Japanese Black Pine from seed 2018 – Scarification and Stratification

This is the first post of my Japanese Black Pine from seed project.

Starting this year (2018) I’m participating in a “Japanese Black Pine from seed”-contest that is hosted by BonsaiNut.com. The contest will last 6 years and the winner will be the one who has grown the best Pinus Thunbergii bonsai by 2023.

First step is ordering some seeds, I bought seeds from 4 different sellers:

25 seeds from SeedRack.com
50 seeds from Treeseedonline.com (they sent me 75 seeds)
25 seeds from an eBay seller called pandoragarden (He/she sent me 150+ seeds)
50 seeds from treeseeds.com (they send me about 1000 seeds instead…)

So I ordered 150 seeds but ended up with 1250 of them…

The contest started on January 1st 2018, before that nothing was allowed to be done to the seeds.
So on the 1st of January I started with the scarification process on 3 of the seed packs I received (will start the 4th one (the 1000+ seeds) in 1.5 months or so). This means I put the seeds in warm water to allow them to soak up water and sink. The ones that don’t sink after 48 hours will be removed.

After 48 hours most of the seeds have sunk

1. Seedrack.com – 0 out of 25 floated (100% sinking ratio)
2. Treeseedonline.com – 8 out of 75 floated (89% sinking ratio)
3. eBay seller pandoragarden – 10 out of 150 floated (93% sinking ratio)

Next step was taking the seeds that sunk out of the water and placing them on a damp paper towel, moist not wet, after that I closed the paper towel and put it in a plastic bag (ziplock bags are perfect for this but I didn’t have any) together with some sphagnum moss to keep evertything moist. After punching some holes in the bag for air circulation it goes in the fridge for 2 months (cold stratification process).

The reason I used damp paper towels and not some kind of potting soil, like I did in a previous post, is that it’s much easier to collect the seeds from the paper towel in 2 months then it would be from a bag of soil.

If all goes well there should be a follow-up post to this one in 2 months. Fingers crossed!

UPDATE:

3 weeks after the first batch I put my last batch into the fridge.

1. 150 seeds from TreeSeeds.com -> 1 floater (I did hand pick the 150 biggest in the 800+ seed batch, I put the remaining 650 in water too, only 3 of them floated so pretty good sinking ratio)
2. 40 Mikawa seeds from BonsaiPlaza.com -> 2 floaters (when you order from them make sure to pick the option where they send seeds in a package and not by regular mail. I chose the last option and got 50 seeds, 10 of them got crushed completely. From the other 40 I’m guessing at least half of them got a severe poundng too so lets hope for a 50% geremination ratio…)

Click here for the sowing of the seeds post.