Well, it’s stormy weather today, so what better time to sit at the kitchen table and do an elementary school science project. I sorted through my shoebox of old seeds and decided that it would be easier to do some simple seed viability testing before planting a bunch of old seeds. The oldest pack I’m testing is a 1996 unopened pack of onion seeds.
There are a lot of unopened flower seed packs. I googled to refresh my memory on seed viability testing, because it’s been many years since I did this. It’s basically the old ziploc bag method with a dampened paper towel inside. I watched a video by Gardener Scott, whose YT channel I enjoy, and he had some useful tips. He recommended that instead of wrapping the seeds inside a damp paper towel and sticking it in the bag (how I used to do it), he suggested placing the paper towel inside the bag, then misting the paper towel inside the bag, and finally put the seeds on one side of the paper towel. That way you can see if the seeds germinated without opening the bag and fiddling with unwrapping the paper towel to find the seeds.
A lot of gardeners keep a garden journal, but I’m not organized enough to stick with jotting down notes regularly and keeping track of data. And the thing about any journal or recordkeeping is it’s only useful if you analyze the notes and data, to gain some information and insights. Know thyself is always a good bit of data to seriously analyze before starting projects. I know I won’t keep up with jotting down notes in a journal, then reading them later, plus I’m likely to misplace the journal (like I did with this shoebox of old seeds). Since it’s winter time, I figure I can easily keep track of some baggies with seeds in them for a few weeks and check if any germinate. Using that information will make it easier to decide which of these old seeds to plant.
I have a few packs of cactus and succulent seeds, like these 2010 Park Seed succulents and I remember those were not cheap. I’m not doing seed viability testing for those, because there aren’t many seeds in these packs. I’ll just plant them and hope for the best.
Apologies for the terrible photography. I am really awful at taking pictures. Now, it’s back to laundry for me.
Note: Yeah, yeah I looked at the succulent seed packs again and noticed there are 300 seeds with that sempervivum pack, but the other packs of cactus and succulent seed packs don’t have many seeds in them.
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