Germinating Cantaloupe Seeds
Do you ever test-germinate your seeds to see how good they are?
We bought a cantaloupe from a local farmer's market a few weeks ago, and
I saved the seeds. I put the slimy gooey seeds into a bowl, filled it
with water, discarded all the ones that floated to the top and just kept
the ones that stayed at the bottom of the bowl. Then I dried them on
some newspaper. Even after discarding the floaty seeds, I probably
still have well over a hundred seeds. I'm definitely not going to plant
all of them and I'm sure they will go "bad" in a few years, long before
I get around to ever using them all up, either personally or through
seed trading. But before I considered allocating garden space to these
seeds and/or trading them away, I wanted to make sure that these seeds
were good.
So I placed about a dozen seeds on a sheet of wet paper towel, loosely
wrapped them up and put the whole thing in a ziploc bag. I left the
ziploc part open for ventilation, and placed the bag in my grow box.
About five days later, this is what they looked like:
Every single one of the seeds germinated! Not only that, the roots were
really starting to develop, with some of them growing through the
double-ply paper towel and coming out on the bottom. Since I don't know
the variety of the parent cantaloupe, I probably won't plant very many
of them. But it's good to know that these seeds are good!
Before you ask, no, I did not save these seedlings, because our
indoor grow box
is definitely not big enough to grow melons in over the winter. It's
always difficult throwing perfectly good seedlings away, but they served
their experimental purpose, and went to go rest (permanently) in the
compost pile.
Chinese Elm seedling: Mr. Nature
