Would it be possible to purchase daylily seeds after they have been stratified, for shorter or faster growing times.

They get soft and squishy during damp cold stratification. The Post Office would mash them up on their way to you and they would all be dead.

That said, some that have just had cold without the damp can take off right away after arrival. I just tried some as I am in a hurry. All my bonus seeds from that vendor germinated within a couple days!

The ones I am interested in though have done nothing. As I have discussed with others it seems to be entirely cross dependent. Not all crosses will act the same way at all, despite the generic dogma.

My advice - split your seeds. Put half to cold damp stratification and test the other half right away. Then you cover all eventualities.

plasko20 said: They get soft and squishy during damp cold stratification. The Post Office would mash them up on their way to you and they would all be dead.

Seeds that go through cold damp stratification are not suppose to turn mushy, if they do they are not viable seeds. Good seed that are cold damp stratified should be black, shiny, plump and hard. When they are exposed to room temperatures they should start to sprout, normally in about 10 to 14 days. Some do often take longer, and they should all sprout (by cultivar) about the same time.

That is not my experience at all.
When doing my most recent experiment with over 150 seeds of a specific cross rather than bury them I decided to instead just gently press them into the top of soil after stratification. That way any that did not germinate I could scoop up for a second round if I could see them easily. Impossible if buried.

However, upon my gentle pressing many exploded. The ones I did not press down upon after I learned not to do that, germinated fine.

The chances of me picking only 'bad' ones to press down upon would be small.

Perhaps it is my method of stratification, involving a small time in diluted peroxide (10mins) prior to going in the fridge for 4-6 weeks. This might degrade the seed shell?

@plasko20
I am in the process of germinating 30 seeds of a purchased cross. I agree with Larry @Seedfork. The seeds arrived here wrinkled and shrunken. I put them into moistened paper towels and the towels into sandwich baggies in the vegetable crisper of the fridge. No peroxide soak - which I thought was supposed to replace cold moist stratification? After 30 days the seeds were plump but none had sprouted. One had some mould (threw it out ). They have been kept at room temperature for seven days now and they are sprouting. I will be potting up some of them tomorrow and leaving the others to continue germinating. I would have thought that for a seed to explode when pressed into the soil surface it would have been dead or died while in the fridge and rotted inside its seed coat.

Interesting, thanks for sharing.
For me, the peroxide is also to help sanitize the perlite and baggy within which the seeds are going to be stratified. Despite this, an indicator of contamination for me is that the perlite turns a yellowy/brown color after stratification and placement to room temperature, and those seeds will be mushy due to contamination. If it stays pure white, it is a good sign all is well.

But even many of the good ones will no longer pass the "squish test", I think.
I have a ton of spare seeds I can test this with, actually.
I can do the squish-test before and after cold damp stratification splitting the seeds into experimental groups, if I remember. If they explode in my fingers using the same pressure as when they were dry, I will be able to ascertain that.

I like the idea of the paper towels, but again would probably need peroxide to sanitize them first (or perhaps I can microwave them just before use, or use a UV-lamp?). Or do you guys have a source of sterile paper towels?

My assumption is that paper towels are sterile in comparison to the seeds. I would assume that viable seeds collected when they are mature from the pod are usually also sterile in terms of pathogens. The paper towels, baggies, envelopes I use are just normal goods - no special treatment by me and I re-use envelopes that have held daylily seeds before.

Perlite turning yellowy brown to me would be a shocking sign of contamination and rot. Usually if a seed is not viable it develops white fungus growth. I would think that it might then discolour when rotting and I would guess that could cause the perlite to also discolour but I would think that is at a later stage in the rotting process. The seeds would probably have become nonviable long before then.

My basic assumption is that the fungi and bacteria that might grow on a daylily seed would most likely do so because the seed is not viable. In which case the microorganisms are not pathogens but saprophytes and are living off the dead seed but did not cause its death.