Our easy and simple germination test shows whether your seeds are good or not with supplies in your kitchen. Stop guessing and know for sure!
Do you know the magic of milk and molasses in improving your garden? Plain old milk is a miracle for plants, soil and compost. Molasses boosts the benefits!
Do you have some old packets of seed around, with doubts about the viability; or have you saved seed for a few years and wonder if they will still sprout?
Do you know if those seeds will grow?
Have you ever wished for a way to make sure?
We will show you how to know for certain whether that older packet of seed is still good, or how long you can keep those tomato seeds around before needing to pitch them.
There is a way, it is easy and simple to do. It’s called a seed germination test and you probably have all of the supplies needed in your kitchen.
Germination Testing Supplies
You will need these 3 things, plus the seeds you want to test for germination –
Wetting the Paper Towel
The first – and most important – step is to thoroughly wet the paper towel. This is the first and easiest step, but most mistakes are made right here, leading to poor germination. Smaller seeds don’t need as much water for germination, but larger seeds do. The extra moisture will create a humid environment in the plastic bag, helping the germination process.
The dry towel is on the left, with the properly wetted towel on the right side. You should be able to see through the towel to the surface underneath – then it’s wet enough. If it’s drippy when you pick it up, it’s wet enough. If you wet the towel like on the middle left side – damp but not wet – there’s not enough moisture for the seed to absorb and begin the germination process.
If you want to learn more about what happens during a seed’s germination, read Starting Seeds at Home – a Deeper Look!
Folding Paper Towel
Next, after the paper towel is thoroughly wet, fold it in half. You can see just how wet the towel is by the amount of water left on the board after folding it over.
Unfolded Paper Towel
Open the towel back up, leaving a fold to mark the center of the towel.
Seeds on Paper Towel
Third, place the seeds along the fold, leaving room for them to sprout so they don’t become tangled up.
If you are doing a germination test use enough seeds to make the math easier, such as 10, 20 or 25 seeds. When we are doing a germination test, we follow established testing guidelines, but as a home gardener a smaller amount will verify if your seeds are viable and can sprout.
Folded Paper Towel
Re-fold the paper towel, enclosing the seeds.
Rolling Paper Towel
Roll the paper towel up….
Paper Towel in Ziploc
…and place it inside the Ziploc bag. There should be a good amount of moisture in the bag to start the germination process, so if you don’t see moisture droplets inside after a few minutes, open the bag and give it a squirt of water.
Finally, place the bag in a consistently warm place – like the top of the refrigerator or in a warm window. Most vegetable seeds do not need light to germinate, so a darker place is fine to begin with.
Check every couple of days for moisture levels and the start of germination. If the moisture levels drop significantly – this is a good sign the seeds are absorbing the water and beginning to sprout. Add a spritz or squirt of water as needed, usually only once or twice a week.
Once the majority of seeds have sprouted, open the paper towel up, count them and do the math to get a percentage. For instance, if you started with 10 seeds and 7 sprouted, you have roughly a 70% germination rate. If 20 out of 25 seeds sprouted, there is about an 80% germination rate.
Germination Testing Results
This is what one of the germination tests we do looks like – pretty good! These seeds are viable with a better than 90% germination rate.
Multiple Seed Germination Testing Results
For smaller seeds, we will often divide the germination chamber into half or quarters to make the process more efficient. Some seedlings will mold faster than others, this is why you monitor the progress closely if you are pre-sprouting for transplanting.
Seed Germination Testing at Seed Savers Exchange
The “Paper Towel Method” is almost universally used. Here are the results from a germination test at Seed Saver’s Exchange. Note the labeling of variety of seed and date the test was started. If you are keeping track of your germination percentages, like we do, it is important to keep clear notes and details!
Germination Results at Seed Savers Exchange
Please Note: Depending on the type of seed you are testing, you may see very different results and they may take more time than the average vegetable seed.
For instance, herbs and flowers usually take much longer – sometimes weeks – to germinate, and can have lower germination rates. This is normal and not something to be concerned with.
Learn more – Seed to Seed Book is our go-to reference for all things seed related, including germination times, needs and regional recommendations.
Do you know about the magic of milk and molasses in improving your garden? Yes, plain old milk of any kind – whole, 2%, raw, dried, skim, or nonfat – is a miracle in the garden for plants, soil, and compost. Molasses only boosts the benefits! Let’s see how and why they work.
Using milk on your compost and in your garden will probably come as a surprise to most.
Upon closer inspection, however, it starts to make sense. The amino acids, proteins, enzymes, and natural sugars that make milk a food for humans and animals are the same ingredients in nurturing healthy communities of microbes, fungi, and beneficial bacteria in your compost and garden soil.
Raw milk is the best, as it hasn’t been exposed to heat that alters the components in milk that provide the perfect food for the soil and plants, but any milk will provide nutrition and benefits. Using milk on crops and soils is another ancient technique that has been lost to large-scale modern industrial agriculture.
Milk is a research-proven fungicide and soft-bodied insecticide – insects have no pancreas to digest the milk sugars. Dr. Wagner Bettiol, a Brazilian research scientist, found that milk was effective in the treatment of powdery mildew on zucchini. His research was subsequently replicated by New Zealand melon growers who tested it against the leading commercially available chemical fungicide and found that milk out-performed everything else. Surprisingly, they also found that the milk worked as a foliar fertilizer, producing larger and tastier melons than the control group.
David Wetzel, a Nebraska farmer, completed a 10 year study on applying milk at different ratios to his pastures, and recorded the results with the help of a team made up of the local Agricultural Extension agent Terry Gompert , a university soil specialist, a weed specialist and an insect researcher.
What they found was amazing- the grass production was drastically increased; the soil porosity or ability to absorb air and water doubled; microbe activity and populations increased; cows were healthier and produced more milk on treated pastures; the brix or sugar level in the pasture tripled, indicating more nutrients were stored in the grass than before. Grasshoppers abandoned the treated pastures- the sugars are poison to destructive soft-bodied insects as they do not have a pancreas to process the sugars.
This also explains why damaging insects leave healthy, high-brix-level plants alone, as they contain more sugars than stressed and sickly ones. Read Milk Works As Fertilizer for the full article.
For the home gardener, the ratio can range from 100% milk to a mixture of 20% milk to 80% water, with no loss of benefits.
Use as a spray on the compost and garden soil before planting and as needed when insects appear. Spray directly on the insects and around the areas they inhabit. When combined with molasses, it becomes a highly beneficial soil drench.
A proven solution is 20% milk – 1 cup of milk to 4 cups of water, or 2 cups of milk to 8 cups of water for larger gardens. Whatever amount you need, the 20% ratio has been proven to give the most effective results with the least amount of milk.
David Wetzel’s experiments found that 3 gallons of milk per acre benefits pasture grasses most, so the costs are minuscule compared to the benefits!
Molasses is a viscous by-product of the processing of sugar cane or sugar beets into sugar.
Sulfured molasses is made from young sugar cane. Sulfur dioxide, which acts as a preservative, is added during the sugar extraction process. Unsulfured molasses is made from mature sugar cane, which does not require such treatment.
There are three grades of molasses: mild or Barbados, also known as first molasses; dark or second molasses; and blackstrap. The third boiling of the sugar syrup makes blackstrap molasses. The majority of sucrose from the original juice has been crystallized and removed. The calorie content of blackstrap molasses is still mostly from the small remaining sugar content. However, unlike refined sugars, they contain trace amounts of vitamins and significant amounts of several minerals.
Blackstrap molasses is a source of calcium, magnesium, potassium, and iron; one tablespoon provides up to 20% of the USDA daily value of each nutrient. Not only do these nutrients do a body good, they are highly valuable in building up the soil!
Molasses is a very valuable addition to the compost pile, as well as to the garden itself. Unsulfured blackstrap is the preferred variety due to the mineral content, but any of the unsulfured ones will do fine. The benefits beyond the minerals are the natural sugar content that will feed the microorganisms in the compost or soil of the garden.
Use 1/4 to 1/2 cup of molasses to a gallon of water and spray onto the compost pile or garden, or add to the drip system for the garden. For soils that are poor, stressed, or need help, use 1 cup; for those that need a little “snack, “use 1/4 cup. The readily available sugar content will skyrocket the microbial activity.
Apply once or twice a month, but be careful not to overdo it – don’t train the microbes to expect you to feed them, only give them a boost when they need it!
Blackstrap molasses is also commonly used in horticulture as a flower blooming and fruiting enhancer, particularly in organic hydroponics. Use the before mentioned mixture in the drip system, or sprayed alongside the roots of fruiting vegetables as they start to flower to increase their flowering and fruiting.
Add 3 Tablespoons of molasses to the milk spray solution mentioned above and use to feed plants during the height of growing season. Hungry, high production plants such as tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, melons, and such will really benefit from the consistent feedings, giving you more production that is more flavorful.
A fringe benefit of spraying the milk and molasses mixture on the garden is biologically friendly weed population control. Many broadleaf weeds thrive on diets high in available nitrates and potassium diets, common with commercial fertilizers. Phosphorus is “tied up” or bound with calcium in the soil and needs biological activity to release it. The calcium in milk helps to compensate for what is unavailable in the soil, while the increased biological activity from both the milk and molasses releases unavailable phosphorus and creates soil conditions that are unfavorable to the germination of weed seeds.
The costs of applying the milk and molasses mixture are minimal, but when compared to any other fertilizer and insecticide regimen – even those that are organic in nature – milk and molasses have no comparison.
For instance, one acre has 43,560 square feet, and a gallon is 128 oz.
Doing the math, we find that 3 gallons per acre is 0.003 of an ounce per square foot!
Assuming a gallon of organic milk costs $8.00, that works out to 0.00055 dollars per square foot or 0.055 cents per square foot! Yes, that is right – when rounded up, it is six-tenths of a penny per square foot of garden.
So if you had a large garden – say 1,000 square feet – one application of the milk would cost a whopping $0.55 (55 cents), plus the expense of 2 – 3 tablespoons of molasses. What other biologically friendly soil fertility improvements would cost this amount?
Here’s the proof of the math:
1 acre = 43,560 square feet (ft²)
1 gallon = 128 ounces
128 oz/43,560 ft² = 0.002938 oz/ft²
3 gallons x $8 = $24
$24/43,560 ft² = $0.00055/ft² multiply this by 100 for cents = 0.055 cents/ft²
Who knew that something as simple as milk and molasses had such powerfully positive, far-reaching effects? Especially without any of the negative effects of petrochemical fertilizers?
Easy Seed Germination Testing at Home
Our easy and simple germination test shows whether your seeds are good or not with supplies in your kitchen. Stop guessing and know for sure!
Milk and Molasses – Magic for Your Garden
Do you know the magic of milk and molasses in improving your garden? Plain old milk is a miracle for plants, soil and compost. Molasses boosts the benefits!