Foreword:
I’m trying a new format for this journal, I hope y’all feel free to correct any mistakes and misinformation you see, as I’m sure there’ll be a bunch here and there. 
My journals always lack the specific info needed to paint a proper snapshot of the environment that created the phenotypes, so this time I’mma go in the opposite direction and try to paint only my perspective. The goal for this journal is to just dump the contents of my memory into a tangible format, that can be analyzed and criticized. Then rough hewn and whittled down to just the relevant facts, as I see them. If you’ll all join me in this little journey, I’d be glad to have you along.
Theoretical Day Zero.
So let’s say I’ve just decided I want to start some seeds. The oldest a little over a year, and the youngest, barely dry. I don’t like to keep any seeds longer than that because metabolism isn’t frozen inside of a seed — If you’ll allow a bit of an oversimplification — seeds are more like a hibernating bear, with finite nutrient stores. When they’re fresh, assuming an ample nutrient supply before winter arrived, the seeds should be large, plump, and full of nutrition. Small seeds can be linked to genetics, but it’s still the expectation of low nutrition that causes a cultivar to produce small seeds. In my experience, every plant, barring genetic anomalies, has the potential to produce big ol’ walnuts. This is important because size of the seed will be directly related to its longevity, and the larger seeds from a single harvest will, on average, produce larger healthier plants than smaller seeds from the same harvest.
If I’m worried about low germination rates from long periods of poor storage conditions, the first step is priming. You might have heard about gibberellic acids as the germination hormones, because it tells the plant to burn the stored sugars to fuel growth. The problem with this is it needs to be balanced with auxins and cytokinins, or you’ll throw the growth out of wack. Keep in mind that there are herbicides based on synthetic auxins, that effectively cause plants to grow themselves to death. In order to skip the guessing game of how much of each hormone to add, I tend to look to plant based PGRs when I use them — since a plant is unlikely to produce hormones in levels that would cause that plants death…
The addition (or not) of hormones is only part of the equation. The next variable in germination is water potential. I’m so confused by water potential that I’m barely able to speak on its existence. The jist of it is, water has a tendency to move from a place of higher concentration to a place of lower concentration, and the water potential is the speedometer. In old seeds we want to slow down the imbibition of water, so we don’t damage the cells as they wake up. I think of it like overfeeding a person whose been literally starving, and accidentally causing their death, simply by overloading the system. If you want to look into it more, osmotic priming / osmopriming is the term. I was told PEG is the usual method of controlling water potential, so barrier to entry is low in case you want to experiment with that option. If anyone is well-versed, I’d love to hear more about it.
Because my seeds are still young and supple, I tend to direct-sow. It drastically increases the chance of predation by bugs or pathogens, but it completely removes the risk of me crushing a seedling while transplanting it out of a paper-towel, or a bottle of water. They’re being sown in straight Massachusetts old-growth forest clay, cut with some rice hulls and perlite for aeration. Each seed is buried a little deeper than necessary, so that by the time the cotyledons break the surface the shell will be completely removed.
The last variable, excluding the obvious temperature requirements, is oxygen. If you look at any papers on the malting process, there is a point at which seeds will have absorbed all of the water that they need, and the seeds will be removed and left to dry for a number of hours. This is the point where germination has officially started, and metabolism has kicked into high-gear. The plant has just gone from its’ most durable form, to its’ absolute weakest, in a matter of hours.
lol
