🔗 Save $6,000 A Year with My Complete Amish Home-Saving Method I teach: https://eliasyoder.com You put the seed in and nothing came up. You watered it the way you were told, you kept it warm, and you went out and looked at that bare patch every morning for two weeks, and then three, and somewhere in the third week you stopped looking.

And the worst of it is you do not know why. Dead in the packet, rotted in the ground, or something you did. A seed that fails does not tell you anything.

It simply is not there. There is a way to find out before you plant, and it will also bring most of those seeds up in two days instead of two weeks. It costs about three dollars and the bottle is very likely in your bathroom cupboard.

My grandmother soaked her peas overnight before planting. A cup of water on the kitchen windowsill, peas in it after supper, sown the next morning. I asked her once why she bothered, since they would get wet in the ground anyway, and she said her mother did it and her mother's mother did it.

I was not satisfied and I planted a row dry to see. Hers were up four days before mine, and a great many more of hers came up at all. She never knew the reason.

She only knew it worked. A seed is not asleep. It is waiting for rain, and you are telling it the rain has come.

What we go through: Why a seed is built to wait, and what the coat and the chemistry are actually for What a hard rain does to a seed beyond simply wetting it The one percent dilution, and why the three percent bottle is the only one to use Timings by seed: thirty minutes for most, fifteen to twenty for fine seed, up to two hours for hard coats Why you must rinse, and what happens if you do not The damp cloth, the warm dark spot, and why damp is not wet Why the real prize is knowing what your seed is worth before you commit a row to it Old packets, and why this does the most good there How long different seeds keep, so you know what is worth testing Handling a sprouted seed without breaking the root off and killing it The plain limits, said out loud.

This does not make a dead seed live. Plain water does a good deal of it, and soaking alone the way my grandmother did gets you most of the way. It is not a fertiliser and does nothing for the plant afterwards.

And it is not the answer to every failed sowing, because seed sown too deep, into ground too cold, or taken by a bird was never coming up whatever you soaked it in. Four cautions: never stronger than the three percent bottle, because stronger grades will burn the embryo out and leave you nothing. Do not soak longer than the times given, since longer is not better here.

Keep it away from children, off your skin and out of your eyes. And do not treat seed you are putting away, because this is done the morning you mean to plant. This week, find your oldest packet, the one you have been meaning to throw out.

Count twenty. Soak them, rinse them, lay them on a damp cloth somewhere warm. In two days you will know exactly what you have, and either way you are ahead.

Tell me in the comments how old that packet was and how many of the twenty came up. And if you are new here, tell me what you grow most of. Next time we go to the other end of it, because the best seed you will ever plant is the seed you saved yourself out of your own best plant.

I gathered the whole of it into a book at eliasyoder dot com. The people who built this country with their hands knew that, and we are only just starting to remember it. #EliasYoder #Seeds #Germination #Gardening #SeedStarting #HydrogenPeroxide #OldSeeds #SeedPriming #Homesteading #GrowYourOwn #OldWays #SelfReliance #GardenTips #Frugal #Spring