Onion Seeds

So as promised I did a germination test to get some quantitative results on the germination rates of some of the older seeds in our fridge. I hadn't been planning on doing one just yet but when I tried planted onion seeds and none sprouted it seemed like a perfect time to do so as I wouldn't be wasting any seeds that otherwise could have been used. The onions were more specifically Evergreen Long White Onions (apparently similar to scallions) that were packaged in 1990. I placed them in a damp paper towel on a plate, covered it with saran-wrap and left it out to find out how the seeds would fare. It was left at approximately 65 degrees for about 15 days before we began to count them up. The counting took forever and although the package advertised it containing approximately 700 seeds it most have been a very rough approximation for there was much more. After well over an hour of tediously separating the sprouted seeds from the dead ones with tweezers, we added it all up and got the results. In total their were a whopping 1485 seeds 390 of which sprouted creating a (drum-roll) 26.263 percent germination rate. This is a surprisingly large successes rate considering they were not only 20 years old but that the package had been open for all twenty years. After doing some looking around on the internet I found out that onions seeds have one of the shortest shelf lives of all vegetables, all sites agreeing that they are good for only 1 year. All things considered the results amazing me as I was expecting a much smaller number especial after having had no success earlier in soil. Now you may be asking yourself how can seeds that have a 26.263 % germination rate have utterly none sprout in my previous attempt. There are most likely a few contributing factors to this but almost certainly the largest one was the temperature. My first go at growing them had been under the grow lights in our basement (the ones mentioned earlier) and being unfinished, the basement can get quite chilly in the winter. Seeds like warm soil when germinating and will fail to do so if it is below a certain temperature, causing the seeds to rot in the dirt. Doing a bit more looking around I found out that the ideal germination temperature for these particular seeds is anywhere from 60 to 70 degrees, a good deal warmer then the 54 of the soil in our basement. In conclusion the failure to germinate the onion seeds in the basement was almost without doubt due to the cold temperatures and therefore it is not surprising that when the seeds were tried out in the warmer up stairs that the rate correspondingly went up. But this isn't the first time I have had a difficult time getting many seeds to sprout or not even any at all and so this experience was what finally spurred us into getting a heating mat to put under the seed trays. This was something that we had been meaning to get for a while now but had never really got around to and in the short time I have had it, it has already proven to be a great purchase (more on the mat is above).

Winter Garden

In an attempt to use up some of the older seeds I decided to try out an indoor garden this winter. I planted butterhead and loosehead lettuce, radishes, arugula and basil in late September for a January harvest. They grew under the fluorescent lights in our basement and despite all the work it took it was really fun! It gave me something to do the winter months in which there typically isn't to much gardening going on and it was really fun getting to eat some fresh homegrown greens in the winter. It also gave me a sense of what to plant in the the vegetable bed in the spring. My favorite plant out of the five I tried was the Butterhead lettuce. It has a fantastic crunch to it, beautiful ruffled leaves with deep purplish highlights and compact growth. I would advise against growing Loosehead lettuce, for at least in my hybrid it had next to no crunch, its growth was not at all compact and was really slow growing. I currently still have one Butterhead lettuce plant left and am planning on eating it some time in February to give it some more time to grow. As a whole I had great success with the older seeds with the one exception being onions. I tried planting them from seed in January to give them the 8-10 weeks they need before transplanting outside and did not get any to sprout. So I took this opportunity to do my first official germination test of the old seeds! More about this is above.