Well, I'm halfway through the 2 month cycle to produce viable trees and let's just say it's been a fantastic learning experience. About 2 weeks ago we had an afternoon power outage on a 110 degree day - that's about 43.3C for those of you stuck with a less precise temperature scale - that wreaked havoc on the perimeter plantings. I'd estimate over half the cuttings were lost.
Other than the loss of mist for an afternoon there were several other negative factors that played in, operator error as they say in the military. First, the bed is not in a greenhouse and only protected by shade cloth. This exposes the cuttings to the drying effects of the wind. Second, I did not initially compensate the misting schedule to account for the open air bed. Misting times have been increased slightly and the pause between misting is now halved to around 7 minutes. Thirdly, the cuttings were coming from water and nutrition stressed trees. It's very sad to look at the now decimated bed.
The good news is all the above problems are being addressed so that the next round of cuttings late August will hopefully fare better. Also after pulling several cuttings from the center of the bed, roots are forming! There is hope yet.
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