hi all, i have my seeds in baggies with damp paper towels( wrapped in towel). as usual , but they get nasty the first 2 months i started with peroxide and water when i remove the
seeds from hip but months later they look nasty some times with mold. now to clean them again i have used peroxide say 2 or 3 more times but i think it hurts germination process.
whats a good way to reclean mys seeds?. thanks pat.
Some molds seem to be associated with seed death, (though I’m not convinced that at least some of these molds are opportunistic in that they multiply on already dead seeds), others seem to help the seeds germinate by breaking down the seams. In any case, if you don’t have a lot, you can just rub them around in a strainer once a week under running water. I have used oxyclean (15 min soak, 1/4 teaspoon to an ounce of water) which does a great job killing most of the molds and I have gotten germination from the seeds after that.
I have also switched to using mostly petri dishes with seed starting soil, though I still do also still use paper towels sometimes in the petri dishes instead of the soil. Either way works but you will get far fewer problems with molds that way. One nice thing about the soil method is if you miss the germination for a few days, there’s no problem having to extract the little seedling root from the paper towel. You can get plastic petri dishes very inexpensively on-line and they are re-useable.
I will have to try this method with petri dishes and the method of just seeds by themselves with no paper towels. When I heard of the latter my seeds were already taken care of for the year. But I am getting sick of the nasty paper towels. Ideally I want to build a unheated greenhouse one of these years so I can just plant them out in flats and say to hell with storing in the fridge. Back to the subject any ways. I noticed most molds don’t seem to hurt the seeds and there is always mold on all the batches, but when I get molds that totally coat the seed and the paper towels and is coal black the germination rate for those batches are almost zero. And I found cleaning up these batches not helpful. I wonder sometimes if those seeds are less mature than others. Usually I have some batches that are less mature due to early winter weather and dam squirrels force me to take earlier sometimes than I want. I also wonder if these batches started out too wet. Personally I prefer the first reason so I can blame the squirrels and not myself. Knowing Kim already got germination I did check the fridge the other night all my batches except one Hot Tamale x (Rise N Shine x L83) were sound asleep. But on this one I had 9 seeds already sprouting. Its weird how some batches seem to germinate so much earlier than others even when they have the same parents as other batches. I sometimes wonder if germinating seeds next to other seeds release chemical signals to the other seeds to start germinating also. I know from daylilies overall germination percent is better when you plant in a flat than when you plant individually.
The baggies with Calcium Nitrate have never generated mold, but the seeds where somewhat dried.
Neil
Hi Pat: A cheap sub. for petri-dish is those tiny flat-container with lids that Kentucky Fried Chicken put their coleslaw and mashed potato in. I have hard water, alkaline with calcium hydroxide or lime in the water … no fungi can grow.
I notice that stuff in tight plastic bags have no air to breath, and gets stinky fast. I moistened paper towel with half hydrogen perioxide, wrap the seeds loosely, and place in Kentucky-Fried containers. A month later, I pick out the fat seeds, and throw away the old paper with crumblings & loser seeds … and wrap the fat seeds in new moist paper towel. The key is loosely wrap the seeds in a container …with some air, they won’t get moldy.
I would say that air is like water. Seeds needs both but if there’s too much of one of them they could also die from it. I also use moist paper towels in a closed plastic container and keep the seeds in it without too much air. The hermetic box is kept in the fridge. Every week I open the box and see how it looks. When the paper towel looks a little bit brown I change it and sometimes I re-clean the seeds under water before drying it back and reput everything in the fridge.
Somewhere here Jim Sproul describes how he chills his seeds after soaking without using paper towels or anything else.
I found this link where Jim uses paper towels : Paper towel vs. planting media - which do you use and why? - Page 1 - Rose Hybridizers Association Forum and also this one : How long in cooler - Rose Hybridizers Association Forum