Beautiful jagasian! Congratulations and thank you for your well organized list of techniques and observations....plus the reminder to change my reservoir water. I've been doing aeroponic cloning of conifers on and off for a few years now with mixed results. My sprayers are on a timer which has them come on for only a few seconds at 30 minute intervals (which is hard on the pumps). I really like the idea of a fogger and wonder if you would please post a photo of how it is positioned in the cloner? I've always waited until the cuttings were well rooted before transferring them out of the cloner, to the point of sometimes even having to trim roots. Mine are potted into the smallest container the roots will fit into (usually a 3 inch pot) using my propagation mix of 3 parts coarse perlite and 1 part fine coir. The roots are fragile and may clump together so I gently spread the roots apart inside their empty pot, then carefully add media around the roots. If your potting mix is dry it will flow nicely around the roots, then water immediately. Since cloners are usually indoors, along the shock of being transferred, the newly potting cuttings should be babied for a while with humidity and shade. Ken's suggestion of continuing your experimentation by potting up cuttings at different stages of root growth is definitely worth doing to find what works best for you. Please post updates as things progress! Barbara

The tree is small, at under 1 foot fall and 1 foot wide. Up until a month ago, I had it in a half gallon container and under 16 hours per day of artificial light. I transfered it into a 5 gallon pot and under sunlight after I noticed the symptoms described in my original post. When I transplanted, the roots looked OK. The leafs in the picture grew 12 months ago. All leafs on the plant are like this. I see dormant stem buds, but no above soil growth. There may be root growth under the soil. When watering, the topsoil eroded a bit and I noticed a few new, thin and white surface level roots. Should I wait for growth in the spring to see if new growth is infected, before spraying with a fungicide?

hey very interesting link ... but what i dont get.. is if you will be around.. in a couple hundred years .. to view the bark of a mature tree of this kind ... small conifers.. can take years.. if not decades to even start producing a mature bark ... and it would not be until then.. that you would find out.. if you got what you really wanted ... not to mention the couple hundred acres you would need to grow a bunch of these giants.. one might suggest they are not really backyard trees .. especially when you consider the size they will need to be.. before they start on the mature bark thing ... i think this is the kind of thing you plan a vacation around.. not something you can actually do yourself ... but if its your dream.. GO FOR IT ... ken

Tom Tasselmyer (such a Baltimorean name) is reporting that January was the 8th coldest January in Baltimore history. The official records for Baltimore go back to 1871 though the records prior to 1893 are not catalogued at SERCC. The average IIRC was 27F. Coldest ever was 1977 at 22F. The Barnes Foundation Sequoia was planted in 1971 so it would have survived that. None of mine have 'tons of dieback' so far. I'd say it varies from minimal dieback on the largest one, which is about 7' - mostly snow burn near the snow line - to 30% needle damage on my smallest plant. 'Atlanta' might be a hair tougher than 'Chapel Hill'/'Swarthmore'. 'Soquel' has the least damage but it is the big one. Lows were 3F, several times during the month, and a couple 48 h+ stretches that stayed below about 15F. FWIW Pseudotsuga sinensis has similar burning just above the snow line. We had the longest stretch of powdery snow "lying on ground" as the Brits say, that I can remember. 95% of the time here, powdery snow will be mush within 3 days. It stayed cold for so long that a lot of things show a ring of damage where light was reflected by the snow. Even something as hardy as Cryptomeria has completely dead branchlets in that zone. I think I might have posted earlier that I was surprised by how little damage there was in the first freeze. Sadly, the 2nd and 3rd were just too much for various plants. Particularly the 2nd round of snow, which was accompanied by even stronger winds than the first. Maybe they were more brittle because of the earlier freeze, but all of my arborescent Ericas (hey, they kinda look like conifers) were totally destroyed, stems split clear to the ground. I've never seen that in almost 20 years of growing Erica arborea alpina, for example. Not 'alpine' enough, apparently. The foliage was fine though. It's sad to see the green foliage attached to broken stems and dying from the point of the break upward. Camellias are ok so far, including 'Aida' which is the hardiest C. X williamsii, I was lucky I didn't go below 0F as most points about 15 miles north of me in York and Lancaster Cos. did.