Viable Seed?

[Starlight]

Originally Posted by carolyn137

For several decades I've been doing annual seed offers and at first all the varieties I offered were from my own saved seeds which I knew were viable, not b'c I could ever test for viability for all of them, but b'c at the time I was listing several hundreds of varieties in The SSE Yearbooks and would get feedback if something was not right. But also at that time most of the SSE members were very savvy about germinaing seeds.

That all changed when I severed all 4 quads in my right leg in Dec of 2004 and from then on I vowed to get seeds for varieties that would be new to all or most.

But at message sites as these there are lots of folks who are new to processing seeds, etc., and that's when I started seeing problems happening, and that b'c I was now here at Tville and I offered seeds that I had gotten from many sources and also put up a germination thread since I didn't want to continue offering varieties where there were problems, as reported back for single varieties, by many.

Take variety A, one person would get 100% germination while another might get 0 germination. I kept track of all those results.

The persons with the lowest germinations were those who used wet filter papers in a baggie and ended up with lovely mold growth. DE wasn't that much better, then those who used those kits with domes and cooked the seeds.

Summary?

A person can check germination of seeds and they may be just fine but that doesn't always translate to what others might get depending on how experienced they are with seeds, what methods they used, etc.

If you go back and look at some of those past germination threads you'll see the frustration on the part of those who were having problems and you'll see that I then asked them how they were germinating seeds and tried my best to help them understand what might have gone wrong.

Carolyn

You are so right Carolyn. It is amazing sometimes the different methods folks will try. I had some seeds from 2006 that came from Sandhill and they were going to toss them because they tried to germinate only 3 seeds and had no luck. I said I'll take them. Sandhill is an excellent company and never had a problem germinating even older seed from them. I knew it had to be on the growers end and not Sandhill cuz I had no problem at all.

I use one of two methods. Hydrogen peroxide, although when trying to germinate seed that is 6 years or older, I have started using your MG method. I have actually found it to work better on really older seed that the hydrogen peroxide.

I did learn the hard way the first time I tried the MG method. Use just a teeny tiny pinch. My first time trying I had to strong a mixture and fried them seeds. Hated to lose the seed, but I learned.