HYB: seed preparation the lazy man's way

I'm taking a break from seed planting, so thought I'd offer these thoughts.

This posting is only about preparing seeds for planting in pots.  There are a
number of good previous postings in the Archives about seed potting,
particularly Paul Black's method.

The following preparation method makes two assumptions:

1)  Seeds need to dry out before planting.  Then,

2)  Seeds should be soaked before planting.

If you don't agree with those assumptions, you needn't bother reading this.

Like most of us, I'm pretty busy, and irises are only part (though a VERY BIG
PART) of my life.  So, I'm always looking for ways to do things that take the
least amount of time and fooling-around-with.  The following is what works for
me:

1.  Drying them out:

I put each lot (all the seeds from a pod), with the tag from the cross, in the
kind of shallow plastic container that your cheese dip comes in, and I stack
several on top of each other, but not so high that they might tip over.  A
couple of thousand seeds can be stored this way in about a 2' x 2' space on a
shelf.  They then sit undisturbed until October or November (or, in a bad
year, even December).

2.  Soaking them:

You may have noticed that I didn't knot them in old nylons or panty-hose and
hang them in the toilet tank (which I call the flush-with-success method).
Being a divorced male, I don't have a ready supply of such items and wouldn't
use them if I did, since I don't care to decorate the baths in that manner nor
expend the time and effort required to secure each lot in its respective knot.
Instead, at the end of the drying period, I pour about 1/4 inch of water into
each cheese dip container and re-stack them, setting each stack in a plastic
bowl that the Chinese food comes in so that they don't overflow onto the
shelf.  After 10 days, more or less, I rinse each lot thoroughly before
planting.  This is to rid the seeds of the gunk that has accumulated on them
during the soaking process.  To do this, I pour each lot of seeds into a
washing machine lint trap and hold it under a tap, full-force, for a few
moments.  The wire mesh holds even the smallest seeds.  (If you decide to do
this, remember to put the sieve/stopper in the drain opening, just in case you
spill any.)  The seeds then go back into their (also rinsed) cheese dip
container, and are re-stacked until ready to be sowed.  In my case, they're
sowed in 1-gallon pots.  This may take about 3 days, with breaks, during which
I'm careful to keep the seeds moist overnight simply by putting an empty
cheese dip container over any uncovered stack.  That's it.

And now, back to the stack!  --  Griff

Zone 7 along the tidal Potomac near Mount Vernon, in Virginia

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