and the winner is…

Burned, boiled, scraped with a rasp, doused in acid, or left alone? What’s the best way to ger­mi­nate man­zanita seeds?

The first manzanita seedlings

The first man­zanita seedlings

I’d begun a lit­tle kitchen exper­i­ment over two months ago to see which tech­nique would give the best ger­mi­na­tion for the Mex­i­can (or pointleaf) man­zanita, Actostaphy­los pun­gens. As of a cou­ple days ago, the win­ner is: scraped with a rasp.

Here are the first two tiny seedlings that breached their seed coats and made it up to day­light. I’d filed down through into the hard seed coat on the seeds of this batch, let­ting mois­ture reach the embryo inside, and to make it eas­ier for the new plant to emerge. (In gardener-speak the process is called “scarification.”)

I’ll post more results as the other seedlings emerge. If they ever emerge. This is not one of those instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion, buy-it-at-the-home-store-and-stick-it-in-the-ground experiments…

December 20 2008 11:01 am | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: • • • •

7 Responses to “and the winner is…”

  1. Greg on 20 Dec 2008 at 2:02 pm #

    Oh, con­grat­u­la­tions and wel­come to these first two seedlings. I look for­ward to watch­ing their progress.

  2. Eleanor at OutOfDoors on 27 Dec 2008 at 5:14 pm #

    makes sense if you con­sider that the seeds might have been pre­pared to brave the diges­tion of var­i­ous animals…probably being chewed in the process. the resilience (aka stub­born­ness) of nature is won­der­ful, no?

  3. lostlandscape on 30 Dec 2008 at 12:24 pm #

    I guess I was slightly sur­prised at the results. The man­zanita is adapted to fires, with new plants replac­ing old ones as they burn. So the heat and flame treat­ments didn’t have the same effect as break­ing into the seed­coat. The other treat­ments may still yield some results, so I won’t be toss­ing the pots for some time…

  4. Jeremy on 11 Jul 2009 at 11:35 am #

    Any updates?

  5. lostlandscape on 11 Jul 2009 at 12:00 pm #

    Jeremy, still noth­ing from the seeds that weren’t scar­i­fied. I’ll con­tinue water­ing them through at least the win­ter in hopes that some will germinate.

  6. Jeremy on 11 Jul 2009 at 1:17 pm #

    I went hik­ing Thurs­day in the Santa Mon­ica moun­tains and grabbed a few hand­fuls of berries from the man­zanita trees (A. glauca?). I found this site today while look­ing for ger­mi­na­tion tech­niques. Yes­ter­day I put some in boil­ing water and let them cool to room temperature…and another batch has been sit­ting in vine­gar. Now I’m sand­ing down a few seeds to round out the exper­i­ment. No fire and no sul­fu­ric acid for me. Do you think the two months in the cold is required? A few gar­den­ing sites don’t men­tion it…and claim suc­cess. I don’t have any room in my dorm-sized fridge!

  7. lostlandscape on 11 Jul 2009 at 1:39 pm #

    I’d read some­where about how chill­ing the seeds would help and didn’t do a con­trol with­out chill­ing. Con­sid­er­ing your seeds come from a loca­tion not far from the coast, I’d guess that doing some­thing to the seed coat would prob­a­bly be more impor­tant than a cou­ple months in a dorm fridge. Still I’d be curi­ous if the seeds would respond only to mois­ture since the rains usu­ally come with cooler weather. Let me know how your exper­i­ment turns out.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply