We are just a couple of weeks into the life of our new batch of seeds and things have already begun to take off! After planting the seeds, we closely monitored the results and within 7 days of our first sprouts we contacted Phylos Bioscience to test the sex of the plants.

Phylos uses a unique process that involves collecting the cotyledon from our seedlings and pressing out the plants DNA onto special testing cards. The cotyledons are the smaller, smooth-edged leaves that appear first when the plant begins to sprout.

These testing cards are then reviewed at the Phylos labs where they determine the actual sex of the plant. This is a huge advancement as it takes all of the guesswork and waiting out of the initial grow process, limiting potentially costly mistakes that can come from misidentifying plants or waiting too long to pull males from the garden.

After 48 hours, we received our results from Phylos (see below)! 3-of-5 24k Gold seedlings came back female along with two of the Clementine seedlings. Unfortunately, all of the Citrus Sap and GobbilyGoo all came back male, so we decided to replant another round of Citrus Sap seeds (8 in total) to see if we can get a female with this new batch. Stay tuned for our updates next week to see how our new females are doing along with our next batch of seeds!