Sprouting Wheat

[jthornton]

This is the first one I put in the proof box and it's so much bigger that the older ones it's really amazing to me. They are in order from right to left bottom to top.



JT

 

[jthornton]

I was doing great all winter but come summer I keep getting a weird mold on the seeds. The mold is bluish with a skinny stalk and a round head as viewed under the microscope. Not all trays all the time have mold so I'm suspecting that I need to sterilize all the trays. I tried cutting back the volume of seeds so they could dry better but that's not working. I tried adding bleach to the soak water but that did nothing.

I'm all ears...

JT

 

[Sally PB]

 

[gtaus]

I was doing great all winter but come summer I keep getting a weird mold on the seeds. The mold is bluish with a skinny stalk and a round head as viewed under the microscope. Not all trays all the time have mold so I'm suspecting that I need to sterilize all the trays. I tried cutting back the volume of seeds so they could dry better but that's not working. I tried adding bleach to the soak water but that did nothing.

I'm all ears...

JT

Hey JT, I only grow fodder in our winter months. Last year I got a bag full of barley that was terrible for fodder. No matter what, I ended up getting poor germination and mold. My fodder growing methods had not changed, only the seed was from a different batch.

Long story short, I bought a new bag of barley from a different source and got much better germination and hardly any mold. What I learned is that the quality of the seed is a big factor in how well the seeds will germinate and grow mold free.

I think the "bad" bag of barley I got was maybe older stock and already was full of mold type spores that came to life when I started watering those seeds. It was nothing I did and nothing I could do to make it better. In my case, I stopped using that "bad" bag of barley for fodder and kept it to mix up chicken scratch for the summer months. It was plenty good for dry chicken scratch and so nothing was wasted.

It sounds like you have tried everything I can think of to improve the mold situation, so maybe, like me, you just need to get a different bag of seeds from a different source. In my case, I talked to the supplier, told them my moldy fodder issue with the last bag of barley I bought from them, and asked when they were going to get a new batch of barley seed from a different source. The new bag from a different source made a world of difference for me.

 

[jthornton]

think the "bad" bag of barley I got was maybe older stock and already was full of mold type spores that came to life when I started watering those seeds.

I never thought about the mold being on the seeds from the get go. Some research shows a lot of universities use a 30 minute soak in 5% Sodium Hypochlorite followed by several rinses in sterile water.

I found this interesting reply, especially #1 about varying the ratio to soak time.

Randall P Niedz
United States Department of Agriculture
A couple of things come to mind -

1) Vary bleach concentration and time and see if that helps - this captures the inverse relationship between bleach concentration and time (i.e., high concentration/shorter time vs low concentration/longer time). I have found this strategy useful when the tissue is damaged by the bleach concentration.

2) Related to #1 is to use acidified bleach (essentially dropping the pH using an acid). Acidified bleach is extremely potent. For example, I add 10 mls bleach (5.25% sodium hypochlorite) + 10 mls vinegar (5% acetic acid) to 19 liters of water to sterilize bottles for home brewed beer - I soak them for 15 mins. This is only 0.007 M chlorine. In the lab I will start with 10% bleach and neutralize with an NaOH solution, then vary the incubation time as described in #1.

3) A short acid treatment (e.g., 1N HCl or H2SO4) followed by a dip in a dilute base (e.g., 0.1N NaOH) to neutralize the acid. I generally use this preceding a bleach treatment.

4) Heat treatment. Seeds are soaked for 4-24 hours, then placed into sterile cloth bags, and the bags immersed into hot water (45-60C) for 5-10 mins. Because pecans are large, longer immersion may be necessary. I haven't tried this but found it interesting - Watts, J. E.; De Villiers, O. T.; Watts, L., 1993: Sterilization of wheat seeds for tissue culture purposes. South African Journal Of Botany. 59(6): 641-642.

Cite

JT

 

[jthornton]

Interesting observation the Sodium Hypochlorite modified the surface tension of the water and when the seeds are dropped in the go straight to the bottom as opposed to straight H2O where a percentage always float.

JT

 

[gtaus]

I never thought about the mold being on the seeds from the get go. Some research shows a lot of universities use a 30 minute soak in 5% Sodium Hypochlorite followed by several rinses in sterile water.

As much as I like feeding fodder to my chickens in the winter, I don't think I want to spend a lot of time trying to figure out why some seeds grow more moldy than others and trying to find the perfect solution for soaking the seeds.

My fodder tower system was designed for minimum time input to get maximum fodder output. With good seed to start with, I spend maybe a maximum of 5 minutes per day watering and harvesting my fodder bins. When I had poor seeds to begin with, I had terrible germination and out of control mold issues. Even if I would have soaked the seeds in bleach or some other solution, and then rinsed several times with sterile water, I might be able to kill mold growth but the germination rate will still be unacceptably low.

For me, I discovered I was better off using the "bad" seed in a chicken scratch mix, and then buying a new, different bag of seed from a different source and checking out that batch for germination and mold. The first year I attempted to grow barley fodder I got lucky and got a bag of barley that had over 95% germination rate and no mold in the growth. I thought growing fodder was the easiest thing anyone could do. Last year, however, I got bad seed that had germination about 15% and was full of mold. Nothing in my fodder system had changed except the quality of the seed. If that bad seed was my first exposure to growing fodder, I would have quit.

At this point, the only thing I believe that would improve my fodder tower system is to learn what seed is good and what seed is bad. Maybe I'll have to do a small test batch of each new bag before I fill up the tower with bad, moldy, low germination seeds. The feed store does not appear to be very helpful in the quality/condition of their seed and are more interested in just selling whatever seed they are bagging up. I imagine if they can get a lower price on some older seed from a farmer, they just pocket the profit selling it as the same price as fresh seed.

 

[jthornton]

For me the only way my CQ's get greens is sprouts so it's worth the effort to grow.

I'd like to see your system.

JT

 

[wyoDreamer]

There should be a date on the bag of seed - showing when it was packaged. Maybe start taking a sniff when you open a bag and see if you can detect an off or odd odor?

I have my chicken feed in a plastic container with a gasket seal on it. I can tell when it is starting to get older - usually when I am at the bottom of the bin thank goodness. But I had bought some when it was on sale once and didn't check the tag like I usually do. When I opened the bag I knew it was older by the smell of it. I have some cracked corn scratch that is in an old fridge for storage - it has been in there for 4 months I can tell when I open the door that it is starting to get old and not as fresh as it was when I picked it up from the feed mill.

 

[gtaus]

For me the only way my CQ's get greens is sprouts so it's worth the effort to grow.

I'd like to see your system.

JT

Here is a link to the article I posted, lots of pictures.... My $10 Inexpensive DIY Fodder Tower with Dollar Tree Dish Bins

I live in northern Minnesota, so the only greens my chickens get in the 6 months of winter is growing fodder inside my house.