They're all dead.

There's nothing more to be said, really... a couple of months ago, the leaves all turned orange and they shriveled up. Both the control and the acid. No idea why, the conditions were perfect. Experiment over.

Passable setup.

The only thing I could think of to use as a setup for the seedlings was some kind of aquarium, though unfortunately mine had a wire screen covering. I taped sheets of plastic (loosely, for some airflow) to the top, placed the seedlings in and BAM! you have a terrarium. It was a little more difficult than that, but I'll spare you the details.

As for the seedlings itself two or three on both sides, control and acid have had browning of the leaves, but there have been no new problems since they were put in the terrarium, which is working really well. Sprayed the seedlings yesterday, noticed the gibb acid had a slightish yellow tint but don't know what that means.

Comment, please!

Sprayed seedlings yesterday.

Just another update; sprayed the seedlings and saw a little more drying of some leaves but nothing drastically different than two weeks ago.

Sprayed seedlings again

Decided to spray the seedlings every two weeks instead. A few are showing browning which I guess is from low humidity, I'm misting the seedlings several times a day until I can get a setup.

Sprayed the seedlings, not too much growth, both the control and gibberellic seedlings have either showed little growth or the leaves have browned (the structure of the leaf is still there, there's just discoloration.)

Any ideas for a windowsill setup that can enclose a dozen or so seedlings and up humidity?

Update

The last control seed germinated, but that with the other recent one to germinate don't have any leaves. One of the control plants has lost a leaf and the other one is shriveling up. Most of the other seedlings with leaves already have grown a third one, and the ones with no leaves have stayed that way. Interestingly, one of the giberellic acid seedlings with the shriveled leaves has created two more leaves, both with the same distinct shriveled fashion.

Good:

Bad:

I've just started spraying the marked seedlings, Tuesday October 27th, so I'll try to do it every Tuesday, with a 1000 ppm concentration of giberellic acid. I'm worried that the giberellic acid might have lost its potency in some way, because I think it's protein based. I've been keeping it in the refrigerator and was told by the seller (Unitednuclear.com) that it should keep for about a year.

I sprayed each seedling from the top down 1-2 times, making sure that the whole of the plant had a few droplets, and that no acid mixed with the other plants.

Questions and comments are appreciated. (Any ideas on how I could test if the acid is still potent?)

Five more seeds germinated.

This experiment, though very small scale, is showing results completely against what I thought. Since my last post, five more seeds have germinated, three being gibberellic and two being control. They are exactly even. I have no idea what to say about that.

I also went around and noted the different foliage amounts for overall growth, and I was even more surprised. For gibberellic acid seeds, over the seven I noticed:
Medium growth
high growth
low growth
tiny twig
excellent growth
Frail growth
good growth

Below is what I consider frail



Below is what I consider good



I consider excellent to be three leaves at this stage.

The gibberellic acid seedling that is considered excellent is also the first to germinate.

The eight control seeds are as follows:
Not germinated
Just germinated, no growth
good growth
good growth
good growth
medium growth
excellent growth (three full leaves)
good growth.


Do you see why I'm confused? So far it seems like soaking seeds in gibberellic acid has no effect on germination rate and is actually worse for the growth!

The experiment by no means is done. I'll spray the gibberellic acid seeds in a week from now and set them on a bi-weekly spraying schedule. I also removed the plastic from all of the seeds because of mold forming. I scraped off the mold and will just water them more often.

Questions and comments are appreciated.

More germination... Flawed experiment?

On Friday Aug 28th two more of the seeds germinated. Both of them were control seeds. Since then, six more have germinated, half of them control and half gibberellic acid. All of the seeds were clumped together in germination time regardless of whether they were treated in gibberellic acid. Six more have yet to germinate, but I'm questioning my methods.. there are so many sources of error.

This makes four gibberellic seeds and five control seeds. So far more non soaked seeds have germinated, rather than the commonly understood 25% untreated 99% treated. There's still much more to the experiment, but I'm starting to think that someone such as me who is in an unsuitable geographic location and can't work with a large amount of seeds is unfit to collect any kind of data. There are too many variables just with seed quality alone to test much without 100+ seeds, but I'll keep posting in case there are any obvious differences.

I put all of the cups on the windowsill with a hole through the plastic for each seedling. The first to germinate is starting to open up two leaves... I think. The first set of seeds I had never did that and instead remained green stumps for a month.

I'll upload pictures tomorrow. Comments and questions are appreciated.