From Word To Word

I wrote a post about Manitoulin Island a few years ago, mentioning how I had been picking sandcherries and making syrup with them.  Since then I have made several attempts to grow some sandcherries from seed, with almost no success. One batch of seeds, which I cleaned individually as I ate the cherries, were mistakenly left in the zipper pocket of my swimsuit and put through both the washer and the dryer, so I did not even bother stratifying them.  Another batch, also individually cleaned, went through both stratification and planting, but not a single seed germinated.  I tried to find other people who had successfully germinated them, but without success, so I was forced to work by trial and error.

When seeds do not germinate, there are several possible explanations.  First, the seeds may not be viable, which may be caused by the seeds being harvested too soon; by the parent plant not being properly pollinated; by exposure to environmental factors, like growing too near a juglone producing plant; or by some idiot sending them through the laundry.  Second, the seeds may not be stratified properly, which is to say that they may not have been exposed to the proper cycles of cold and heat that are required for the seed to trigger germination.  Third, they may not have undergone the right environmental factors to break down the seed shell, a process that might involve sitting in moisture for a certain time, going through the digestive system of a certain animal, or even, in some cases, being exposed to forest fire.  These environmental factors can often be approximated, by subjecting the seeds to acids or scarification or heat, but determining which techniques to use is not always easy.

Now, I was pretty sure that at least some of the seeds were viable, because I had taken them from a number of plants in a number of locations, all of which showed seedling growth in subsequent years, and because I was collecting seeds at various stages of maturity, all the way from relatively young fruit to the fruit that had ripened fully and fallen to the ground.  I was also pretty certain that I had stratified them correctly, since I have stratified other varieties of cherries very successfully, and it would be strange for such a similar species to require a double-stratification or something of that nature.  I was left with the probability that the seeds needed additional environmental factors to germinate, and I could count out fire fairly safely.  The plants do, however, grow right on the beach, so it was entirely possible that they needed to be soaked for a good period of time, and many kinds of seeds need to pass through an animal’s digestive system, so I determined to watch carefully this past summer, to see how the seeds were being spread naturally.

My first discovery was that a tremendous number of the cherries were being consumed by the gulls.  The gull droppings were full of seeds, and I was mentally preparing myself for the unpleasant task of digging through bird waste for them, when I made a second discovery, that the gulls often voided over the water, leaving the shallows full of partly digested but washed and soaking seeds.  I gathered several hundred of them, stratified them for four months in a soil mixture that was more sandy and moist than I normally use, and yesterday I planted them.  I have high hopes .