Robt R Pries wrote: > Has anyone tried floating Rhodolphiala seeds on water to get > germination? Yes, just recently. using seed of Rhodophiala granatiflora from the PBS sent in by Alberto Castillo. There were about 60 seeds, which I received on the 3rd of May. I wasn't ready to plant them, so set them aside for a few days. Two months later, I discovered the package where I had buried it on the shelf; the seed looked quite a bit more dried out than when it arrived. Not being one to give up on plants, I floated about half the seed in a couple of centimeters of water in a hand sized container, set in a window sill that gets about 4 hours of direct sun (evaporation keeps the water from getting too hot). Four days later, there was an emerging radical on almost every seed. At the end of ten days, there were 3 cm long roots and 2 to 4 cm seed leaves from almost all the seed. I've experimented a bit, with these and other seeds, and find that moving the plants to soil before the seed leaf is less than one cm retards, or sometimes aborts, seed growth. When I planted the germinated seed, I tried to have the soil level at about the "crown" of the seedling; that is, where the seed leaf emerges from the radical. This leaves the remaining seed and the oldest part of the radical above or resting on the soil. One minor problem with this technique is that sometimes it's hard to get all the pieces pointing where you want them, since the roots tend to grow horizontally and the seed leaves grow up, at a ninety degree angle. I use a knife to cut a trench in the soil, place the seed, pile soil back in the trench and then move the soil around the roots with a very thin stream of water. I floated the rest of the seed two weeks after the first batch, with the same results . I now have 49 small plants enjoying the shade outside (should be fifty, but I dropped and broke one). I suspect that if all goes well, I'll be donating some small bulbs back to the PBS next year. Thanks for the great seed, Alberto! Hope this is helpful! Dave