frustration over sterile seeds - advice? Jap. Maple.

This question deals specifically with maple seeds, but I thought I would get input in this forum. I spent most of the day harvesting some Japanese maple seeds, only to get home and find out that more than half are sterile. I was able to visually separate out the obviously sterile ones - too small or flat to contain enough seed starting matter. I then did some cut tests on the ones that looked big and fat, and found that a good number of those were also sterile. In some cases, 1 in 10 of great looking seeds turned out to have green solid embryos. Can anyone explain to me why the tree doesn't just abort the sterile seeds? Why go through all the trouble of creating the wings and everything? Is there an easier way to tell which seeds will be good?

Just to give you an idea of what I mean, I took a photo. The bottom seed was one I visually discarded as sterile - cut test later backed me up on these. The top two seeds both look great to me, but only one is viable. Am I missing something?

Beaker.... A friend has a vry wide Japanes Maple and it send sseed to the groudn all over the place. Nobody gathers the seed up, we just let it stay there and soon there will be hundreds of tiny seedlings popping up all over the place then we all race liek fools to dig up the little seedlings.

You might ask the gang over on the tree and shrub forum. Lots of experts there for everythign to do with trees.

hmm, now to try to figure out how to transfer the message. Thanks, Starlight. It seems every time I hear one of those stories, it is always in another state! lol

I just picked a bunch of Japenese Maple seeds off of a tree. I picked them in the green to brown stage, so wil be interestign to see what happens. They are plump.

If ya don't figure out how to to copy and paste it, then holler and will help ya.

I've spent the last two days doing more float and cut tests on these. About 5% sank immediately in the float test, but some of those were flat. The non-flat ones were viable. After 24 hours, almost half sank, but a batch of those proved to be sterile when I cut them in half.

In a way, I feel a bit better about all the failed attempts to grow japanese maple seeds. I didn't do a cut test on them, so they may have been sterile to begin with. All the fighting I did with mold, etc. may not have been what the problem was.

Good luck with the seeds, starlight. Cut a few in half and check them out. It may save you a bit of frustration down the line.

Hey, here's a topic I actually know about. From my extremely first hand experience, there a a couple keys to getting good viable seed from a palmatum. First, if you want the seeds to grow on for grafting, go for small seed, green palmatum. The small seeds actually graft much easier than the large seed, for what reason, I don't know, but all of my customers who graft swear by it. Second, if you aren't picking a straight green palmatum, you will have a hard time finding good seed. A cultivar or sport is a genetic variation of the green or red seedling, they typically don't produce good seed and more than likely will not grow true to the tree it came from. They like to revert back to straight green or red palmatum, that's why there's so many palmatum varieties, it's unstable. If you want good seed, cut the seed before you start picking, and if the cut is bad, go for another tree and save your time. 90% cut is not uncommon on green palmatum. The best time to pick is after the seed stem dries, that way you know the seed is fully charged. The easy way to do it is wait for the leaves to fall and pick whats left on the tree, it will normally hang for a while and a lot of the blanks will fall off in the mean time. Good luck.

Oh by the way, the picture in my last note, was what happens when you are growing "bloodgood" seedlings and a seed collector switches seed source on you. We've grown hundreds of thousand of these over the years and always had the same seed source that came true red/purple every year with less than 1% green in it. This last year we had 25% green and needless to say had to call BS on the collectors seed source being the same. All palmatum want to revert to a green seedling, even though these greens had a cool purple marinated leaf. Your little red seed in your picture, that's the seed I would want if I had a choice.

Thanks, johnny! The pictures were great. The little red seed in my picture turned out to be sterile. It was nice to see that so many of the bloodgood seeds did come true to form. It also wasn't aware of the smaller green seeds being better for grafting. I was just going to graft with any bloodgoods that came out green. What size cell are you using? I was using 144, but I'm not sure if they are happy with that, or if they just weren't getting enough sun in that spot. I had planned to transfer them when they got to a certain size, but they stayed almost a bonsai size after 6 months.

I have one more source tree I can try, but it didn't stay as red during the summer months, so I was thinking about bypassing it. Only part of it was in full sun, though.

Alright, as far as grafting goes, your success with the reverted red seeds can be bad also. Based on my growers bad experience with reverted red seedlings, we threw out the entire block of greens in that pic because they aren't red and we knew they would graft poorly which would be a disservice to our customers. We grow in 2 7/8" sq x 5 1/2" deep band pots. JM's need air circulation and every tree seedling needs soil volume to make up. In a typical season we can get seedlings to 1/4" caliper and 4' in length. When we water them, we flush them well and let them almost dry completely down, this prevents pseudamonus (however you spell it) from getting in the plant. Never keep them wet. Your little plugs are good for germinating, but I'd transplant them as early as you can. I sew the seed direct to avoid TP losses.

As for your seed source on the reds, the brighter red the wing, the better the color you'll get. But most important, kids look like their parents, so the better looking the tree, the better red you'll get in your seedling. The picture gives you an idea of how we give space, sun and air to palmatum seedlings once they get bigger. The more space, the better your caliper will be.

Looks like a good crop, much success to you!

I was given some sample maple seeds (from a maple grower distributor.) These were in damp coarse sand in a ziploc bag and I was told to cold stratify them before planting. I placed them in the vegetable crisper for winter and planted them in spring. I had great success with 95% of them sprouting and growing.

I guess I missed it somewhere, but how do you tell if the JM see is viable?

the only real way is to do a cut test, but that destroys the seed. I tried carefully removing the outer shell and just germinating/stratifying the green ones, but that didn't work too well. I had a bad case of mold in that batch. The backup method that improves the odds of the seed being viable is if it sinks when put in water. That method isn't 100% accurate, but it doesn't destroy the seed. You may have to soak it for somewhere between 6-36 hours, depending on how dry it was to start with. I've seen different people say different numbers. After a while, you can get a feel for the seeds themselves, and the trees they come from, that will tell you how long to soak for the test.
Does that help?

Yes, that is helpful. I have hundreds of JM seeds I collected this year. It would be really depressing to find that most of them are no good. I need to test them so I don't collect a lot of bad seed next year.

One way to be more sure about the soaking time is to do some cut tests of the floaters. After 6 hours, cut open some of the floaters, 10 or so. I use a straight edge razor in the same way I split pills. If all the floating ones that you cut open are empty, you can stop soaking. If you find a floater that is green, you need to soak longer. I kept all my floaters and used them to mulch a certain area, just in case. I probably had thousands of floaters, about 80% of the seeds.

Thanks for the advice! I will try this and see what I find. I hope they aren't all bad seeds.