Will Your Saved Garden Seeds Grow?

learn How to Test your seeds for germination

I’ll be honest, I still haven’t quite let go my disappointment over last year’s sad Strawflower seed germination. After years of growing them from seed with no problems, I boldly declared this past spring that last year would be my “Summer of Strawflowers” (uttered with eyes sparkling full of stars envisioning armfuls of delightful everlastings).

It turned out to be anything but and all because of really bad germination. I had a one year old packet of seeds and sowed my first tray of them, but to no avail. Nothing germinated. Not one seed. Chalked that failure up to what could have been a myriad of reasons.

Us Northern gardeners have a rather tight window of opportunity to start flowers from seed and have them bloom before frost. I had a tiny window of time, so I sowed another tray using up the rest of the seed packet. Out of 50 seeds sown, four germinated. I was crushed.

In desperation, and with no time left to really try much more, I even tried plucking seeds from some of my rafter of botanicals, but these flowers weren’t harvested at the proper time for the seeds to have fully ripened, so all attempts at sowing those were in vain. This whole thing dragged out over six weeks and wasted not only soil, electricity, and time, but also dampened my garden spirit a bit. Though, I do have to say, those four Strawflower seedlings that did sprout grew to be prolific, gorgeous plants that provided me, albeit not armfuls, but a good few handfuls of harvests.

know before you sow and do a germination test to check your seed’s viability.

It’s super easy to do, and if you have kiddos around, it’s a great activity to get their help with in both sowing and monitoring.

1. Fold a dampened paper towel in half. 

2. Take a few seeds & place on the damp towel. 

3. Fold the towel over the seeds & place in a ziplock bag.

4. Seal the bag and place in a warm location (like on top of your refrigerator). 

5. Check your seed packet for your variety’s specific germination range, but usually in one week you can open the bag and take a peek to see what’s germinated, that’ll give you a good gage of how your seeds are doing. 

If not too much has germinated after a week, give them a little more time in the paper towel and monitor every few days for signs of sprouting.

If the germination rate is down, but there is still viability, simply sow those seeds out in the garden at a heavier rate, knowing that not all may germinate.