Re: soaking seeds

[littleminnie]

I am doing a lot more seed soaking now a days to speed germination. I have always done peas and last year tried corn and it was brilliant so I did carrots, etc and all showed a great improvement. So I soaked my seeds for starting yesterday the night before. The problems I have with soaking are: 1. if you soak it you gotta plant it- and not put it off 2. you don't want to soak too many 3. you have to remember to let them dry awhile before handling so they aren't sticky annoyances!
So guess what i did? forgot to drain them off to dry a couple hours before planting. Then what a pain! How do others do this? I know this summer I will go to plant and have forgotten to let the seeds dry first and it will be a sticky disaster. Also I bought a seeder this season (earthway seeder) and need to make sure pre-soaking will not disrupt its performance. Any advice on this stuff?
I am not talking about chitting or sprouting just a 24 hour max soaking BTW.

[spacecase0]

I see what you are saying, and it seems like a good idea,
but I want my seeds to adapt to me, not the other way around...
good to know how to get things to grow when they would not otherwise be growing.

[steev]

I tend to agree with the overnight soak, but I've only done it with legumes and beets; I'll give it a shot with corn and other seeds; it never would have occurred to me to soak carrots, but I've had such poor results it couldn't hurt to try.

[grunt]

For better luck with carrots, water lightly every day until they show up. They only have to dry out once to be toast.

[littleminnie]

I think I have gotten a little soak happy, but it seems like they all rspond well to it. I was amazed with the corn seed! Of course I am in sand and have trouble germinating certain things if there is an extra chunky, dry problem there- like where I tried tilling in manure that was dry and chunky. Also for places I water with sprinkler rather than drip, sometimes it is too windy to water every day. Someday I will put drip everywhere.

Anyway what about a seeder? It will make the seed bigger to soak, so I suppose I will have to use a different plate. I have never used one before. It is still in the box waiting for pea and carrot day!

[Joseph Lofthouse]

Mar 20, 2011 10:22:08 GMT -5 littleminnie said:

Anyway what about a seeder? It will make the seed bigger to soak, so I suppose I will have to use a different plate. I have never used one before. It is still in the box waiting for pea and carrot day!

My seeder plants way too many seeds for my liking... So I wouldn't consider it a bad thing if less seed got planted. (I usually cover up half the seed-drop holes in the seeder anyway.)