Improving Seed Germination

Planting seeds is becoming more and more popular, there are several ways to go about this and there are things you can do that will speed up as well as improve the germination rate, peeling the  husk is one of them.  How often do you plant seeds only to have them swell up and pop when squeezed due to rot/water trapped inside the membrane or have them unable to break out of the husk/membrane covering and die, removing a some of the husk can avoid these things and increase the survival rate. I found this out quite by accident many years ago when I purchased some seeds from a top US grower, when I received them one variety of seeds had exposed pieces of the cotyledon showing through small cracks and no wings.  At first I almost threw them away but decided to plant them anyway and I am glad I did, the ones with the exposed sections germinated inside 3 days, several days ahead of all the other seeds. These seeds also shed their husks and clear membranes a lot easier than the normal seeds do so I decided to replicate this in my future seeds plantings to see if it would repeat itself and it did, I now do it to all the seeds I plant and have a regular 100% germination rate.

Hold the seed firmly between your fingers with the wing up   then grip the right side of the wing and gently and pull it downwards trying to remove the side of the husk all the way to the tip then repeat this with the other side of the wing then remove any loose pieces of husk as well, it does not matter if you can see small areas of the cotyledon.

Once you have peeled them you can either do the paper towel method or  lay them flat in mix  but you can also use all the other methods as long as you know which is the bottom of the seed. This peel method allows moisture to easily get to the cotyledon which means you do not have to really soak the seeds  reducing chances of rot and it also allows the root to break out of the membrane/husk a lot easier increasing germination rates while reducing rot again by not trapping the root inside a hard membrane/husk.  A peel also ensures that the membrane/husk  is more easily discarded from the cotyledon as it grows as it is not solid right around it. It does not take long to do yet greatly  increases the germination rates of viable seeds.

In these pics you can see the before and after shots of the seeds with all the peeled sections beside the seed they came from. The bottoms are all pointing in.