Some Photos of the Yard

The Pots located under shade cloth and plastic. The plastic is to stop the rain soaking the pots too much.

Close up of the cells with the Giants. These are about 1 month old.

Now that we have had some success with the first trials we have 'upped the anti' a bit. We have another 2,000 seeds in the germination process in Northcote and I have today ( 4Dec09 ) put 1,000 seeds in the fridge in Sydney. About 800 of these are from a Giant tree that I came across in Mt Macedon so it will be interesting to see if any of these germinate around 10th Jan 2010. I am also trying the coffee paper and plastic bag technique on the sempervirens (without the month of fridge stratification) as I found these were even more difficult that the Giants to germinate.

The Project

In Sept 2009 we started the project with a small batch of 50 seeds. The seeds were placed on unbleached coffee filters, wetted and then placed in a zip lock plastic bag.

These were placed in the fridge for 30 days.

After the 30 days they were then placed in the dinning room on top of the Booze trolley (Whisky and Port primarily). This didn't contribute at all to the germination process however we could keep an eye on both at the same time.

We started to see germinating seeds after 7 days at room temperature. These were then individually placed into seed growing cells with a seed starter mix and then a thin layer of moss sprinkled on the top.

In about 7 days the seeds would lift through the soil and be free standing, usually with the seed still grabbing the top of the leaves.

As of 4 Dec 2009 we have 28 Sequoia Sempervirens (Coastal Redwoods) in Pots, 43 Sequoia Gigantea in cells and 33 in Pots. With the heat wave experience we lost a good 100 or so of the Redwoods.

The Project...

I first encounted Sequoia trees in 2007 in a small town in Switzerland called Soglio. There were two massive trees in the back yard of an old hotel (1630) http:// www.palazzosalis.ch/ albergoi.html.

I tried unsuccessfully to germinate seeds that i collected from the pods fallen around the base. Funilly enough it took me a long time to work out which part were the seeds because the cones i collected were already empty. The green cones i collected i microwaved to try and dry them out and it was only then that i saw the flat seeds falling out. Since i microwaved them about 20 minutes its no wonder nothing germinated.

Over the following years i recognised several more in Switzerland (Baden, Lake Constance) and despite becoming more learned in the 'art' of stratification and germination, i still could not get a single seed to germinate.

I relented and took the advice of one of the many Sequoia related web sites and simply ordered some seeds from a 'reliable source' in America.

The seeds were the start of a small project i undertook with my father in his backyard in Northcote in Melbourne.