Posted by Tom Broome on 7/30/2008, 10:42 pm, in reply to "Hildebrantii"
205.188.117.67
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: I am trying to germinate some
: hildebrantii seeds. Been in baggies
: for about a month, and nothing was
: happening. I decided to cut open a
: couple to see what's happening, and
: it looks like the radicles are
: emerging, or starting to emerge, but
: they seem to be having trouble
: breaking through the little 'hatch'
: on the sclerotesta. Would you
: recommend I sand the seeds 'hatches'
: a little bit with sandpaper to
: weaken them?, Or am I just needing
: to be a little more patient?
:
You probably need to be a bit more patient, but after saying that, how many seeds do you have and do you want to experiment? If so, you are on the right track with the sandpaper, but I go one step farther.
I am doing this right now with a batch of whitelockiis with good results, and many times, this species will have a lower germination because of the hatch problem. This comes from Greg Holzman and if you are a member of TCS, he wrote an article on this in the last December issue. What I am doing though, is taking my pocket knife and cutting just around the top and not down into the seed until the hatch breaks away in small pieces, so the entire top is gone. Now, fungus can get in that hole, but I am putting the seeds with the butt end down into a 4 inch pot filled with moist sphagnum moss. (the light stuff they use for hanging baskets and I use it for bare root shipping of cycads) I put the pot in a big plastic bag and wait. The holes never touch the moss so no water gets into the holes, but the best part about this is that if the seed is ready to sprout, it will do so within 3 days. As an example, I capped 16 whitelockii seeds and put them in the pot and in 3 days, 10 out of 16 germinated and have big sprouts coming out. The others might sprout but they aren't as mature. When you cut the tops off, you can see that the ones that aren't ready don't have a sprout at the tip where the ones that are ready have the sprout right below the surface. I have been doing this for 3 years now, and when I first started experimenting with this, I took some old encephalartos seeds that had been sitting in the trays for over a year, and capped them and 90% of them germinated in 2 days. The others were dead and wouldn't sprout anyway. Anyway, if the seeds were cheap enough to play with half of them, try this. If the seeds are truly ready, they will come out fast and you may find yourself doing it to the other half. There is no better way to get fast, uniform germination.
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