I didn't twist too much because trunks were gentle up there.

After binding, I planted the result in a larger pot an cut some of top leaves making sure I don't discriminate any one of plants:

Four days later, a few leaves died out, but the rest look good and new leaves are growing on top, red in color by some reason:

 The color may be due to lack of nutrients, or just a normal thing under plenty of light (last few days were very sunny). Wired connections also look fine:

Next update

Eucalyptus propagation

11 days ago I soaked eucalyptus seeds before sowing them. 3 days later they looked like this, resembling black tea:

I put them on rockwool plugs because from my ficus propagation experience, they proved to be the most performant. At the same time it became apparent that not all particles in the seed bag were actually seeds:

Just couple days later many seeds started to germinate! It's fun to see how they immediately start to suck water from plug, looking like small alien leeches:

Next morning, cotyledons appeared:

I decided this is time to move them to soil, so that night I took freshly arrived akadama soil (I hope there's no insults written in Japanese):

And filled bottom halves of nursery cells with it. I believe at this stage akadama may be too coarse for these little seedlings, so I'm using it for its drainage and to raise soil level.

Akadama makes pleasant hiss and changes color when it adsorbs water

I put premixed compost/pumice/maybe-lava as top layer to make sure it doesn't dry accidentally and is fine enough for little roots to dig in.

By that time, some seedlings were already few millimeters tall and were holding to plugs very tightly. I actually severed some of them white I tried to pull them out. Probably, I should've either acted faster when roots are not rooted too deep or later, when stems are less fragile and more convenient to grab.

Approximately 80 seeds have germinated, so I used 2 nurseries and put 3-4 seedlings to each cell. Next day, almost all of them looked well and even very small ones were growing up.

Then, couple days later, almost all seedlings in one nursery, the smaller ones, suddenly died. The reason was definitely not drying nor freezing. I suspect they might have been exposed to too much heat during partially sunny day, but I'm not really sure. Other version is that they didn't receive enough sun, because I kept them in shady shelve of my greenhouse. Also, in this nursery I initially put the smallest seedlings, so they may have been genetically inferior. Either way, only one of this group have survived.

At the same time, in second nursery, which I kept on top shelve of greenhouse and there the largest seedlings grew,  almost everybody survived and are growing, making total over 30 plants so far:

So 9 days after sowing and 6 days after transplantation, some plants are starting to develop second pairs of leaves:

Baobab and eucalyptus

I'm starting two new projects today.

First is Adansonia perrieri - a rare species of baobab. I've got 3 seeds, pretty large ones.

After a night soaking in warm water I'm sowing them. One seed didn't sink, so I expect propagation rate to be not more than 2/3, but that's OK.

The premixed soil I got recently disappointed me a little - it doesn't hold moisture well enough - water just pour down the bottom of the pot and in a day soil is dry even though air is at almost 100% humidity. To circumvent it, I put a layer of sphagnum moss in the middle. Hopefully this organic addition will improve soil properties. I'll mix my own soil next time.

Another project is eucalyptus. I got a small bag of seeds which themselves are really tiny, even smaller then ones of ficus. Advert said "75 seeds of Eucalyptus deglupta, Rainbow-Tree, Rainbow-Gum, Rare viable seeds". It's more likely there's well over 100 of them actually. I'll try to propagate them all and then have fun doing trunk fusion. I'm soaking these seeds for 3 days.

Pruning follow up

Plants I've root pruned and trimmed 3 weeks ago not jus survived but grew several new branches and a lot of leaves. I consider experiment successful and other plants should be also ready for some training.

Speaking of other plants, they are growing unrestricted and look enjoying new space. The largest ficus is 18cm tall and at least 7mm thick near ground.

Smaller siblings in their new home also grew much faster than they did before, this is their progress for last two and half weeks:

This is the overall greenhouse view:

Summer is coming and on clear days temperature inside greenhouse can reach 50°C, so I've purchased a timer socked and set a schedule to turn off heating during sunny hours.