Most vegetable and annual flower seeds are pretty easy to grow --- just throw them in the ground at something close to the right depth at the right time of year and they sprout just fine.  When you start trying to plant tree, shrub, and perennial herb seeds, though, propagation techniques often get a bit more tricky.  I always stumble when I'm told to scarify or stratify seeds, but both techniques are actually quite easy, as I discovered when I started looking up information about growing honey locusts and persimmons from seed.

Persimmon seeds need to be stratified before they will germinate.  People try to make stratification more difficult than it actually is, telling you to put the seeds in a pot of dirt or in a ziploc bag with a wet paper towel and leave them in the fridge for a certain length of time.  In practice, I've discovered that native plants have evolved to stratify quite nicely in the garden.  Just plant the seeds in the fall and they'll be exposed to plenty of cool temperatures and will germinate as usual in the spring.  I tried this with persimmons a few years ago with good success and am trying again this year.

Honey locust seeds, on the other hand, need scarification to germinate.  The problem is that many seeds evolved to be eaten by animals and to pass through the gut relatively unharmed.  Seeds need thick coatings to survive the stomach acids, but these thick coatings are often impenetrable to water, meaning that your seed won't sprout unless it's scarified.  The natural way to scarify seeds is to pass them through some animal's stomach and let the acids break partway through the seed coating.  Barring a handy animal, people will drop the seeds in a vat of acid or hot water, or will manually damage the seed coat (hopefully without damaging the seed inside.)  I tried to file my honey locust seeds with no luck, and instead ended up snipping through the edge of the seed coat with fingernail scissors.  This is my first attempt at scarification, so I'm very curious to see whether it works!

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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