Unflasking the Seedlings

The flasks arrived in the mail this morning. Here's a picture of the box they came in and the two flasks--which are actually spaghetti sauce jars with a small hole in their lids, stuffed with cotton. The seedlings are in a dark grey sort of lumpy media, which is why the flasks look sort of dark.





I removed the lids from the flasks, filled them with lukewarm water and poured the water out a couple times to remove most of the grey media. Then I dumped them in a small plate and rinsed them there a little more. Now they look like this.


Then I separated them out and sorted them roughly by size. Here some are on a newspaper to give a better idea of their size.

I filled a mixing bowl with sphagnum moss, wet it thoroughly, put a layer of it in the bottom of each tray and then one by one wrapped each seedling in a bit of sphagnum and put them in one of the trays. There were about 40 seedlings per flask, some of them very very tiny. When I was done, the trays looked like this and I put them under some fluorescent lights, partially covered with a piece of saran wrap.


I'll keep them moist but not wet. I'm a bit concerned about having them all in the same large tray in case of a fungal infection and may get another tray and move half to a different location just in case. I did use brand new trays and a new bag of sphagnum.