It's worth it! I did a tray from plugs this spring without knowing any of this. In retrospect, I'm amazed I didn't kill them ten times over in my heavy clay, heavy rains, dense planting... Yeah. My stems weren't the most amazing ever, but they were surprisingly very nice and I sold every single one to customers who came back still gushing over them for weeks. I'd say, give a small number a try if you have a few square feet to spare, just to see if it's really as hard as it sounds. I don't think it is!

This recommendation comes from Colorado State by Joe Hanan's group working on Carnations. Boron nutrition was first worked on in the 50's by Mastalerz who showed that boron was critical to prevent tip abortion under stress conditions - low light or high temperatures. Increasing the boron levels also improved petal color. Unfortunately, the published research on adding boron is limited or just commented on in the Colorado Greenhouse Growers Bulletin. When I was a faculty member at CSU in the early 80's Joe talked about how critical it was to boil the boron prior to adding it to the fertilizer barrel. Initially this was just done for borax but later, Joe recommended it for all forms of boron that were added. His experience was that failure to get the boron into solution prior to adding it to the concentrate barrel resulted in reduced boron in the final solution and therefore inadequate boron levels in the plants. By purposely recommending "always boil boron" the growers could 'see' that the boron was in solution prior to adding it to the concentrate tank where you couldn't see what was in the precipitate on the bottom of the barrel! The purpose of using a glass container is that it allows you to see if the boron is all in solution or if there are still solids in the bottom of the container. Usually, it only takes a couple of minutes once you are at the boiling point for the boron to be in solution. Once in solution it doesn't precipitate back out. This maybe an "old wives' tale" but it works... Remember that the final solution going out to the plants should be less than 1 ppm or boron toxicity can be an issue.