If you’ve ever tried to start plants and flowers for your garden from seed, you may have found it’s not always successful. Or maybe you’ve come across terms you don’t quite understand, so we’ll address some of the most common seed planting needs in this article.

Some plants and flowers crop up from seeds without any effort. In fact, the ones we seem to desire least in our gardens tend to be the ones that are constantly cropping up.

Other seeds however, never seem to "work", no matter what we might try. And those are the ones we’ll discuss today.

Some seeds - and they can be for flowers, general plants or bushes - need a bit of time and the right conditions before they’ll sprout. Here are the most common procedures needed:

1. Soaking - Many seeds simply need to soak for awhile before they can be planted. In some cases you simply need to soak the seeds for a few hours, but some seeds will need to soak 12 hours or more before they’re ready to be planted.

Often you can tell when a soaked seed is ready, because it expands in size or it breaks open a bit.

Soaking a seed is easy. Just put some water in a glass or mug, then drop the seeds into the water and leave them sit for the required amount of time.

2. Scarify - This is the one that seems to confuse people the most. Scarifying a seed is needed when the seed has a very hard shell around it. All you have to do is nick the shell somehow… you can scratch it up with a knife, or try and actually nick a piece off, or put a good dent in it. Once you’ve damaged the shell somehow, then you need to soak the seed.

Damaging it first is important, because that’s how the water is allowed into the shell. If you don’t scarify the shell, the water will not be able to penetrate and thus the seed will not be able to grow.

3. Germinating - This term will vary from one type of seed to another. In some cases you may need to put the seeds into the fridge or freezer for several weeks or months. In other cases you can simply put the seeds into moist towels for several days or weeks.

In reality, all you’re doing is trying to mimic what happens naturally outdoors. When seeds fall to the ground it’s usually at the end of a season. Those seeds are then covered and get cold for months because the ground freezes. There also tends to be a lot of moisture due to snow and rain. All of these natural weather conditions work to scratch up and wet the seeds. So once the weather turns warm again, they’re naturally ready to start sprouting.

Posted on March 31st, 2008 by admin
Filed under: Gardening, Articles