Some seeds do require light to germinate and some seeds require complete darkness to germinate, depending on the Genus and species of plant. I have found most conifers pretty easy to germinate and I usually surface-sow the seeds after soaking the seeds in water for 24 to 48 hours (with a water change if the water discolors). After a day or two, most conifer seeds will sink to the bottom of a container of water if they are viable, but not always. My Pinus aristata seeds did not sink and they germinated just fine. Since Picea seeds are pretty small, I would just sow them as stated above. Dr. Dirr says that no pretreatment is necessary, but a short cold/moist pretreatment probably unifies seed germination. Don't give up if the seeds don't germinate during their "supposed" ideal germination time, but you may not have good seed so don't be too disappointed if you get no germination from this seed. Good luck, Mike

I'm having some Kootenai-source wild-type Thuja plicata seeds mailed to me from Lawyer Nursery. When they found out I only wanted about 50 seeds, they volunteered to send them to me at no charge(!) -- what great people! I'm wondering how best I should go about germinating them, and found this thread. I'm curious how honymand scarified them, as they seem to have had some success. Abrasive, kinetic, chemical, etc? Beyond that, I was thinking of a 1-week refrigerator stratification in a ziplock bag containing a piece of paper towel, lightly dampened by a mild 1% hydrogen peroxide solution, with the seeds placed on one side of the towel so that they're visible and in contact with both the moist towel and the air in the bag. I would then take the bag out and keep it in a dark place until roots become visible in the bag. The bag will be checked periodically for germinated seeds, and whenever one is found, it would then be laid apon the top of a mixture of approximately 40% peat, 40% composted manure, and 20% loose fill vermiculite with time-release fertilizer in seed trays. An additional half centimeter of soil would be laid upon it, and the plants watered from underneath. The plants would then be grown indoors in my LED grow room until they look sturdy enough to be gradually introduced to the outdoors. I'd probably also have some seeds undergo slightly modified versions of the above process, just in case I do something wrong. Does this sound like a reasonable approach? Also, any scarification tips would be recommended.

Sorry - I see there was another post last year about the galapagoense seeds, but maybe someone else is growing them now and has seeds? :) SOrry for the duplicate question, but if anybody has a source for these I'd so much appreciate the info!! Thanks :)

OMG! Stop IT! STOPIT! Slow down!! Relax. Chill. Take this weekend off from the lawn and go to Schlitterbahn or something. You are waaaaay over thinking this. And you're, well, let's just leave it at that. I have a lot of questions about how and why you did what you did, but I'm not going to ask - I assume someone you trust told you to do all that stuff. For the most part they were misinformed about what works in Austin and other places, too. Here's how you do a lawn in Round Rock. First look around you and notice that nobody has a zoysia lawn. There must be a reason for that. The first thing to know about gardening is to select plants that are well adapted to your climate and soil. That's the reason about 80% of the lawns are St Augustine and 15% are one form of bermuda or another. The rest are either xeriscaped or some form of zoysia, but those can be hard to find. The reason everyone has St Augustine is that it is dead simple to grow. The reason they don't have zoysia boils down to disease. Once it gets a spot of fungus, it goes dormant for the rest of the season. It will come back next April, but most people choose to replant with St Aug or bermuda. People will tell you that St Augustine requires too much water, but all grass needs to be watered once a week to look good. You've done something that you will be reminded of over the course of the next 3 years. You rototilled. I realize the Seedland website suggests rototilling. I'm not sure where that comes from but it is universally a bad idea. Scott's website also tells you to rototill in preparation for new grass. That's dead wrong. What is going to happen is your fluffy rototilled soil will settle back and form a new structure over the next 3 years. As that happens it settles unevenly leaving holes and hills for you and your mower to run over. It you try to level it now or next year it will continue to settle and recreate new hills and holes until the soil structure is finally finalized. The new structure will be formed by soil microbes, chemistry, soil mechanics, and gravity. You should have ignored the hard soil and rocks under the top layer of soil. That can be addressed from the surface without damaging the existing soil structure. I did not see any zoysia in the pictures. The first close up pic might be crabgrass but is more likely dallisgrass. Crabgrass would be much preferred because it will all die in about November with the first frost. Dallisgrass is perennial and will come back if it freezes out or not. Your second picture shows nutgrass. Nutgrass is a sedge (more formally it is called nut sedge). As a sedge it needs a sedge killer to affect it even slightly. Nutgrass is a swamp type grass that much prefers continually moist soil to even occasionally moist soil. But if it gets continual moisture it will take off and not look back. There is another sedge called green kyllinga that looks a lot like nut grass. Green kyllinga is not nearly as aggressive as nut grass, but it also will survive in deeply dried out soil. Either one needs a sedge killer to kill it. Sedgehammer is one and Image is the other one. If that is nutgrass and you get yourself on a deep and infrequent watering program, the nutgrass has a good chance of going away permanently. In step 6 you sorta wasted the bags of fertilizer. There were no roots for the fertilizer to fertilize. By the time the grass would have come in the fertilizer would have been washed through. At step 8 the thing to do would have been to roll the seed down. Rollers are not used to level the soil. They are used to press the seed down into the surface of the soil. Leveling is done with a drag which picks up soil/sand from the high spots and drags it to the low spots. Then the soil is wet down and soil added to the low spots that appear when it was wet down. But I digress. Step 9!! You're using my favorite sprinkler. I have six or seven of those (several houses with large yards). Step 10. Yes you could have done something else to the soil, but you didn't need to. And you did not need more soil. More soil too often leads to new drainage issues. The worst case is the soil backs up rainwater causing it to flood the house. You did not need the 20 bags. Step 13. Are you going to leave the hoses buried or, sometime in the future, dig them up? I have hose splitters on top of the ground to cover all the grass at once. Sears hoses, by the way, have a lifetime guarantee and you don't need to keep the receipt. Step 14. Hmmm. Those oscillators barely put out any water. 15 minutes 4x per day is probably fine even running through the night. I can't imagine that would be too much water. Step 15. The bastard weeds sprouted in 9 days which too often leads the home owner to stop watering frequently enough to sprout the real grass seed. What you should have done was water exactly like you did immediately after applying the RoundUp. That would have sprouted all those weed seeds that you now have. Then you could have reapplied RU to kill the newly sprouted weeds. THEN you put down the grass seed after all the weeds are outta there. Step 17. Don't use any more starter fertilizer until you have your soil tested ($25) at Logan Labs and you post the results here for feedback. With Texas soil you have to worry about P and K levels. No other test labs will give you the quality of results that Logan Labs will. TAMU, in particular, has a terrible reputation for their soil testing problems. Step 19. The new grass coming in might be the zoysia. The problem now is the weeds are up and shading out the new seedlings. Zenith needs sunlight to take root. But at this point you have a mostly dallisgrass lawn. Dallisgrass can be killed with atrazine. If I remember correctly zoysia is safe with atrazine. But is NEW zoysia seedlings safe from atrazine? I'm not sure of that. At this point you're going to have a weed lawn. What do you want to do? I would suggest rethinking the logic behind zoysia. Let's discuss that with respect to how to proceed. If you're working with a tight budget let us know. Some lawns are a lot more work over the long haul. What are you looking for? Do you want the nicest lawn on the block or just something to keep the mud out of the house? Or something in between? To have a really nice bermuda lawn is a lot of work with mowing 3x per week and monthly feeding. To have a really nice St Augustine is dead simple with mowing every week or two and feeding 3 to 5 times a year. I'm not mentioning watering because all lawns need to be watered once a week in the summer heat, so that's just the way it is. There are some non traditional grasses that can be used for low water usage if you want to go that direction. Even prairie grass is preferable to zoysia. So what do you want?