I hear complaints all the time that a particular crop has very short-lived seeds. This is usually ascribed to the size of the seed, but other seeds that are much smaller germinate fine.
I tend to plant my oldest seeds in an established population. I may get lower germinstion, but I’m reinforcing whatever allowed the seeds to survive long term.
Anyone else playing with this?
I sow my old seed in seedling tray and i prick out gradually.
In my experience i was already wait many months than old seeds want germinate. In my opinion the most part of time the conditions are not required for wake up the sleeping.
For exemple one of my persley seedling has germinate in two months.
One of my lettuce seedling will wait a rain and more low t° for germinate.
Some of my old tomato seeds are germinate after one month. They are wait that i emptied their seedling pots in a big planter or in full ground for germinate.
One of my strawberry seedling has germinate after 6 months.Because that they required a frost for germinate.
I store my seeds in a cellar in the basement. Last year I succession planted my parnsnips, getting great spring germination and almost no fall germination, then getting no germination this spring or summer at all. I suspect the seeds expired, but it seems really stark so I also might have mishandled the seeds, getting them damp or something without realizing it. Also those are store bought seeds, I’m saving my own for the first time this year so I have a lot more motivation to make sure I store them properly.
I don’t understand how a plant can evolve to have seeds that just give up and die so easily, so I also wonder if the plants expect damp storage like tropical seeds due to being from Ireland and similar perpetually rainy places. Or if since it’s a biennial it both can make so many seeds that germination rate isn’t important? Maybe even storing seeds all together simulates crowding and so the seeds kill eachother somehow like how sibling insect larvae happily eat and slaughter eachother when they hatch all together, except in some invisible chemical exchange.
I think a lot about what the plants’ strategies are, what they want and what they avoid, things they expect and situations theyre prepared to handle well. Seeds have only so many chances to wake up before they use up their stored energy and chemistry for germination, and when a seed fails when planted it probably had a bunch of false starts that sucked its reserves, or it just wasn’t ready to wait so long under the conditions it was stored in. I suspect there’s an adaptive reason for my parnsnip seed packets failing despite my attempts so take good care of them, and I’m still looking to nature to figure out what’s going on with that and what their deal might be.
Parsnips are one of those plants that supposedly have only a 1 year seed life. This makes no sense to me, because if there’s one bad year the seeds are all dead and the plant goes extinct.
My opinion is that this is a matter of using only new seeds every year until the plant forgets how to survive. I.e., human selection.
It’s one of the plants I’d like to work on. I got seeds one year, but I was focusing on other things and when I went back ten years later I got 0 germination.
Being biennial, it would take 2 bad years, since half the population would be in the 1st year phase.
I may be wrong, but I don’t know of a single plant in nature that has seeds that last only one or two years. I believe this is the result of inadvertent human selection.
I could see that happening with a perennial or even an annual, if being selected for increased seed production, but for a biennial root crop I can’t think of what the cause would be.
If there were any selection I would think there would have been selection for an increase in storage time, even inadvertently. But I suspect it may have been a “weedier” crop and the seeds were not saved but more commonly just scattered at the end of season. Just my guess, I don’t know the traditional cultivation methods.
In biennial crops with short term seed viability adapted to a relatively stable and predictable climate, an average two year viability window (with 1 year being common, and 3 year uncommon but possible) would seem ideal because it allows for a consistent genetic overlap within the total population (year 1 plants & year 2 plants).
It would also explain how the 1 year germination window would be selected for, because anytime genetics for longer storage time might pop up they would likely be overwhelmed by the genetics of the rest of the population.
Genetic lag from old seeds seems like a factor that could discourage the plant expending energy in making seeds that last longer. Some relationships require a nonstop treadmill of adaptation, like a very tenacious parasite, hostile microbes, or maybe even symbiotic microbes who adapt extremely quickly and refuse to cooperate with plants that don’t change as quickly (the last one is a bit of a stretch but you get the idea). So the risks of high quantity short lived seeds could be very worthwhile if 3-4 year old seeds are already “outdated” for whatever horrors the plant has to deal with.
(edit: another factor could be interaction with humans - what if short keeping seeds force humans to adapt with frequent trading, somehow benefiting both the seeds via biodiversity from many places and the humans via involuntary increased connectivity? A huge leap of logic, given how little I know about ag history but I had to share the idea.)
Whatever the reason for the seeds being short lived, I do think it the potential for improvement is high.
It would be very easy to select out seeds because all you need to do is mass plant the seeds that have been saved 2 years and whatever germinates will hopefully pass on those traits. Then repeat the process.
You could even have two separate populations being selected if you also plant seed the second year.
The trick will be growing out each later generation in isolation from any volunteer seedlings, nearby crops, or wild populations.
Joseph said his parsnip population didn’t have the short seed life.
For the crops that supposedly have a shorter life span, I sow short rows of older seeds separately (this year, my 2024 parsnip seeds germinated no problem, 2023, nothing). That way I can make sure they are not mixed up with the most vigorous seed lots and keep them for seed to encourage better seed longevity.
What is your growing media?
Mixture of native clay and potting soil. I’m going to mix up a new batch and plant the rest of the old onion seeds.
