Garden Centre

Monday, December 15, 2008

Growing your own plants - stratification

One of the great mysterious processes of seed germination is stratification. Basically, all this means is that where perennial plants are from temperate climates, their seeds will probably need a period of both soaking and chilling before they will germinate. This is because the natural conditions in which they would germinate are that they would spend a winter on cold, often wet, ground. So that’s the process you need to recreate in home conditions to get your seeds to understand that its time to grow. Without the stratification process, they don’t get the message and remain dormant.

For plants from the Australias, stratification often involves heating, to mimic the forest fires that allowed seeds to grow where mature plants had been destroyed.

So to work out how a seed may need to be stratified, consider where it comes from.

This week I’m stratifying Alpine strawberries. They grow in extremely cold areas, so I’m going to give them at least a month of cold – normally this would be in the fridge, but as the Alps are under snow cover for much of the winter, I’m putting my seeds in the freezer! And although the process is usually both moist and cold, because of the extreme cold of the Alps, I’m giving them a month of dry cold (frozen in a plastic bag) and then two weeks of moist cold (in the fridge on some damp paper – that should give the impression of the ‘spring melt’ that they need to get their seed cases cracking and the embryos inside growing.

It feels very good to be starting to grow something in December, even if the growing process does begin with a period of chilling.

Frozen fruit courtesy of mindluge

Labels: alpine strawberries, growing plants from seed, stratification

The All Seasons Gardener at 4:13 AM

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