Fridge Stratification // Starting Native Seeds in Late Winter
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 5 ก.ย. 2024
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NOTE: These were put in the fridge on January 31st. Some videos are prerecorded. Go by your seed packet or use several sources online to find the stratification days you need for your specific species.
In this one, I'm putting some seeds in the fridge for cold moist stratification, in case my winter sowing fails. I have several previous videos on winter sowing I made this winter, and I recommend you watch all of them for full context. I'm also doing a few select seeds indoors under grow lights, again as an insurance policy. I enjoy growing indoors and haven't done it in a quite a while. It's also easier for me to watch over them. Let me know how many methods you employ for starting your seeds in the comments. :)
Thanks for watching!
I appreciate your channel focusing on native plants. I have been gardening for 3 years, only 2 seasons with native plant growing. Native plants are another level entirely compared to your typical easy annuals such as zinnias or a marigold when it comes to seed germination😦 Prairie Moon Nursery advises to use coffee filters or sand, which yes work but you have to be diligent to prevent mold. I prefer vermiculite or coffee filters with weekly changes. I just order some 90+ day seeds, not sure how that will go😅 My experience of easy grasses no stratification: little blue stem, june grass, pink muhly, purple love grass, side oats grama, blue grama, and switch grass, all grasses sown outside in individual pots blasting full sun. Most difficult low germination grass is prairie dropseed. Wish winter sowing method worked for me, south Texas has crazy temperature swings in the winter, the water jugs proved to be a sauna killing the seedlings. 60 plus day plants with high germination rates using 30 day stratification: Most silphium -Compass plant, cup plant, prairie dock, rattlesnake master, blue mist flower, native petunia, golden rods, rudbeckia fulgida, most liatris, verbesina, and most asclepias. I had high germination with native strawberry seeds when putting its original seed pack in the freezer for 3-4 weeks. Most difficult plant to successfully keep alive thus far is lead plant, lots of germination but lost around 50 seedlings that had 4 pair+ of leaves, however I ordered inoculum which hopefully will lead to success -most legumes need this including baptisia. Echinacea, chocolate flowers, all rudbeckia varites, hyssop, monarda, and salvias have a higher germination rate when stratified. There's many more, sorry for the long comment 🤣
Very valuable info in that comment!! Thank you so much for sharing that with us. I was just looking through my older seedling photos from previous years, so this was great timing. I'm having great luck with grasses and some flowers, too, with indoor grow lights and no stratification. But it's certain species, and I'll have an update on them soon!
Last year I watched a video from the channel Soil and Margaritas, she experimented with putting the seeds in the freezer for 24 hours. She had success, so I tried the same method and I had success too. I started echinacea, bells of ireland, rudbeckia I even did coleus which does not need cold stratification, I had about a 85% success rate of germination. I cut up coffee filters, put the seeds on it, sprayed with water (generously), put into ziplock baggy, sealed the bag, then into freezer for 24 hours. Took them out and let them defrost for a little and stuck them into my little cell trays. I recommend adding this method to your experiments. Lol This maybe the only method you need from now on.
If that works for me, I’d be very excited!!! Thank you so much for the suggestion!😮
Some of those “A” germination codes require cool soil, some warm. Especially the grasses.
The good news is that even though the Canada wildrye says it’s a cool season grass and switchgrass is a warm season grass, I have them both growing indoors just fine under a grow light, no cold stratification, and both are doing well. So well that I need to probably pot them up…oops!
But keep in mind that Roundstone stores their seeds in a cool environment (I forget exactly, maybe 50 degrees?). So even though I didn’t cold stratify my indoor seedlings, it still worked!! I’ll have an indoor seedling update soon.
It's so confusing, I was looking in the Native Plant Propagation Protocol database at this one grass and it actually said that whether or not the seeds had dormancy depended on what region in the US they were from 🤷... My region wasn't supposed to need stratification and luckily that ended up being accurate. I need a fridge just for seeds! Some people have a beer fridge, I guess I need a seed fridge.
I used to have a mini fridge I used for seeds. Unfortunately it died on me. So now I take up a full drawer in my normal fridge. LOL ! As for the stratification stuff, it really can get confusing. I hope it gets easier to find accurate info.