Rewilding My Lot

Last year I attempted to germinate Texas Mountain Laurel seeds. I had no success, but supposedly this is not unusual. They are very hard seeds that in nature take years to germinate.

My son (Dan Rossiter) did some of his own research and found a method that for him has a high rate of success, so I am experimenting to see if I can replicate his results myself.

From a friend’s mature Texas Mountain Laurel tree in July, I picked several seed pods. I took pods from the branches, not the ground. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to deal with them immediately, so I put the bag in the freezer for three days.

First, the seeds were released from the pods, which was easily done with the gentle use of nutcrackers. The yield was 35 good seeds, 4 rotten seeds, and one that I accidentally crushed with the nutcrackers.

Texas Mountain Laurel seeds are very hard and the outer coating has to be broken in order to admit water and oxygen. Scratching or cracking a seed to allow germination is called scarification. In nature, that would primarily occur by temperature fluctuation cycles (freeze/thaw), or by animal or bird intervention during eating and elimination.

The next step was to very carefully snip off a tiny piece of the red outer seed coating without damaging the pale soft inner part. Believe it or not, the tool for this part was the clippers that I normally use to cut cat claws! Almost all the seeds had one end that was obviously narrower than the other, and that is the end that I clipped.

The yield after that process was 30 intact seeds and 5 where I had accidentally nicked the inside of the seed with the clippers.

The germination step was done in a way that could be monitored, before the seeds were ready to be placed in soil. This environment needs to be moist and dark, so I created a little incubator with two plastic trays as base and lid. Inside was a damp towel on which the seeds were placed, and then a damp paper towel was laid on top. After a few more squirts of water the lid was closed and the seeds checked once a day. I separated the five seeds that I had nicked, so that I could see if that damage affected germination in comparison to the others.

Here’s where there was one key difference in my protocol vs. Dan’s: He was sandwiching his seeds between two damp layers of paper towel, whereas my base layer was a wet towel and I made the environment even wetter with extra squirts of water.

I checked the seeds every day, and there was indeed germination with most of them within a week. However, in my more moist environment, I had a significant growth of mold on the seeds as well.

After seven days of incubation, I discarded 7 of the 35 seeds because there was no growth and I thought their mold was too much. The others I gently wiped and transferred to a clean and slightly less moist environment. At that point, there were 21 germinating seeds (including two that had been nicked during scarification), and a further 7 that were not yet showing any signs of germination.

The next step was to transfer the germinated seeds to pots of soil. I’ll write about that in another post.