Amellia88, thanks for the compliments. I have had far more failures than successes germinating seeds. Some are easier than others. The blue gum and lemon scented eucalyptus tree seeds are fool proof. 90-95% of those germinate which is a lot when you plant 20 expecting a bunch to fail! I had to give a bunch away. Of the olive, pine, elm, redwoods, and various other tree / plant seeds I planted, I got zero success. The last seeds I planted were 15 dwarf myrtles (I have 4 growing), 10 white gardenia..gardenia thunbergia (1 is struggling to grow, 2 others have sprouted but are sickly), and 5 pink wild pear (1 growing).
The gardenia in the picture is a Cape Jasmine (gardenia jasminoides). Of all the seeds I've planted, and that number is probably pushing 1000, it is by far the easiest and most successful seed to plant. And like I showed in the picture, 10 months later I have a 2-3 foot tall flowering gardenia. What would that cost to buy? $40-50? A pack of 30 seeds ran me $3 off of Amazon.
Tips or tricks? It's all preparation. For these particular gardenias, I scuffed each seed up with 150 grit sand paper. All you have to do is run one edge of the seed over the sand paper a couple times to scratch it up. Then I put the seeds in a cup of warm water for 24 hours. You will notice seeds sinking to the bottom...those are most likely viable seeds (not always though). After 24 hours you will probably see some seeds still floating. Those are probably empty seeds. A lot of people just toss those out but I plant them too...you never know!! After 24 hours time to plant!! I use 1 part sphagnum moss, 1 part vermiculite. I avoid perlite for my seeds because I caught a couple seeds that were trapped under some large perlite and they couldn't sprout and died. Gardenias are sown 1/4 below the surface. I just poked holes with a pencil using the eraser side dropped the seeds and covered them up. You want to try and keep the soil around 70 degrees. A heating pad is great or a warm windowsill. After that just keep the soil moist and in 30 days or so you will have little baby pac-man gardenias springing up everywhere!!
**Important note to planting seeds: ** All seeds have a built in ability called "geotropism" which enables them to orient themselves to gravity so their roots grow down. If you plant the seed upside down it has to expend a lot of energy turning itself around, weakening it. More than likely it will still sprout but why put the seed through unnecessary stress? So you want to locate the radicle of the seed and plant that part down or on it's side a bit. That is the place where the seed was attached to the plant and is easy to see. Now the root goes straight down and your baby seedling pops up strong.
