The Trick to Grow Lavender from Seed

Hi again, it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm. About three years ago I did a video on how to grow lavender by seed and I have to say I think I did a pretty good job uncovering the basics, the planting depth, the temperature, the humidity to get good germination on lavender, but I missed the most important point or at least didn't emphasize enough that the quality and freshness of the seed that you use will make the difference between getting a full tray of germination and just getting a few sporadic plugs like I'll be able to show you here. So that's going to rectify in this video. I'll go back through the basics of germinating lavender, but I want to talk first about those suppliers you can trust and how you know you can trust them. Getting right to it, I'm putting up a list now of four different commercial suppliers that I personally have tried and found their lavender seed to be of super high quality. The first one on the list is Gelido, then Geoseeds, Hazards, and then also William Damseeds here in Canada. The reason I've chosen commercial suppliers as opposed to say retail suppliers like the people who sell on Amazon, Etsy, eBay, and of course off your seed rack at your local hardware store is that these guys have a duty to their customers, the big commercial growers, to make sure that they've tested the germination on their seeds and they're offering the freshest seed. They also have a special class of seeds that they offer called primed seed. With Gelido, that's going to be called their gold nugget seed, I believe. On the other three, it'll be called apex seed from the ultimate supplier, Benery, which means that they've prepared these seeds for fast germination and that only works if they are sown fresh, like within the first six months after you've purchased the seeds. If they've been sitting on that seed rack or at that eBay supplier for a couple of years, you're going to get sporadic germination and I have just the thing to prove that to you. In my previous lavender video you would have seen, and I'll throw in the clip now, sometimes I got two or three per cell of germination. This spring I used up some old in this tray here. I'll get you a close-up of this as well. I didn't do this because I was trying to get bad germination, it's just I had an old seed packet hanging around and figured well I have lots of lavender in the greenhouse, I'll just throw these into a tray and see what I get. I'll give you the close-up here and you can see that as opposed to getting two or three per cell, I was not getting one per cell. It's less than less than half the tray has germinated and maybe I got the odd one that was two per cell but it really was not a high germination rate and that's just because it was stored in my hands for an extra year after buying the seed. So fresh seed and high quality seed makes the biggest difference. Getting down to the seeding method here, on the left here these are the lavender seeds and I've just for comparison put some lupin seeds on the right here which are a medium to large size seed. These lavender seeds are much much smaller so when it comes to the plug tray here you can see that in a big cell tray like this that if I were to dibble a big hole in the center and drop it in there it'd be easy for that little seed to get lost so that's not what I want to do. If anything if I dibble it all I just make a little divot in the center and then just drop a seed in the top there and by the way I like to use these open face plastic trays like these that I just rake the potting soil across into quite loosely and what you'll note is that if I press on one of these I can actually press it down by quite a lot put a lot of compression into it but I haven't I've just loose raked it into here and that's taking advantage of the engineered qualities of these potting mixes. The potting mixes are meant to have lots of air and lots of moisture holding capacity and when you press them down like that it loses both of those and becomes a much harder thing for the young seedling to put its little roots down into so you get faster root development and better seedlings if you don't have to press it so hard together like you would with an open system like the soil blocks so not bad mulching that system but I like this for better root development as for the potting soil itself if you went peat and perlite based coconut fiber based bark mulch based any of those will do the the deal as long as they're engineered as a potting mix or a seeding mix without too much fertilizer in the mix you don't want that in there right away to burn the roots of the young seedlings temperature humidity and light temperature around 20 degrees celsius or thereabouts a little bit warmer is fine but probably a seedling heating mat usually is quite a bit warmer than that so I wouldn't recommend that regular household temperatures should probably do the job a lot of big deal is often made about how much light they need actually that has not been my experience you sow them at the surface anyway so they're bound to get some light but I've germinated them in complete darkness in my germination chamber and hasn't made any difference and oftentimes there's a big deal made about putting them into the fridge or stratifying the seeds for some length of time I find that that is only an issue if you're dealing with those old or poor germination seeds so if I took that tray that I had the poor germination in pulled out the plugs now the ones that have germinated and then put it into the fridge I might get some subsequent germination but from my point of view it's always just a better deal for me in terms of time and effort to work with the fresh seed and get germination so under those temperatures and surface zone give them good humidity you should get germination within about two to three weeks of your lavender seeds and if you didn't you probably aren't working with very good seeds all right that's all I have to say on the topic I hope that was useful to you and if you have any questions about germinating any seeds or about lavender in general please drop those into the comments below the video and I'll see what I can do to help