How cool is this! Who wants to play mad scientist?

I've used this on Marigold seeds and I had unusual and vigorous plants.

https://unitednuclear.com/inde...

That does look like it'd be fun to experiment with it. It's good to see you back, Keith. How are you doing?

plantmanager said:That does look like it'd be fun to experiment with it. It's good to see you back, Keith. How are you doing?

Hey, thanks for the welcome back!
The past few months I have not been doing much as far as growing anything, and with Covid at a high the end of last year I did not grow as much variety of plants so thus had not had much to share. But, I'm hoping from all my experiments last year I will have some surprises to share here 😊

Okay! We'll look forward to seeing your surprises, Keith.

If this can help you, gibelleric acid (GA3) is very much used in the flower trade to obtain early-blooming flowers when even traditional greenhouse forcing methods aren't enough. Commercial growers in India and Israel pioneered drenching barely emerging peonies with GA3 as opposed to spraying already emerged plants and were able to reduce to harvest times by a massive four weeks.

It's rumored a Chinese breeder was able to get a small number of F1 Itoh seeds to sprout and to even obtain an F2 hybrid using GA3 but all attempts to replicate his work outside of China have failed. While it would be easy to simply call this a scam and move on, Chinese breeders have long been known to flat out lie about their methodologies to protect their trade secrets, especially from domestic competitors: for example Poon's Nursery in Zhejiang obtained two splendid sports of Nuccio's Bella Rossa, a solid red and a variegated one. The latter is widely suspected to have been obtained through some exotic hybridization technique (somatic hybridization?), possibly with backing from a State-owned agri research institute, but the breeder maintain it was a "fortunate accident" while propagating "traditionally obtained hybrids". Right.

ElPolloDiablo said:If this can help you, gibelleric acid (GA3) is very much used in the flower trade to obtain early-blooming flowers when even traditional greenhouse forcing methods aren't enough. Commercial growers in India and Israel pioneered drenching barely emerging peonies with GA3 as opposed to spraying already emerged plants and were able to reduce to harvest times by a massive four weeks.

It's rumored a Chinese breeder was able to get a small number of F1 Itoh seeds to sprout and to even obtain an F2 hybrid using GA3 but all attempts to replicate his work outside of China have failed. While it would be easy to simply call this a scam and move on, Chinese breeders have long been known to flat out lie about their methodologies to protect their trade secrets, especially from domestic competitors: for example Poon's Nursery in Zhejiang obtained two splendid sports of Nuccio's Bella Rossa, a solid red and a variegated one. The latter is widely suspected to have been obtained through some exotic hybridization technique (somatic hybridization?), possibly with backing from a State-owned agri research institute, but the breeder maintain it was a "fortunate accident" while propagating "traditionally obtained hybrids". Right.

I can honestly say this does help speed up blooming and create new varieties of flowers.
I used it on African marigolds, some of my plants reached 6 feet tall at the end of the growing season and bloomed within a month of planting seeds! I also got massive and weird blooms, and some leaves were bluish color!

I'm very much into cacti growing and we all know how long they take to grow from seed, I wonder if this could accelerate their growth but not too much they get too thin and break?

keithp2012 said:

I can honestly say this does help speed up blooming and create new varieties of flowers.
I used it on African marigolds, some of my plants reached 6 feet tall at the end of the growing season and bloomed within a month of planting seeds! I also got massive and weird blooms, and some leaves were bluish color!

I'm very much into cacti growing and we all know how long they take to grow from seed, I wonder if this could accelerate their growth but not too much they get too thin and break?

The industry has looked a lot into accelerating succulent growth, especially now that they are so popular and considering the crazy prices large specimens can fetch. I mean... I recently bought a small Agave 'Royal Spine' and it was quite the drain on my finances.

Anyway right now work on succulent propagations and growth is chiefly in three areas: temperature, moisture and especially lighting.
Generally speaking young cactii will grow faster at moderate temperatures and, this was a bit of a shock for me, high levels of moisture. Light however seem to have the best effects and is the area which holds more promise.
Light levels need to be varied during growh, starting from about 50W/m² and slowly increasing to four times as much. Tailored light spectrum composition is an area where a lot of effort is going right now, but besides telling me that mountain Opuntia species need "unusually high" UV levels to grow and bloom, lips are sealed on the matter.