Nancy, I doubt that you drowned yours last year...however, you may have caused them to rot if you planted in cold soil and watered the cold soil. That is totally different than drowning them. LOL!!!! I do not scarify...snip or score the peas. I also don't soak. When I plant outside, I plant first knuckle deep and forget about them till about mid June. When I plant indoors, knuckle deep and plant in damp soilless mix. I have all the sweet peas I want then some. lolllll. Last year I threw some seed out just to get rid of them....next thing I knew these vines were growing and I was like....hmmmm I didn't plant sweet peas there. Then I remembered I just emptied the package, didn't even plant them. Really they are not that difficult to grow. Sierra

I love the purple beans. I used to plant Violetta, an Italian purple bean for many years. Once I planted those and a yellow wax bean on the same trellis. You can imagine what happened, I got yellowish beans with purple blotches on one half of the trellis. It just got so I wasn't eating or putting away the beans like I should so I took a break. This year I'm trying the lemon cukes on the trellis. I don't know, the trellis is getting a little old and not sure it will support the cukes. Let's hope for a better growing season this year without too much rain this Spring.

When I was buying my seed packs at RKO, I saw a big box of Heavenly Blue MG and a box of Cosmos seed that would cover 100sq.ft. I never saw such big boxes of seed! Is this something new? So far, only these two flower varieties were available. I have seen wildflower mixes in bigger boxes but not others. I have a terrible habit of buying packs and then not getting around to planting them, so I always have leftovers from the year before. Sometimes the weather doesn't cooperate (i.e.rain),but mostly it is poor planning on my part.

Gary, I also thought that you were referring to the method used to save seed rather than the way seeds are stored. Craig called me this AM as he often does, he's now retired as you know and is having a heck of a good time doing all those germinations on older seeds and we talked about it at length b'c he's also raising my plants for me to ship up here and a few of the seeds I sent him that were sent to me are older seeds. As to processing seed, we both will only use fermentation. As for storing seed most of mine are are plastic screw cap vials in 100 place boxes b'c they are actually scintillation vials that I "liberated" from the place where I last worked b'c they moved to a different system. When I ran out of vials I started storing my saved seed just in regular business envelopes stored at ambient room temp. Craig does use mostly glass vials, just different stroke for different folks. I think how one stores seeds depends on how many they need or want to store and where they live as to humidity, temps, etc. Craig was relating this AM how he woke up seeds of Cherokee Purple from 1992 which was the first year he listed it in the SSE Yearbook, OK that's 19 years and I countered that I was still ahead of him in that I woke up 22 yo seeds of Septmeber Dawn. LOL The documented record is waking up seeds 50 yo that were stored at the Cheyenne Station, a precursor of the USDA stations and those seeds were just stored in a file cabinet in envelopes and germinated tested after they were moved to the new USDA station at Ames, IA. There are quite a few of us who have also found that seeds of heart varieties lose viability quicker than others. We also talked this AM about how each of us try to encourage increased viability of older seeds, or try to wake up seeds that have shown no viability, at first, when tried. Back in the mid-90's we got a lot of seeds out of the USDA when it was still possible to do that and the germination on most of them was weak to nil so we had a lot of seeds to work with and tried many methods we knew about to wake them up. I won't go into that here, but suffice it to say that when Craig is trying to wake up old seeds , and he does it in those cells as you've read elsewhere, he puts saran wrap over the cells with recalcitrant seeds. I do something a little different and that's to soak those seeds in water for about 24 hours with a pinch or two of blue stuff, MG or Peters or whatever, or a few drops of liquid fish or seaweed prep. The reason for that is to up the nitrate concentration whch has been shown to participate in seed germnination. Befoe that I was using 0.2% K nitrate, but really, the problem with older seeds is one of dehydration. So, whether you meant to ask about seed storage, which I've spoken to or the method used to save seeds, I've spoken to that as well, and actually for both Craig and myself and yes, we've been the best of friends now for over 20 years. Carolyn, who notes that she recently sent a rare rin/nor mutant variety ( means they never get ripe) to a hybridizer, those seeds were from 1993 and he got them up quite easily. I really don't think it makes a huge difference whether seeds are stored in glass, plastic, paper envelopes or whatever, when it comes to seed viability, as I hoped to illustrate above.