Temperature and Seed Germination

I am one of those people who like to see results as quickly as possible.  I guess I have gotten used to our modern world where everything is now now now!  We hate to wait.  This is especially true for me and my garden stuffs.  I want it to be as fabulous as possible and I want that fabulousness to be right away.  Sometimes it can be frustrating starting your garden from seed because it takes so much longer for it to get that full and thriving look.  The gratification is not as instant as putting in plants that are already developed.

If you are planting from seed and you want the fastest results possible, then I suggest that you pay attention to the temperatures that you sow your seeds.  Different plants have optimum temperatures that allows for faster germination as well as a greater likelihood for emergence.  I found the following chart at this website and I have found it quite useful when starting my seeds.

For each plant, the first number represents the percentage of seeds that successfully emerged.  So, looking at the first vegetable, asparagus, you can see that at 32 & 41 degrees, no plants emerged.  At 50 degrees 61% of the plants emerged.  The second number in parentheses represents the number of days it took the seeds to emerge.  So at 50 degrees it took 53 days for the plants to pop up.  Way too long, if you ask me.  For each plant one of the numbers in parentheses is red.  This represents the optimum temperature in terms of speed of emergence as well as the highest success rate of emergence.  Make sense?  So if I wanted to grow asparagus, my best bet for having quickly sprouting plants would be to keep them around 77 degrees, and about ten days later...pop!  I should be seeing some little plants poking their heads up.  I find this useful especially when putting my seeds in their jiffy seed starters.  I try to keep seeds with like temperatures together to so I can monitor how warm or cool they are.  So far, it's been working.  My plants that took the longest to sprout were my peppers.  Compared to how quickly everything else was popping up, waiting over a week for those little guys felt like forever.  But now my seeds have all sprouted and it is just a matter of time before I transition them into their forever homes - the garden boxes.