Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Science/2022 March 23

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March 23

Gardening vegetable seeds.

Activation of seeds: I'm so shocked at how you can just buy vegetable seeds in a plastic bag at a store. And they say the bag can be left on the shelf for a year, and you can still grow the vegetable seeds. Then when are seeds actually activated, shortly after being put in the soil? And most of the instructions say to put the seeds like .5 to 2 inches below the soil. Which is a no sunlight zone. Seeds don't need sunlight? Then, once a seed is activated, I don't presume you can put it back in the same plastic bag you bought it from? 67.165.185.178 (talk) 22:18, 23 March 2022 (UTC).

See Germination. The article discusses the conditions that seeds need to germinate. --Modocc (talk) 22:28, 23 March 2022 (UTC)

Ah, so water it is. 67.165.185.178 (talk) 22:50, 23 March 2022 (UTC).

Just as an aside, seeds don't generally need sunlight to survive, they have a store of carbohydrates, in the form of starch, that gets quickly converted to readily available sugars which the young plant feeds on while growing until it can start to photosynthesize. That large storage of starch is why we use many seeds as cereal grains. The store of starch is called the Endosperm, and is usually the bulk of what makes up the seed, the actual embryo itself being a very small part of it. Enzymes within the endosperm convert the starches to sugars when they get wet, initiating the process of germination; if kept dry and away from pests, many seeds keep more-or-less indefinitely on the scale of human lifetimes; the Oldest viable seeds are on the order of thousands of years old. --Jayron32 14:38, 24 March 2022 (UTC)

This article, from 14 years ago, says the oldest seed to germinate was about 2,000 years old. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 01:45, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

The Millennium Seed Bank is "an underground collection of over 2.4 billion seeds from around the world, banking them to conserve them for the future". [1] Alansplodge (talk) 11:33, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

In the wild, as both I and Bugs noted above, the oldest viable seeds are about 2000 years old. If conditions can be properly maintained, places like the Millenium Seed Bank should be able to keep seeds viable for much longer than even that. --Jayron32 11:49, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

Since it wasn't mentioned you, might also be interested in reading about Recalcitrant seeds, which are seeds that cannot be stored for very long, perhaps only 2 years. Note that such seeds can't be frozen or simply cryopreserved either so attempts at long term preservation like with the various seed banks is an active area of research. Note that the classification is a functional one, the reason why such seeds cannot survive storage has some variability as our article mentions. Our article also mentions an intermediate category intermediate seeds which survive a bit longer and perhaps more importantly for where this is of interest can survive simple cryopreservation. Nil Einne (talk) 00:47, 30 March 2022 (UTC)