How would you like to sprout practically any seed overnight? Of course you would!



I like to mess around with plants, but I have always had a hard time getting seeds to reliably sprout, or germinate.



Yesterday I was poking around the web trying to learn more about how to get seeds to sprout with more success, and I found a reference to something called "seed scarification". This is a fancy way of describing the method of nicking, sanding, or clipping off part of the seed's shell so water can get to the inside part to activate germination. You can search YouTube to see a selection of videos on this topic.



The reason that seeds take varying lengths of time to germinate is not because the inside of the seed takes more or less time to activate. It is simply because all seed shells are somewhat water-resistant. The germination time has to do with how long it takes water to penetrate and permeate the seed shell or coating and get to the inside part of the seed. Once the water reaches the inside of most seeds, they all activate and grow immediately at that point.



Yesterday when I found this method, I tried sanding one edge off each of ten pumpkin seeds. The previous two attempts at germinating these same commercial pumpkin seeds resulted in only one sprouted seed from the 20 that I attempted to germinate. But of the 10 pumpkin seeds from the same package that I sanded one edge off and started germinated yesterday, already today 6 of the seeds have sprouted with up to 1/2" long roots! That is less than 24 hours!



So although this is a very simple Instructable, I hope that it will help a lot of you that like to grow plants from seeds.



Let's get started, shall we?