How long to give a seed to crack?

I dropped 4 seeds in water, three sunk. one didn’t. i put it in a paper towel anyway. the three that sunk are all sporting tap roots, the one that didn’t sink is still holding strong. how long do you give them in the paper towel before giving up?

Many people don’t even bother with paper towels.

I try to give seeds 7 days before I start fretting. However, I only soak for 12-24 hours, then put them into Rooters, whether or not they’ve cracked. They can take up to 2 weeks, but that’s rare.

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ok thanks. that’s way longer than i thought so good to know. i already fretted and put another in a glass just in case.

i like the paper towel so i can kinda see what’s going on and if they made it through the first step or not. so far the others from my first grow and three of these all sprouted tap roots right away so was never concerned about the “what if”.

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@blackthumbbetty has you covered it Has taken over a week for some or longer and 24 hrs for others

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well i may have an extra plant on my hands. oh … damn?

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turns out i only needed to wait a few more minutes lol. cracked right after i dropped a fifth seed.

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@KinSEDC… CONGRATULATIONS!!!

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thanks! but… it was premature. turns out my eyes suck lol. thought it cracked but not yet. the replacement already popped its tail out and is in soil, so hooray for that! we’ll see if this one does at some point.

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I’ve had seeds in water/peroxide for 6 days before a tail shows. Thicker seed husk I imagine. You can drag the seed across an emory board to score the seed husk which will speed it up. My current seedling took 3 days.

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Most seeds seem to germ within 2-4 days, it seems. That sound about right, to you, from what you’ve seen in your grows and on the forum?

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if you’re asking me, this is only my second grow and figured i got pretty lucky with my first and was just a matter of time before i hit one that didn’t pop right away. i was 100% with three different methods, including plopping three directly into soil outside. i wasn’t sure if it was myth or not that those that don’t sink won’t crack at all. but, we’ll see with this last one. good to know they can take time so i don’t fret so much.

Yeah; absolutely.

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They do make magnifying glasses for a reason. For some reason our mom kept the lens to one and I found it in her belongings. I use it all the time when dealing with seeds to plant. My vision isn’t great. :joy::joy::joy:

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Well… i guess i didn’t realize my eyes weren’t great! I finally had to get glasses for close up but i guess there’s now another distance that I can’t quite see. weed is teaching me all sorts of things about myself :roll_eyes:

aaand i just bought a magnifying glass. god that’s depressing. :sweat:

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@Agrestic It’s not depressing. We use all kinds of gadgets to grow and I’ve yet see one post about using a magnifying glass to really look at things. Now THAT is depressing.

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I use my loupe all the time. And not just for checking trichomes.

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I said magnifying glass…not a jeweler loupe. Definitely not the same thing. I can’t use a magnifying glass to look at this and get a real good idea how it looks under a magnifying glass…I could with a loupe.

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Hey @Myfriendis410. which jewelers loupe do you use? Is it adjustable or have different settings? Just curious …

i bought a few but this one works best with my iphone for taking pics with the 30x. the 60x is useless for me. i zoom in a little on my computer before saving the images. higher powered ones were much harder to focus and the depth of field gets so shallow.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B078N34WZR/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1