Enjoyed the links posted here. Here's my own 2 cents on this. I do all the seeding for a CSA (about 70 boxes per week), sow about 300 lettuce seeds a week for 7 months straight. The first and second year made many mistakes and got poor germination. Putting lettuce trays on heat mats did reduce greatly the germination rate. Putting the trays in a unheated hoop house also didn't work, it got too hot during the day. Now we just leave them outside. In spring gets down to 45F at night, maybe 55F during day. We use automatic overhead sprinklers, so the trays get over watered every day. Our seedling table must provide water for all the seedlings so must water enough for the largest plants. To prevent damping off, use a 1:1 perlite:peat mix (Black Gold seedling mix) with some sifted compost included 4:1 mix:compost. The overall mix is light and airy. A coir based mix didn't work, stayed too wet. Use only solid fertilizers, liquid ones get washed away with the overwatering. For the mix, I add in crabshell meal (Eliot Coleman recommendation), greensand, and soft phosphate. When I added in bloodmeal or fish meal to the mix I got damping off. To much available nitrogen. When the seedlings are about an inch tall, I sprinkle a mixture of bloodmeal and sifted compost over them. This gives them the needed nitrogen and once an inch high, I've never had any damping off. To save time I never tap the seeds into the mix. After filling the tray with mix, just drop/bang the tray against the table 4 times to get the mix to settle to a good firmness. Put the seeds on top and add a layer of fine vermiculite and overhead water. The fine vermiculite layer noticeably increased our germination rate on all seeds. Keeps the top moist and more importantly protects an emerged seedling from fungus. The vermiculite is sterile.

whats the hurry??? do you plan on growing these trees indoors over winter??? .. good luck with that ... if not.. why not pot them all into one smallish pot.. and put them on the north side of the house.. and let mother nature take care of it all this winter ... the suggestions all remind me of morning glory seed.. i used to use a fingernail emory board ... just to get thru the hard coat.. then lay them on a paper towel.. folded in quarters ... dampened ... inserted into a sandwich and laid on a teacup saucer [hard to lose it.. lol] ... and as soon as i saw life.. potted into media ... the knicking never worked for me.. i ended up knicking the embryo.. or cutting the tip of my finger ... blood did not aid germination ... and.. as noted.. why all this for a weed tree??? .. other than the experimenting of it all.. which i do honor ... ken

Yes, I save seeds, mostly from flowers, but did Bull's Blood beet (took two years for it to seed; it's a biennial) and got a baby-food size jar full, I also do some heirloom tomatoes. This year I had salvia, vinca, ageratum, poppies, zinnias, kiss-me-over-the-garden gate, and hollyhocks, lots more that I can't think of right now. I also did daylily seeds for the first time a couple of years ago. I had them in nursery rows in the garden ready to bloom this year and then got blasted with the hard freezes several days in a row, so no blooms this year. Lots of fun to see what you end up with.

(I know its an old thread, but the following info could be useful to someone doing a search) I just started a whole bunch of black locust seeds. I collected them last fall, and stuck them in my freezer. In April I used a sharp razor to cut open the pods. I only kept the biggest, healthiest looking seeds from the biggest pods. I nicked/shaved a small piece of the OUTER seed casing (do not cut the green inner seed), then submerged them in warm water overnight (12 hours). They should swell up a bit, I think you could keep them submerged for longer, probably 24 hours, if they haven't swelled, you should wait longer (maybe remove the ones that swelled and leave the others). Then I wrapped them in a wet paper towel, kept wet by placing one end in a small jar of water to wick up to the rest of the paper towel (seeds NOT under water). Most of the seeds germinated after just 2 days. I planted the ones that germinated and they are growing well right now. Note that this technique works well for most seeds with a hard outer shell including many tree seeds. Often when directions say to be patient, germination can take 3-4 weeks, you can use this method to get germination in 3 days (I've done it with strawberries for example and slow to germinate tree seeds).