A video introduction of the problem:
I have a handful of almond seedlings that came from seeds from the almond tree on my old property. A few of them are showing signs of severe zinc deficiency. Note that this same result can be from a severe sulfur toxicity, but adding zinc to the soil started to fix the problem.
The question is, should I try to recover this seedling, or assume it’s generational and eliminate it? It’s not responding to the first zinc treatment.
Being in the same pot, and the others being healthy, I would assume it is just those seedlings and the genetics they inherited.
I would pull them and be glad you didn’t waste more resources on them by finding out later.
Might be also that the seed itself had (non-genetic) faults that caused the taproot to be faulty. Even so, it doesn’t seem like it’s worth saving. Better select of something and that’s quite an obvious candinate. That seems like quite an extreme trait to be genetic, but I have also seen tomato varieties that have similar traits so it might be that it never grows out of it.
Adding amendments to the soil is the kind of thing that sounds brilliant at first, then you try doing it for awhile and you realize how much effort and sometimes expense it is. And then rather suddenly I stopped being very interested in amending my soil except for those occasional opportunities to score free mulch.
Agreed. I normally don’t add anything, but in this case I needed to verify which kind of deficiency it was. If it’s a problem with my soil, I dump on bunches of seeds and keep those that survive the best. If they’re not taking up a nutrient because it’s cold or the PH is too high/low those things are handled other ways.
Now that I know it’s a zinc deficiency (it could have been sulfur toxicity, which can’t really be resolved in this situation) and likely based in the seeds rather than the soil, I can move ahead and simply cull the worst.