Breeding room update STS application
Today is flip day for the devil's carnival. So with that we have the first silver thiosulfate (STS) application. The recipe we used was from heirloom and it is the one he used and was very successful with. Make sure to have gloves on when handling these chemicals and we wore long sleeves. Use no metal tools either for the silver. We used plastic spoons, glass, and a piece of paper on the scale.
Here is everything you will need:
Silver nitrate
Sodium Thiosulfate pentahydrate (pentahydrate use 1.56 times more than anhydrous version)
Distilled water
First up: 1g silver nitrate put into 60mL of water. Stirring. Should dissolve in about 10 seconds.
Sodium thiosulfate pentahydrate - 6.25g into 240mL of water. This needs to be a 4:1 ratio to the 60ml silver nitrate solution.
So in total:
1g silver nitrate in 60mL of water...check
6.25g sodium thiosulfate in 240 mL water...check
So now we have our solutions. Separate they can store for years in a cool dark place (light degrades the silver). But now we want to take enough to do our sprayings. Mixed together it'll last the 2 weeks we need it to. Now we will mix it at 4:1 with the solution and then 5:1 with distilled water.
We took 10 ml of silver nitrate solution and rapidly stirred it into 40 ml of the sodium thio solution. Once that was mixed it was then stirred into distilled water at a 5:1 ratio. Since we had 50 ml solution, we mixed it into 250 ml of water. BAM! Time to spray our victim.
She has acclimated to her new home and is looking quite healthy. Starting to look more like her carnival mother everyday.
When you go to spray this solution, it is advised to put news paper down. Well we just had a large 2'x2' box that she fit into to spray.
We didn't want to her to be all pollen so we marked the branches to be sprayed and put a bag over the rest to protect them.
Sprayed like she had mites. All over. As Heirloom said, "If I had a vat of it, I would dunk the whole plant."
She will have 2 more days like this a week apart. A total of 6 applications. After the first application today, around noon, and the final one will be just after I post this. Once this is done she will be in 12/12 and in 4 weeks we should have pollen. On spray days...twice a day. No direct light. The carnival reveg that will be pollinated also will stay for another week in 18/6. So when pollen flies, it'll be prime pollination time.
I hope this helps anyone that wants to dip their toe into breeding or to just make fem seeds. If you want to go the colloidal silver route, you can and we did with success. Just wanted to try out what the pros use.
Everyone have a great night. Bud pictures in a bit. Been hitting the hookah this afternoon.
