sooby said:To break seed dormancy the seeds need to have some internal moisture or they won't respond. If they don't have seed dormancy then they won't benefit from stratification. The same seed may possibly have seed dormancy at one point and not at another because seed dormancy can wear off in storage.
It's quite possible that people who dry refrigerate actually did not have seed dormancy, so the refrigeration was just storage. In studies even seeds from evergreen species benefited from moist stratification by germinating faster and more evenly. That latter is really the key, daylily seeds will germinate eventually regardless but some may take a long time, weeks or months if not damp chilled prior to starting You can't tell by looking at them or necessarily from their parentage.
It's quite possible that some people do not have daylily seeds that have seed dormancy. So you will get varying answers. In some cases the seeds are germinating despite what was done to them rather than because of.
Experiments were done in the 1950s as noted in the article on Rich Howard's website, as well as for that Daylily Journal article. In both cases a proportion of seeds germinated immediately without stratification so not all seeds in the batches had seed dormancy even though the parent (in the case of the DJ article) was a "dormant".and the seeds were selfed.
Storage and stratification are not the same thing. Refrigerator dry storage is to prolong the length of time the seeds remain viable, damp cold stratification is to break seed dormancy.
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