gardening

Improving vegetable seed germination with chemical pretreatment

Some vegetable seeds, particularly many exotic chilli pepper varieties and some Asian eggplants are tricky to germinate. After trying the obvious things - cold-induced forced dormancy (cold stratification), abundant moisture, high humidity, and temperatures over 80F, I’ve found that some seeds simply do not germinate with much success at all. But having read a number of articles on this problem, we decided to try an intensive chemical process to see if we could achieve better results.