As interest in using native plants increases, more home gardeners might be interested in starting perennial plants from seed. Native plants can be difficult to find in garden centers and ...

Boost your garden's productivity by learning the best times to start seeds indoors – including a month-by-month guide for ...

After-ripening, an extension of seed maturation is pivotal for seed dormancy release, which has implications for germination and subsequent seedling robustness. The efficacy of this process varies ...

Dormancy of Lupine seed can be broken by the process of scarification. In nature, seed of bluebonnets may survive in the ground for years without germinating because of their hard seed coats.

But the most common form of seed dormancy is also the toughest to break. Seeds in such states take up water, which revs up their metabolism. But then the metabolism quickly winds back down, ...

Most native tree seeds require treatments to break seed dormancy before the seed will germinate. These are done naturally by weather cycles, moisture, sunlight and wildlife in the forest environment.

Then, as weather patterns trended warmer, people were getting mixed results when dormant seeding. This was because the warmer weather caused the seed to sit in cold, wet soil instead of frozen soil.

How Dormant Grass Seed Holds Its Ground. Snow cover and ice don’t wash away dormant seed as easily as you’d think. When grass seed is applied during dormant seeding, it settles into the soil ...

That hormone tells the plant to form the bud scales, to stop certain aspects of growth ahead of dormancy and even to keep the seed dormant until the time is right for germination, Dr. Day said.

The dormancy period may last as long as five years in some native grass species. “Native grasses have a strong seed dormancy, and that works well in natural conditions,” Baldwin said. “But in ...

Seed dormancy allows plants to hedge their bets on the future; the Global Seed Vault extends this state for decades or longer. While varieties in the field may become extinct, their banked seeds ...