// Twitter Cards // Prexisting Head The Biologist Is In: Some Seeds for 2016

Tuesday, April 5, 2016

Some Seeds for 2016

I wrote this earlier in the season, but it is only appearing now because I had several other posts already in the queue ahead of it. This happens from time to time when my writing gets ahead of the calendar, but usually my postings don't refer to a specific time frame and so nobody notices.


One can garden all year-round if they live in the warmer parts of the world. I'm stuck in the depths of a (really mild) Minnesota winter, but I don't have a greenhouse. I can still do some very limited gardening.

I just (17Feb2016) planted a whole mess of seeds into containers that are going to go outside and stay outside tomorrow. Tomorrow is expected to reach some 40F (and then 50F the day after), but we'll probably have some well below freezing in what is left of our winter. So... what am I thinking?

Lots of seeds spend winter outside. Many even require a lengthly cold and wet (from being under snow) winter experience to reliably germinate on schedule in spring. This requirement can be provided at any time of the year using a fridge (called cold stratification), but the winter here provides an easier way to do it...

So, I planted:
All in all, I planted some 600 seeds. I suspect most are viable and will start growing when the weather warms up. Some of them are a bit more uncertain. The Tulipa seeds were probably stored for far longer than they like. Rubus seeds are sometiems described as hard to grow (requiring acid treatment to improve germination). The Arisaema triphyllum seeds are very old, but previous testing had shown them to have very good germination.

The seeds represent various different goals and projects. I'm not going to go into detail about them, however, until I have living plants to help illustrate my ideas. In general, I'm hoping the plants will be interesting.


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