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​How to Speed Up Seed Germination During Winter and Spring

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If you live in a colder part of the nation and are an avid gardener, you’re probably champing at the bit to get some seeds in the ground. If you have a greenhouse, that might only be a few months away. If you’re a gardener in a colder state like Colorado, you’re going to have longer to wait. And no matter how long your growing season is, you’re likely to want to get to harvest faster once you plant your seeds. Which leads to a topic that often comes up here at our nursery supply company: how to speed up seed germination.

It’s a question that home gardeners and nursery suppliers have been asking for a very long time. While genetic engineering can help a plant grow faster, there are some aspects of speeding up seed germination that you can control. Let’s take a look at ways that you can get those seed popping faster.

Soak Them In Water

There’s not much easier advice than this! All you have to do is pre-soak the seeds in hot tap water for 24 hours. The water penetrates the seed coat and allows the insides of the plant to break from the seed more easily. Usually this occurs naturally in the soil, but it can take a much longer time.

The only thing you have to be careful of is letting the seeds soak for too long. Any longer than 24 hours and they could start to rot even after you put them in soil.

Scarification

Scarification is another physical means of speeding up seed germination. The purpose of a seed is to protect what’s inside and then provide initial nutrition to the plant. Because of this, the seed coat is quite hard and fairly good at protecting its interior. Scarring the seeds will remove a bit of this seed coat in order to let water in, which starts the germination process.

There are a couple of ways that you can scar a seed before putting in a ground. If you only have a few that you’re planting, you can take a knife and knick each seed, or scrape each with a bit of sandpaper. But that can get quite tedious if you’re planting hundreds of seeds, so you can speed up the process by shaking them in a jar with a piece of sandpaper.

Seed Stratification

Seed stratification is the process of tricking a seed into germination earlier than it would when it’s out in the wild. Stratification is often used for wildflowers that have a very hard outer coat on their seeds. This coat prevents the seeds from opening too early in the wild if there’s a particularly warm February day.

Seed stratification is necessary for plants that are expecting to overwinter in the ground. But if you get your seeds in the mail in March, you don’t want to have to wait another entire year before you can enjoy them. Seed stratification involves putting seeds in a moist, soil-filled bag for a time, usually 10 days to three months. This “tells” the seeds that they are cold, and that they can go ahead and wake up and start germinating. This process is especially good for our nursery customers who need full plants to sell to customers by April.

If you get your seeds in the fall and can actually make use of the natural cold outside, you can overwinter them in your garden. The problem with this is recovering the seeds later, because locating them can be difficult. The best way to find this is the put them in pots and bury the pots themselves, then dig them up and transfer to them wherever you want them when they start to sprout.

Keep Them Warm

No matter the kind of plants you are using, there’s one thing that most of just love: warmth. Keeping seeds warm tells them that the summer has arrived. Of course, that’s the purpose of most greenhouses. If you don’t have a greenhouse, keep the seeds in a south-facing window. You can even use something like a seedling heating mat that warms the seeds in their pots.

Don’t Forget to Harden Them Off

Plants that are started indoor have it pretty easy. After all, you soaked the seeds and scarred them so that the plant itself could emerge. Then you told them that winter was over and warmed them up considerably!

Since they didn’t have to work hard in order to get out of the seeds, seedlings haven’t been hardened by the world yet. They aren’t used to being cold or being whipped around by the wind, so seedlings that have been raised indoors are more likely to die than those that have been grown directly in the garden, even if they look identical.

Hardening plants is easy. Just take them outside in Spring for a couple of hours each day, then a bit longer each day after that. Eventually the wind will “harden” them to the wind and cold, at which point you’ll be able to plant them in the ground. Just don’t forget about them and leave them out overnight during their first day, or all of the work you did up above will be for nothing!

Then Come Back For Your Gardening Tool!

Of course, seed germination is on the first step to a healthy plant. Once your plants are growing in the garden, you’ll need to take care of them with the best garden hand tool around. Find them right here, and happy planting!


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