Dawn Redwood Bonsai

Unfortunately I believe that I accidentally over watered the seeds for my first attempt at growing a dawn redwood tree. However I’m not giving up hope on my first try, I’ll be keeping an eye on it and hopefully I am wrong and something will grow, in which case there will surely be plenty of more photos posted. I think that I’ve learned from my mistake and my setup is improved for this next go, I have a good feeling about this try.

The first thing I wanted to do to improve my setup is separate each seed into it’s own space, so I took a trip to Home Depot and bought a Burpee seed starting kit for just over $5. There are 36 slots, but I don’t want to rush into this in case I make another mistake. So I am starting with nine slots and three different soil setups. The seed starting kit comes with grow cubes, just add warm water and the disks expand into soil for your seeds.

Three seeds will use just these grow cubes, three will use the grow cubes with the seed starter that I originally bought for the first try to cover the seeds, and the final three will use just the seed starter. With the seed starter, to prepare it you need to mix it with water, once it has absorbed the water the excess water needs to be squeezed out so it is damp and not water logged. I took special care to make sure I did a good job with this step so that I don’t saturate my new seeds. Note: the tray shown below was rotated 180 degrees from the previous photo, so now the grow cube soil is on the right side.

With one seed per slot I covered the two columns on the left with the original seed starter, and the column on the right with soil from the grow cube. Then it was topped off with just a small amount of water to get the germination process started.

The seed starter kit came with labels, although I don’t think I’ll forget which column holds what, it is a nice touch. Finally, the kit came with a clear cover to create a small greenhouse and to keep the humidity high. Now we wait and hope for the best!