08/18/2026
If you’re struggling with germinating your starts for fall planting here’s how we get almost 100% germination in our fall sown hardy annuals and perennials:
It’s time to start cold hardy plants for fall planting but we’re still in the heat of summer and a lot of cold hardy plants prefer a period of cold to break dormancy.
That period of cold is a process known as cold stratification.
A lot of people just store their seeds in the freezer and call that their cold stratification period but seeds prefer to go through that cold period in moisture, as it mimics how they would be in nature in the cold damp earth.
We cold stratify our seeds by sowing our seeds into trays and keeping them in the cooler for a week or two depending on time (before our cooler we had a fridge dedicated to this).
You can sow your seeds without this step but I will warn you now that germination will be much lower and much more sporadic.
Perennials and biennials are more picky when it comes to requiring a period of cold stratification, however a lot of cold hardy annuals will still germinate fine if they don’t recieve it.
After a couple weeks in the freezer we’ll pop our trays onto our seed starting rack with a humidity dome to germinate - our shop is around 22-25 degrees in the summer so it’s the perfect temperature for most seeds to germinate without the need for a heat rack.
They’ll grow on in the shop for a few weeks before getting planted sometime in October!
