If looking at the seed packets I bought, germination times are usually 1-3 weeks. The first ones are often a bit faster. Now I found seeds that are the opposite. From the marigold (calendula officinalia) seeds I put out end of april one (!) was germinating one week ago. It was a huge bunch of seeds, when I put all my leftovers in the soil. Obviously not much living there and even the only one who survived took quite a while to come out. I didn’t expect that it’s possible to germinate so slow. Maybe there’s a state between alive and dead for seeds also – not only for Schrödinger’s cat.
Schlagwort-Archiv: germination
old seeds versus new ones
Nothing much happening here. So I had to look again at the small plants I already presented here. So from the germination contest the fresh seeds (1st and 3rd) are doing very well. Despite the age also the tagetes is quite good (2nd and 4th). The self collected seeds are struggeling a bit, but we have the same also with some bought seeds. What I’m convinced now is that the age of the seeds is really the problem. And looking at my tagetes shows it: I planted more of the fresh seeds than the old ones. Maybe twice as many. But I now have roughly between 70 and 90 plants. The old, collected seeds started with 4! OK, now every day one more germinated, so we are looking at 6 now. Again, only half the amount of seeds and also germination start was 3 days later, but still it’s a factor of 10! So going from 4 year old seeds to 10 year old in this case killed 80% of the seeds.
Now I got a bit bored of watching my seeds not grow. So I took some of the seeds, which didn’t germinate so far and are very old: Calendula (yesterday) and Cosmea (today) and added a lot of those seeds to the pot. Let’s hope that something will grow in the end.