Rockwool - Over germination (Too many seeds) [HELP]

[MatthewRorke]

Hello,

I am an outdoor grower and I love to grow everything. I was bitten by the bug of gardening about two months ago and have been learning how to grow since then. I spent a month trying to build my own grow tent to which I managed to get right, however, I went to a really nice hydroponic shop in my area to source a decent grow light and, in doing so, I fell for the sales pitch and left the store with a grow tent, grow lights and about 50 rockwool.

I am in the Southern Hemisphere and thought I would begin with perfecting the germination process in rockwool.

Rockwool is so easy and having an out-door growing background I sewed multiple seeds into my rockwool. It seems that almost every seed has germinated in the 6 rockwool that I sewed seeds in. The problem with this is that I sewed multiple seeds in to each rockwool. 3 rockwool has sprouted about 4-5 spinach stalks each and the other 3 rockwool has sprouted 4-5 onion stalks each. They look extremely uncomfortable and the onion stalks seem to be bending and twisting around each other. My thoughts are that either I should open the rockwool and attempt to move each plant in to it's own soil where it has a nice chance to grow before they start taking on the fibre of the rockwool, or to simply snip the weakest stalks until I have one stalk left and leave that to dominate.

Unfortunately my below-amateur knowledge of hydroponics (and possibly growing altogether) has put me in a position where I am not 100% certain as to what solution would be the best going forward, how do you think I can save these guys? Also, can you maybe assist me in explaining how many seeds I should be sewing per rock wool?

Unfortunately the average Joe that makes a Youtube tutorial doesn't present fact, but rather a methodology which can't be applied to other growing situations.

Thanks for assisting me and please feel free to correct any terminology that I misused and to give any advice, I would appreciate the hell out of it!

Kind Regards

Matthew

 

[Beverly]

I would love to help you Matthew, but i have no experience using rockwool. I also searched prior forum threads and posts for "rockwool" and nothing came up. Perhaps you are here to teach us something? Perhaps you will be the rockwool expert. Hopefully someone will pop in the thread who has experience that can be shared with you. There are some expert gardeners here (i am not one of them) so let's wait a bit and sees who shows up.

 

[MatthewRorke]

I would love to help you Matthew, but i have no experience using rockwool. I also searched prior forum threads and posts for "rockwool" and nothing came up. Perhaps you are here to teach us something? Perhaps you will be the rockwool expert. Hopefully someone will pop in the thread who has experience that can be shared with you. There are some expert gardeners here (i am not one of them) so let's wait a bit and sees who shows up.

So I am trying two things, my spinach had far less sprouts in the rockwool than the onions did, so I took my clippers and clipped the weakest sprouts, I've placed the one remaining spinach per rockwool and placed it back in my humidity dome. For my onion I opened the rockwool and removed as many onion sprouts as I could (without touching the root so not to contaminate it). I then placed those in soil. I htried to make the soil space larger than the rockwool and left a good amount of airspace between my soil and my seed to ensure there is (hopefully) not too much shock/stress.
I've placed them in the grow room and their scheduled "sun rise" was 30 minutes away (I decided to run the day cycles over night in our winter & autumns). I'll see how they're doing tomorrow and maybe give an update on the progress within two or so days. I'll include pics from now.

 

[MatthewRorke]

Just an update, the spinach (which I clipped all but one) is doing very well and is continuing to sprout. The onion is not faring as well. I introduced a new dome environment to it in order to increase the humidity (I just cut the top off a cocacola bottle and made a ventilation hole above for warm air to escape) and I'll let you know the result in the next update, but I have a bad feeling about the onions.