After realizing my mistake with the first attempt at growing Japanese Indigo seedlings, I tried again. On April 25th, I laid out some seeds to sprout in damp paper towels. I’ve used this technique with beans before, but I didn’t think to try it with the Japanese indigo seeds until I heard from Laura Harris, a fellow Seed Savers Exchange member to whom I sent some of my seeds earlier in the spring, that she had done it. And ta da! Success!
Here are a couple photos of the seeds once they germinated.
Here are several sprouted seeds placed gently into potting soil (store-bought, free of tomatillo seeds!). After I put them into the pots I covered them with a little more soil:
And here they are popping up on May 3rd:
The newly planted seeds are in the 6-packs on the left, with the darker soil and no vermiculite.
Meanwhile, I started pulling up all the obvious tomatillo seedlings from the 6-packs on the right, and noticed that some of the newer, shorter seedlings looked a little different. The leaves were more round, and the stems a little more pink. In the cell on the lower right you can see one that I’m pretty sure is not a tomatillo. In contrast, in the cell right above it there are some taller tomatillos, and a very short tomatillo. The leaves are pointy. But in the middle of that cell you can see a couple seedlings with rounder leaves:
Could these be my original batch of Japanese indigo seeds finally beginning to sprout? Let’s hope so!