beckygardener said:
How about shrinkage. If they shrink down to a small percentage of what they were when collected from the pod, would that be another indicator of a non-viable seed?
It would depend how much they shrank, I guess. I remember some quite shriveled and wrinkled seeds surprising me by germinating without even plumping up but presumably there is a limit.
beckygardener said:Is drying them out for 3 days possibly too long? I had read in the article above that you leave them out for about a day and then bag, tag, and put them in the fridge.
I had a quick look at the article, I got the impression he was harvesting them and immediately bagging and refrigerating? Maybe I missed the reference to one day. Anyway, to answer the question, no three days isn't too long. In the original daylily seed germination experiments by Dr. Robert Griesbach back in the 1950's he air-dried daylily seeds for 2 to 4 weeks in one experiment and they were fine. He generally stored the seeds at room temperature in paper bags until needed for his experiments, although some for later experiments were stored at 50F to prolong storage viability. They would then have been re-hydrated and refrigerated to stratify before being started in the experiments.. Dry room temp storage may not work for you in your climate (too warm and humid which is not good for seed storage), though - he was in Chicago.
What Whatley appeared to be doing was stratifying immediately by refrigerating while the seeds were still plump from the pod. They may have contained enough internal moisture for chilling to be effective in breaking seed dormancy (if there was any). So you're probably looking at the difference between immediate stratification versus drying for longer storage prior to stratification.
