Yes my bad. I will change if I can. Thanks for catching my error.
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LOL That’s great for you to share the knowledge and spread that word, cuz! Thanx for the vote of confidence!!
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When it works as well as that does, it should spread its own word 
I just nudge it along…
I do enjoy the ensuing conversations… Why we complicated things, when mother nature already has a simple way. Gotta say, nobody has left a non-believer yet 
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Actually @Cormoran , it’s a combination of all of the above… About 10-12 yrs ago, I just thought about it hard one day after having some seeds, of a strain I did NOT want to lose, failed to geminate.
I was like ‘ok, what went wrong, how can I fix this, what will it take to germinate my seeds’?! Ok, so what does a seed need to germinate?
- warmth (spring/early summer)
- enough moisture for it to have a drink when it wakes up (pops)
- good rich soil
- a bit of darkness to gather it’s thoughts
So, I did my best to imitate the conditions that Mother Nature tells them babies…hey, wake up, little ones!
The rest, as they say, is history!
Plus, WC is full of micronutrients, including mycorrhizae, which is super important in helping the baby roots take up nutes better.
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@Floyd …Sorry, I didn’t mean to ‘hijack’ your thread there cuz!
But I tend to get up on the ol soapbox when it comes to some things lol
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No worries. Feel free to post anything you like here.
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ok lol laid back, like my thread, I can dig it cuz! 
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Yeah, that’s kinda how I ended up stumbling towards this myself as well - I used to just put the seeds in a wet paper towel and cover them, which gave them 2/4. Then an entire batch failed, a friend of a friend told me he heated the paper towels, and I tried that. Much better rates, but still some failures, mostly caused by my clumsiness in transferring them to soil. So now, I’m trying rooting cubes in a prop tray, as I said above - with 3/4 it’s going better than paper towels, but I’m still seeing a few seeds without enough vigor to really crack their shells and get going. Both of my Sour Lemon seeds seem to have failed now - the one that grew with its root upside down died when I tried to adjust it, apparently, and the second one has barely cracked the shell but doesn’t seem to have made it any further in 9 days. They’re from Mark, so my guess would be they’re older seeds and my method has been tried and found wanting. Time to try something else, worm castings sound like a good plan with all those micronutrients and microbial action. 
Maybe also some h2o2 and/or gibberellic acid in the water if worm castings still aren’t 100%, I’ve read about those in other threads.
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I do the wet paper towel in a ziploc but I try to run the paper towel under warm water whenever I think of it and it usually works fine. The Lebanese I’m trying needs to have a tail later today when I check or I’ll be doing the WC method tonight.
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Yeah, wet paper towel usually worked fine for me too until it didn’t. 
Usually, the seeds pretty much do it all themselves with just a little water no matter what we do, basically… hopefully we find the WC do that little bit extra that the seeds might not be able to sometimes. I’ll probably try that tonight myself, depending on whether I can motivate myself to get out of the house in order to buy pure worm castings… looks like they don’t have any at any of the nearby stores so I’ll have to drive for 20 minutes each way, ugh. I do want to see if this makes the Sour Lemon a little bit easier to crack, though, and now is the time if I want them to be included in this grow. Decisions, decisions…
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Exactly how long it takes me to get to my store for castings etc.
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Shore Grow most likely has some but that’s a drive. I got some off Amazon once.
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In my case, that’s how long it takes me to get to the much-further Home Depot… because apparently, neither Lowes nor Walmart which are <5 minutes away actually have them in stock. Wtf?
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I don’t go to Shore Grow for much of anything that’s not somewhat crop-specific anymore, and most of that I can get cheaper on Amazon… too far away when most general gardening supplies are at Lowes, Walmart, Home Depot, or there’s even another gardening store closer to me. It just isn’t specifically aimed towards our demographic of gardeners.
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Morning @Floyd, pardon me but I had to add to @JohnnyPotseed’s perfect explanation with a silly comment:
Swimming and floating in worm poop while living in seedling heaven!!
My next throwing of seeds will surely be the JP approach!! 
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The owner and the older guy there are good dudes so I like the idea of supporting them even if it’s a drive and a buck or two more here and there. I’m not running a charity so I opt for Amazon over them more often than not but for when I don’t I’m fine with paying a little more with them. They’ve been involved in the legalization movement and have done benefits for medical patients plenty of times. They also used to do grower’s classes all the time from basics to advanced stuff and transitioned it onto IG when the lockdowns started. As far as I know every Tuesday at 8 they do a session for an hour or two. You can ask questions and they have some interesting guests like the creator of Blumats, the owner of Coasts of Maine, etc.
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So do I, just not the actuality so much… and for a single bag of worm castings, for which their profit margin will probably be paper-thin anyway, I figure it would be easier to save my time and mail them a check if I’m really that worried about it. I did already buy both my air-cooled reflectors from them rather than Amazon, which probably makes more difference to their bottom line than driving and buying every bag of fertilizer I get from them ever would. Unfortunately, they weren’t retailers for the company I got my new lights from, so I didn’t have the option this time. C’est la vie, they’ll survive.
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I have to put in an ‘addendum’ here folks… there’s also something else to take into consideration, and that’s the age and how they were kept. In the case of older seeds that have ‘hardened up’ you gotta remember to rough the shell up with a tube of medium grit sandpaper, first, and maybe also trim that ridge off with a scalpel or razor blade.to help them be able to pop. even then if they were kept in poor conditions, you might still be disappointed
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Oh yeah with that mentality you’re right and will save much more money than me. When I go it’s pretty much a game of what else I’ll buy while there.
I was going to them for RO water so that made a difference too. They’d fill up 5 gallon jugs of RO for me free so I would buy at least a little something while I was there.
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Why not grab one of these, zero waste unlike the RO systems…
I got one and it’s great!
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