Woad Seed Germination Experiments

In my last post I referred to the germination experiments I did last summer and I went back through old posts so that I could link to the one about woad seeds. However, it turns out that I never wrote about the woad seeds. I spent a long time writing about weld seeds, in the category of “what I did this summer,” then moved on to writing about fall projects.

Here is the belated summary of my woad seed experiments from summer 2011.

I sorted the seeds by color and size. Categories included “black big,” “black small,” “green brown,” “black and gray big,” and “black and green big.” I planted them into little cells with labels.

Here’s a photo of the set up.

overview of woad seed trial

And, in short, they all grew. Oddly, the “black big” took longer to grow.

all woad seeds grew

My conclusion from this experiment was that I didn’t need to sort woad seeds and save only the biggest or darkest in color. Also, you need to plant at least twice as many seeds as the number of plants you want, since in each color-and-size category the germination rate was low. I don’t know whether the appearance of the seed has any relationship to the amount of color a plant produces. I doubt it, but it would be hard to prove.