I’ve been gardening for a number of years, but I can’t recall another time when I had to wear nitrile gloves to sow seeds.

As mentioned in the prior post, I am interested in germinating a whole bunch of elderberry seeds for inclusion in the food forest.  Today I procured a little vial of wickedly strong sulfuric acid, which I used to scarify the elder seeds I collected over the weekend.  The little glass vial of acid was housed inside a secondary containment vessel, which my chemist friend assured me was required by the Department of Transportation in order for the chemical to be safely transported.

In addition to the acid, my chemist friend shared a whole bunch of wisdom about materials handling, safety protocols, and the like.  I confess I was a little nervous heading into the scarification process – sulfuric acid at this concentration (18 M!) is apparently no joke.  As it turns out, the process was pretty easy, and nary an injury was suffered.

The procedure was fairly straightforward.  I placed perhaps a teaspoon of seeds in a glass…um…glass, added the acid, and set a timer for 10 minutes.  When time was up, I added baking soda – a lot of baking soda – to neutralize the acid, then washed the seeds.

My plan is to set up a little experiment:
Group 1 – untreated seeds planted directly in the garden now, Group 2 –  untreated seeds cold stratified in the refrigerator for 60 days, then planted in the garden, Group 3 – acid scarified seeds planted directly in the garden now, and Group 4 – acid scarified seeds cold stratified in the refrigerator for 60 days and then planted in the garden. According to the research, Group 4 should have the highest germination percentage, so we’ll see.

Given that I had only a very limited supply of sulfuric acid, I decided to throw some allium seeds in the mix, about four seeds each of Bear’s Garlic (Allium ursinum) and Ramps (Allium tricoccum), the latter being notoriously difficult to germinate.  Though I’ve never read anything about using acid to scarify ramps seeds, the citizen scientist in me figured it was worth a shot.  I would love it if either of these alliums would naturalize in the food forest, but I’m not holding my breath – I haven’t yet found a variety that wants to really take hold and come back year after year in my particular conditions.  The closest I’ve got is a small patch of garlic chives (Allium tuberosum) that finally flowered this year after 5+ years in the ground in the garden proper.  I’m thinking of dividing them later in the fall and moving half out to a partly shady area in the forest.  In other allium news, my onions should arrive in the mail any day now…