For data geeks - link to my 2011 Germination data

[nctomatoman]

http://nctomatoman.weebly.com/2011-g...formation.html

This is a work in progress - now complete for lettuce, greens, beets and eggplant.

Coming soon (the more data to enter, the more it makes my head hurt!) - tomatillos, then herbs and flowers, then sweet peppers, then hot peppers...and finally, tomatoes. THAT is going to be quite a project - but it is nice to have all the info in one place.

You will find variety, vial number (of interest mainly to me of course), days to germination, seeds planted, final number of plants, germination percent, and age of seed.

It may end up answering some questions you may have as to how long it takes this or that to germinate, relation to seed age, etc.

for ALL of these I used my dense planting technique.

Enjoy!

[jgaleota]

Nice. Good to see how long eggplant seeds take to germinate. Mine are not up yet and I was starting to worry!

[nctomatoman]

Worked quite a bit on this today....big task remaining is the tomato data (a few lesser categories also pending are my various experimental grow outs).

But....hot and sweet peppers, eggplant, flowers, herbs, lettuce, greens all in good shape.

[nctomatoman]

This is now nearing completion.....all that remains (all, what a laugh) is to details the germination info for the various Dwarfs for my project work, as well as a whole slew of varieties I am growing out for Carolyn in order to send her seedlings.

But there is now ALOT of info at the link!

[platys]

Out of curiosity, do you happen to have your previous years germination data? I'm a huge data/stats geek, and I suddenly have an urge to try and create stats models. More data is always better.

[carolyn137]

Originally Posted by platys

Out of curiosity, do you happen to have your previous years germination data? I'm a huge data/stats geek, and I suddenly have an urge to try and create stats models. More data is always better.

I can't speak for Craig, but I know that I don't try to see what the germination rate is with older seeds unless I need to resurrect at variety. But I've been distributing seed for some older varieteis in my free seed offers here and each year I ask for a feedback thread on how the germination went. And the Feedback thread for the 2011 is in the General Discussion Foum right now.

Just a point I'd like to make and that's that one can't assume that the viability of ALL saved seed from OP's is the same. Many of us, for instance, have found that seed from heart shaped varieties loses viability faster than do other varieties. And the other species ones such as the currants often last longer as do the cerasiforme types such as Matt's Wild.

My best wake up was seeds from September Dawn that were 22 yo old but the documanted record is waking up 50 yo seeds that were stored in a file cabinet at the Cheyenne Station, a precursor to the USDA stations and when the germplasm from Cheyenne was sent to Ames, IA where the new USDA station was germination tests were done.

If you want to visit me I've got seeds stored in vials that go back to about 1989 and you can fool around with trying to wake them up and see what the germination rates are. I recently sent seeds to a hybridizer of a rare variety, seeds from 1993, and he has some up and I'm delighted.

But I get the impression that you like to work more with numbers than fooling around with actually doing germination tests.

Amd I right?

[platys]

Exactly right. What would be really nifty is to get enough data that I could break the analysis out by shape and color, for example.

What's appealing about Craig's list is that he uses one particular method of germination, and knows what he is doing. That helps control for the variable of someone, say me, planting their seeds way too deep.

Edited to add:

However, with enough data, differences in how people germinate, problems with shipping and experience levels should even out - but I'm not sure just how much data that requires. The more granular you want to be (for example, looking at a particular variety), the more data you need.