A meat tray below with eight more paper potted seedlings. These were the first to sprout of the 100 seeds I used for germination testing. These sprouted between five and six weeks of cold moist stratification in the refrigerator between moist paper towel. I did have to replace the paper towel twice as it became nasty looking and started to mold.
In the picture below you can see the seed leaves as well as the first true leaves on these hops seedlings. These seedlings are about 2 weeks old out of the sprouting baggie and growing fast.
At 7 weeks I had to pot up 8 more. At 8 weeks I had to make up a whole flat of 36 pots as a large number of additional seeds sprouted. At 9 weeks more seeds are still sprouting which puts the germination rate at about 50%, and I have no doubt this number will push higher in the coming weeks as I can see the seed root pushing out of the seeds in the paper towel. If I were to count the ones I need to pot up that are currently in the paper towel (need to get more pots made up) then my germination rate is about 75% at nine weeks. While this is a little longer than I expected, it is quite welcome to the less than 15% germination rate of directly planted seeds with no stratification.See also our entry on growing hops from seed: http://infinitegardens.blogspot.com/2008/03/growing-hops-from-seed.html
