Pre-germinating ("chitting") Your Seeds - Attempt 1 - FAIL!

I was all set to write this post about how I pre-germinated my seeds before I put them into my soil blocks, and how easy it all was. It was going to be great! It was going to be inspirational! It . . . didn't work.

I read about pre-germinating (aka "chitting" your seeds) a few years ago, and have since been chitting my peas before I sow them in the garden. It works great. The idea is that you soak the seeds in warm water overnight to get them to break dormancy, then once they're committed to growing (they can't go back into full dormancy once they've sprouted) you sow them into your garden bed outside. This way you can start your peas a week or so earlier than they would normally sprout outdoors. With peas this works great - they sprout in about 12 hours and you're ready to go.

Another reason to chit your seeds is that you're also doing a germination test at the same time. When you're starting plants indoors, you don't have as much space as you would outside, so you only want to plant seed that you know will grow. When you pre-sprout your seeds, you know which ones will grow and which ones are duds.

For some reason this didn't work for the broccoli, brussels sprout, and parsley seeds I tried to germinate this week. My house is pretty cold, but I had them on a heat mat, so that probably wasn't the problem. The brussels sprout seed was a few years old, so that might have been an issue, but the broccoli and parsley seeds I bought less than a week ago, so they should have been fine. So my best guess is that either 1) I soaked them too long (I think it was over 24 hours; you're only supposed to soak them for around 8, but I got busy and forgot about them) or 2) I let them dry out too much between rinses. I'm thinking the second was my problem, because it looked like some of the broccoli seeds might have started to germinate but then never sent out a root.

I sprout wheat seeds all the time for my sprouted whole wheat flour, so I'm not new to seed sprouting, but I usually do about two cups of seeds at a time. There were much fewer seeds in this experiment (20 broccoli and just 5 parsley), so my guess is that there just weren't enough seeds to stay damp and so they dried out.

Another issue may be germination time - parsley is in the carrot family, and carrots take up to two weeks to germinate. So it was questionable if this method would have worked at all for them.

I will try this again; probably for my May 1st round of seeds. Hopefully I've leared a bit from this failure so I'll be able to post a happier report at that time.

I want to mention that I first read about this method in Steve Solomon's Gardening When It Counts. It's a great resource, and I highly recommend it, especially if you'd like a more comprehensive explanation of this method (I think he only recommends it with the larger seeds like peas and beans, though. That's what I get for trying to be a smarty-pants and do my own thing!)

Have you ever pre-sprouted your seeds? What do you think I did wrong?


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