I already mentioned my woes with beans this year. Unfortunately, with the late frost, they only got exacerbated. I planted all my yellow beans, and we unwisely ate the rest, so I had none left. Thus, after they froze, I bought new seed packets. I will have some yellow beans, but nowhere nearly as much as I would like to.
I was always fairly confident in the germination rates of seeds, both bought and homegrown. When I wanted to grow 100 plants, I would buy somewhere around 100 seeds. For whatever reason, that was not the case this year. Homegrown seeds have a 90-100% germination rate, but bought seeds have between 0-50% germination rate. All other variables – temperature, light, substrate, watering – are identical, so it definitely is the seeds themselves. I noticed that many of the bought seeds had necrotic spots, and even when the germ itself was intact and the seed sprouted, the resulting plants are often tiny and sickly-looking.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Those are the remnants of over 100 seeds planted two weeks ago. Only a handful sprouted, and the plants are still tiny, some barely poking out of the ground.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
Compare that with these black beans, planted from my own, two years old. These started to poke out of the ground just yesterday, and already some are bigger and healthier-looking than the older ones. And although it is not clearly visible in the picture, there is actually a 100% germination rate, I checked every receptacle.
© Charly, all rights reserved. Click for full size.
These last ones are yellow beans grown from newly bought seeds, sown before those homegrown in the previous picture. Yesterday I went through them all and I sorted out about 50% of the receptacles where the seeds were either dead or completely rotten away. That is the best result with bought seeds this year. If I were buying seeds and sowing them directly into the ground and then waiting for them to sprout, I would have an empty garden this year.
These are different varieties, but it is the same species (Phaseolus vulgaris), and the yellow and black beans are similar in seed size.
Two years ago, I was growing beans too, mostly from bought seeds (that is how I acquired the black and yellow beans), and I do not remember having this trouble. This year, I bought seeds from three different suppliers, two of whom I had a positive past experience with, and they all had trouble.
Then there were pumpkins. Since I decided to expand my growing this year, I knew that I wanted to grow three varieties of pumpkin. White marrow Cucurbita pepo “Květa”, orange Hokkaido Cucurbita maxima, and butternut Cucurbita moschata. I had some leftover seeds of Květa from last year, so I put those on a wet paper towel to germinate (a method that we used for pumpkins since I was a kid), and they all germinated within a week, and nothing else needed to be done. At the same time, I put in the same conditions some fresh butternut and Hokkaido seeds. After two weeks, none of those sprouted. So I bought new ones from another supplier. Some Hokkaido sprouted, but butternut did not. So I bought butternut seeds from the same supplier that I had the old Květa seeds from.
Those started to germinate in 3 days, and within a week, 80% germinated.
At this time, I was getting pretty pissed and I tried to break off the tips of the seeds of Hokkaido and butternut. When doing that, I found out that some had rotted in the shell as they became mushy and soft. Some did not rot, but they also did not germinate. But breaking of the tips did induce germination in at least a few, so I do not need to buy additional seeds, I should have enough plants for my garden, and perhaps even to give some seedlings to my neighbor.
The funny thing about all this is that the white runner beans I wrote about in First Fails (Phaseolus coccineus with germination just 20%) were actually from the same seed supplier I had the excellent Květa and butternut seeds from. So, at least as far as the beans go, it does not seem to be a supplier issue. Still, it makes me wonder what is the cause of these troubles. In essence, I had to buy three packets of seeds to get one packet’s worth of plants, and that is really not something I remember happening in the past.
In my experience, sprouting is all or nothing. Some years I have way too many, some years not nearly enough. Though I’ve also made the experience that with all squash/courgette/cucumber seeds some seem to take very long. Like this year I’m trying watermelons, and some of the seeds sprouted quickly, the plants are ready to go into soil, and other sprouted two weeks later. One year I threw out the soil with the “dead” squash seeds after I’d planted the little sproutlings and ended up with squash all over the place.
Though I thing that you already know that you should never use homegrown courgette seeds, because with recombination in F2 or F3 generations you may end up with poisonous veggies.
Good reminder. While it should be possible to save seeds from the pumpkins that I grow this year, since they are all cultivars and not F1 hybrids, and there are no wild pumpkins around with which they could cross-pollinate, they might cross-pollinate if someone else in the neighborhood were growing a hybrid with the bitter genes. The highest risk for this would be for the “Květa” marrow pumpkin, if I were inclined to save its seeds. Although that is the one with the fastest and most reliable germination, I did get more than my money’s worth from those.