Cold Stratification: Why, How and When To Chill Your Seeds

This video covers the topic of cold stratification. What it is, why we do it and how we do it. There are simple ways and more involved ways to practice the effort, so we demonstrate your options.

As we've been growing the gamut of native northerm flowers, the topic of cold stratification kept crossing our path. For years, we struggled with low germination rates on certain things and we just could not figure it out.

That is, until we actually started practicing cold stratification! Cold stratification is the process of exposing your seeds to colder temperatures, essentially to simulate an actual winter. What we had not realized is that many flowers, especially native northern flowers, had built-in dormancy protections that delayed germination until that winter was experienced!

Certainly, this topic is as simple as "just chuck your seeds in the fridge," but it's really the background and understanding of why that is important. We'd heard about cold stratification plenty of times, but it wasn't until we truly understood it that it became an important practice.

As we mention, while we are advanced growers, we also have not grown every possible thing under the sun. It's quite likely we may have missed certain flowers where this practice is strongly desired. But, if your seed packet or general research says to refrigerate those seeds, this is the process it's talking about!

We do have a full article on this topic and will keep it updated as we learn more about the topic. It became an almost instant hit on our blog and that tells us it's a topic that many are yearning to know more about. So we figured a video was also appropriate.

https://frostygarden.com/topics/cold-stratification-of-seeds-when-to-cold-stratify-seeds/

Oh, and in case you didn't know, we also operate the world's leading subarctic blog. Here, you can find tons of information on extreme northern cold climate growing and also the most thorough seed sowing schedule on earth for zones 0 through 6!

https://frostygarden.com/

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