I have reached the point where I have enough lingonberry cell mass to try rooting a few of them. This is done on different media, and since I want to have these develop into plants with leaves and roots, I can’t do it in a petri dish!

Instead of using a purpose-made plant growing container, or even a polypropylene takeout container, I am using some condiment containers I have left over from the original cell culture experiments I did a few years ago. These are half polypropylene, which is autoclavable, and half polystyrene, which is not. To use these, I autoclave the bottom half and soak the other half in bleach while the autoclave is running- when the parts come out, I pour media and fish a lid out of the bleach. it seems to work well enough against contamination.

The media is woody plant media with MS vitamins and zeatin, per the recipe in Plants from Test Tubes. I poured a few CM into each cup (these are large condiment cups, not the tiny ones).

During rooting, it seems important to have a source of light so that the plants can start making their own sugars. These are growing in a basement, which is roughly “room temperature”, but there is not much light down there. I built a rooting tray with overhead lighting for the plants. It is mostly built off of the hardware for the “SunDown” lamp that I built. The hardware is a little overkill, but modular enough to be recycled into future lighting projects.