As diverse northern flower growers, one of the things we’ve heavily encountered is the need to perform cold stratification. This is common to see across native northern flower varieties, essentially simulating the winter the seed would experience in nature. Typically, it’s done via refrigeration or freezing the seeds.
In years past, we’ve had somewhat complicated methods and schedules to deal with the timing of this effort. This is entirely incompatible with our preference towards “lazy” methods.
We recently discussed “meeting the averages” when it comes to growing. I realized I wasn’t doing that, I was trying to hit precision. Nature isn’t precise, nor do I need to be.
I looked at the “average need” across our cold stratified seeds. At ten weeks to last frost, we’re essentially 2 to 6 weeks from our desired sowing time for almost all of our cold stratified seeds. We could essentially cold stratify all our seeds in one-go, then pull them from the fridge at the appropriate sowing date.
If a seed needs a couple weeks at refrigerated temperatures to break dormancy, two additional weeks isn’t going to harm things. In fact, stratification time is often ambiguous anyway. It’s not uncommon to encounter wide time ranges, like two to four weeks.
This method feels so much more “our style” and how we roll around here. We’ll report if there’s anything catastrophically wrong with the method, but I suspect I stumbled into another cheat code.
In case cold stratification is new to you, we have a full in-depth article on the subject linked in the comments. The purpose is to improve germination rates of certain seeds, primarily affecting specific varieties of flowers.
