>What I've done with the Calochortus in the past is to sow the seeds in >summer (as soon as they are ripe, basically) in both containers and in >places where I want them to grow, but nothing has ever come up. I've tried >covering the seed and sowing them on the surface. Nothing. Zip. They do not >ever emerge. I've kept seed flats as long as three years and those seeds do >not want to germinate. The seed flats stay outside for winter. Seeds of species adapted to cold winters would not germinate until the following spring in any case, otherwise new seedlings would be killed in their first cold winter. Maybe there's some mechanism which prevents seeds from imbibing before the onset of cold in their first year, so that action only occurs in spring. Imbibing and then drying out afterward can lead to a deeper dormancy which can delay germination for years. Sowing the seeds directly into the garden, dry, resulted in tiny calochortus leaves which were quickly mowed down by rabbits. And that was that. Sowing in pots left outside in winter has never worked for me. I suspect the seeds imbibed and then were frozen, which is probably fatal. In any case if there's germination, the tiny bulbs would be killed if left outside for another winter. Pots have too little soil to protect the bulbs from cold. Bulbs, any bulbs, are only hardy to about -12C, if even that, without the protection of a large volume of surrounding soil. The method of stratification I described works ridiculously well. Some of the seed packets I received from Alplains had a hundred seeds, and maybe only five didn't germinate. Some seeds took four or five months to germinate. Bob p.s. Thanks for the kind comments. _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/…