Planting Sprouted Tree Seeds and Mystery Fungus Update

A couple weeks ago, I wrote about discovering some of the tree seeds that I have been storing in the refrigerator were covered in a fungus. At the time, I wasn't sure if my seeds were ruined or if the fungus would actually be beneficial. I also found several sprouted buckeye seeds and was wondering what I should do with them, since spring won't be arriving for a while this far north.

@schoonercreek suggested that I pot up the sprouts and keep them cool until spring, or at least until they leafed out. I thought that this sounded like a good idea, better than anything I could think of and made a mental note to take action sooner rather than later.

Truthfully, I sort of forgot about them in the midst of our busy lives. When I finally remembered, I felt a sense of urgency about addressing the sprouting seeds before they got too far along. I also didn't know how many more would sprout in the meantime and I didn't want to loose any due to neglect.

This was the only buckeye that sprouted from the fungus group.

The first thing I needed to do was come up with some containers. @schoonercreek had recommended some gallon pots, but I wasn't going to have room to store many of that size. I figured something small but fairly tall would have to do until I could set them outside, at which point I will probably need to re-pot.

I asked Aimee if she had any ideas about pots and she suggested using paper coffee cups. This was a great idea except I hadn't been saving any. With my coffee addiction saving a bunch of cups would have been easy. Doh! There is a reason she is the brains of the operation...

I know a few other ways of getting free pots. Sometimes, greenhouses give used pots away or I could raid the cities recycling centers for tall yogurt containers or something similar. Both of these routes would take time and forethought and I had run out of both.

I decided to use red solo cups instead. They are inexpensive and I will probably get more than one use out of them.

I drilled drainage holes in the bottom of the cups. I was able to do about 5 stacked cups at a time.

Now that I had my pot situation sorted it was time to see what was going on with the seeds. I had kept the uncontaminated seeds separate from the ones that appeared fine but I was still worried about cross contamination. Luckily, the originally unaffected seeds still seemed to be free from fungus. I carefully removed the dirt to find 11 sprouted buckeyes now!

Sprouted buckeyes!

I also checked the acorns for signs of sprouting. So far the acorns appear unchanged which is a good thing because I don't want to have to deal with anymore sprouted seeds than I have to until spring. I was secretly hoping for at least one or two just so I could see what they looked like.

So far the acorns appear unchanged.

The last tub I checked was the fungus contaminated one. I had no idea what to expect. I could see a bit of mold or something at the surface. Once I dug deeper many of the buckeyes had a thick, unidentified coating around them. Some of them seemed fuzzy and others had more of a thin, slimy, light brown coating.

Fungus infected buckeyes. Under the coating of fungus the seeds do not appear to be rotten yet.

This is probably the best representation of what the fungus is like. Does anyone have any ideas what this could be?

I did end up finding one more sprouted buckeye in the contaminated group. It didn't seem to be affected so I now had twelve sprouted buckeyes to plant.

I filled each solo cup a touch over half way with potting mix and moistened them with rainwater we had collected in the fall. Then, one buckeye went in each cup and I topped them off with more soil and water.

Not sure how we still had a jug of rainwater this far into winter but we did!

I put the whole tray of sprouted buckeyes back in the fridge with the other seeds. I will probably check on them every few weeks to see if there are any more sprouts I need to attend to and I will pot them up as necessary. I'm even going to save my coffee cups this time!

After a job well done it was time to kick back with a drink. The red solo cups were already out and it was Friday night after all!

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