Now there are a lot of posts on germination so I'll tell you what worked for me in the case of Sequoia and Sequoiadendron.

These were the first confier seeds I tried to grow and I had all the details on pre-treatment, soil, water, light etc. But I just couldn't get it right. Nothing really seemed to work for me.

I'll skip the pre-treatment in this post, because I didn't vary on that - just did it by the book all 5 times I tried.

The first 3 times I tried with different soils, temperatures and moisture and sowed in a traditional manner with some mm soil on top of the seeds. Nothing happened! I waited for months without any result at all.

I tried dropping the last mm of soil, so the seeds would get more light. And boy, did that help. Lots of seeds germinated after 2-3 weeks, but now another problem appeared! The root just wouldn't take hold. It like the germination was so rapid that the root just pushed the seed of the soil until it toppled. I tried helping by making small holes with a match but to no avail - at the best a plant would survive a month, but most of them just died after week or so.

5th time I covered the seeds with nothing but a single sheet of wet toilet paper. And that solvedd the rooting problem. They got enough light to germinate and enough downwards pressure to root properly - only to present a new problem. The seed shell wouldn't "let go" of the young plant, so I had to assist on that.

See my old blog on this project: http://sequoia.blog.com/

In the end I lost all the small trees although some grew to as much as 25 cm or more. I bought some 5 year old trees in a nursery instead.

/Hans Olav