Every year you spray pre-emergent weed killer on your field crops and rogue out any weeds that come through.  Every year…there are no weeds in the field.  You would think that over the years the supply of viable weed seed in a particular field would eventually diminish into non-existence.  

Yeah right…..the one year that one of your sprayer nozzles clog, when spraying that pre-emergence weed killer, you get to see all the weed seeds just waiting for you to slip up and immediately germinate and grow in the one row that you missed. 

Why do all those weed seeds stay viable over such a long period of time when the seed from commercial seed lots, even when stored in the most ideal conditions, seem to lose vigor and viability faster than we’d like?

Dormancy is the answer.

Certain plant species have survived over the centuries because they have developed mechanisms to germinate over a long period of time, or only under certain environmental conditions.  This increases the species probability that at least some of the seeds will germinate at the time when conditions are ideal for plant growth and reproduction.  Here are a couple of dormancy types that enable seeds to survive naturally in the soil, and also the ways that seedsman have devised to break that dormancy…opening the physiological door.

Next, we’ll talk about “Seed Shelf Life – Things are Happening Inside that Seed Sitting on the Shelf.” 

Keith
k.kubik@hmclause.com