Week 2 - Planting the seeds

Yes, I was supposed to plant the seeds last Tuesday, but it was in the middle of my exam week, so I let the seeds cold stratify for an extra week. I think that ought to be okay. Today I finally took them out of the fridge and decided it was time to plant them. The planting process is pretty awesome - the bonsai kit comes with this small disc of dehydrated peat soil, wrapped in a plastic mesh. You have to rehydrate the soil disc first, before planting the seeds in it. If you've ever watched one of those little dehydrated sponge toys grow in water over time, it's pretty much like that, only way faster. The disc expanded about 4x in size, in the time span of probably 7 minutes or so, from a little less than 1cm to 4cm! Here's the dry disc before hydrating:

The directions said to pour 1000ml (32oz) of warm water slowly over the soil disc in a large bowl, and then to let it sit until it has expanded to about 4-5cm tall. I realized quickly that 32 oz is actually 4 cups of water, so I decided to do this in a large mixing bowl. Ready? Here goes!

How cool is that? :) I measured it to be about 4.5cm at the end. The mesh kept it from expanding in width, so it still fit perfectly inside the clay pot from the bonsai kit, with some room to spare. I was surprised that the soil would be taller than the pot by a lot, because it looks kind of funny in my opinion, but I guess that's how they want you to do it. I put the soil into the bonsai pot and placed a collecting dish underneath it, as the directions tell you to keep the pot in 1/4 inch of water. Then it was time to plant the 2 seeds I had been cold stratifying all this time.

There is conveniently a hole at the top of the mesh that encloses the soil, so all I had to do was gently push the seeds into the top of the soil and make sure they were lightly covered. Here's what the soil looks like inside the mesh - this photo was an exercise in learning to use the manual focus function of my Canon A720 (one of the reasons I bought it!)

And that's it! The next part is to place the pot in a north or west-facing window (mine faces north) and wait patiently until the seeds sprout. The directions don't give any guideline as to how long it should take the seeds to sprout, but I'm thinking if I don't see anything within a couple of weeks then I will probably start germinating some of the other seeds that came with the kit. I'll keep you updated!