purchased these seeds back in November 17 from myseeds.com. I purchased "regular" and "mikawa" to see if there was an actual difference other than the price.
I forgot to update that I planted those out a couple weeks later. Most of the seedlings were showing their first set of leaves so I decided to do cuttings on 25 or so of the strongest ones. Plenty more were ready but I only had that many small nursery pots on hand. For the soil I used cactus mix (e b stone I think), pumice and large perlite. For the mix where the cuttings go I mixed peat, perlite and a bit of vermiculite. This was my first time with seedling cuttings so it felt a little strange cutting the roots off a seedling, but I have seen others results so I hope they live!
The first and second pics of the seedlings are regular black pine and "mikawa " respectively. Nothing very scientific but about the same floater vs sinker ratio and viability of the seeds. Maybe just in the favor of the regular batch.
These are the "mikawa" seeds, the cuttings have actually grown taller than the ones i just tranfered to larger containers. 4 of the 12 didn't make it through.
These are the regular seeds, about the same growth on the cuttings as the other, but the untouched seeds have definitely grown the best. Lost maybe 3 of these in the cutting process.
A update on these black pine I planted last year. I did not afford the time to repot any of the black pines this spring to get the roots sorted out. So I hope they're not too much of a mess next year.
First pictures are the cuttings the "mikawa" in the black pots. All the others in the larger pots were not cuttings.