Redwoods Struggling On

One of my hobbies for the past few years has been raising a pair of Coastal Redwood seedlings indoors, far outside their normal range and documenting the results. I have been a little lax about posting updates although its been a pretty dramatic winter.

After a lot of growth last spring and summer redwoods seemed to be doing pretty well, branching out, growing new shoots, of the two, J2 seemed to be healthier with more mid-level branches and about 20-21" in height, B2 while nearly the same overall height ( <19" ) at the top was much more spindly and only had a few offshoots. However things have been looking pretty bleak for the past several months. Here is how they are today.

J2 - fighting on

B2 - not so good

This past winter season has not been kind to my redwoods, both experienced extensive browning or "burning" of their needles and then outer branches. The causes of this are mysterious to me. (If anyone has any experience with Redwoods indoors, I'd be happy to hear any suggestions).

This seems to be related to the season, although its not totally clear. The growth was definitely slow last winter, and I recall some browning of B2 especially. The pattern was much worse this year. I had a few guesses, maybe not enough water or moisture in general, although I do feel that we were pretty consistent all year long and the few times I tried adding a lot more water it didn't seem to have much effect.

We also have moved as you might see from the latest pictures. I thought that it might be level the sunlight that was part of the problem. That is my best guess right now, as since it's been warm enough to put them in the 3 season sun room (pictured), they've started a few shoots of regrowth. Earlier in the winter there was an accident that knocked J2 and cracked it's original pot. We re-potted into a new 8" diameter pot, that is fairly deep. Initially J2 did pretty well in the new pot at the new house. At the same time B2 started getting worse and more dry and brown, so since all other things were apparently the same we thought of re-potting B2 as well. So a few weeks later we also took B2 out of its original pot into the new 9" shown above. It was interesting and I should have photographed it, B2's root ball had one long root wrapped all the way around the base of the root ball, I wouldn't say it was root bound, but I can't say if that was a problem.

Initially there were some new shoots from B2 after the re-potting, but sadly the new shoots and needles withered and eventually died.

So somewhat ruling out the pot size for now, the temperature and weather didn't really seem to be a factor. We had a really mild winter this year, almost no snow, and not too cold. Again both redwoods have been indoors, and sitting by some windows, so they probably never get much colder than around 60 degrees or so. The only other thing I haven't really checked, is the pH level of the soil, I read somewhere that they need a slightly acidic soil (pH 5.5 - 6.0).

That comes back to the sun, it seems they are doing better with more direct sunlight, so we'll give that a try to see if they can recover.

Some final pics:

J2

B2 top