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Raiders of the tiny seedlings

polymerous
10 years ago

The past couple of weeks I've been starting daylily seeds in 32 or 38 cell flats (each cell about 3" deep). As the flats got planted, they were moved outdoors, as I really have little room to grow seedlings inside. (Such room as I have is right now occupied by baby pepper, basil, and lettuce seedlings - of types that are difficult to find at the nursery hereabouts.)

Today, I discovered (to my horror) that the tiny seedlings in 3 of the 11 (thus far) flats were uprooted and thrown around. Some of the seedlings look to have been destroyed (no roots left), others are survivable (roots and tiny leaves still attached to each other) but the trays are such a mess that there is no surety now as to what the parentage is! (I've been planting seeds as they pre-sprouted, so I could have up to 7-8 crosses in one tray, all meticulously labeled.)

Arrrrrrrgh. So much for my labeling, and efforts to know what the seedlings are!

Tomorrow I'm going to have to try to do something about this. I suspect that the culprits are birds (if they go after emerging bean seeds, I guess it's not so unlikely that they'd go after baby daylily seedlings), so I will try to put some netting or wire caging or something over the flats.

I am not too happy.....

Has anyone else had this experience? I know that some of you direct seed outdoors, so you've got tiny babies exposed to all the perils of the natural world. How do you cope?

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