LIFE OF SEEDS.

Waipa Post, Volume IV, Issue 156, 22 October 1912, Page 4

LIFE OF SEEDS.

HOW LONG DOES IT ENDURE ?

Interesting tests on the vitality of seeds were commenced some sixteen years ago by the botanist of the Royal Agricultural Society of England. He made a collection of forty-three sorts of seeds from the harvest of 1895, including half-a-dozen cereals, seventeen grasses, a dozen clavers, half a dozen turnips, and allied plants. The samples were put in paper bags, which were kept in the close-fitting drawers of a cabinet. Every year the samples were taken out and tests made. In the case of cereals, the germination of barley and wheat was very little affected during the first five years. After that, however, they could only be got to sprout with greater and greater difficulty. In ten years not a single seed remained alive. Oats were little the worse in nine years, but by the end of the fourteenth year there was not a. white oat surviving. Two years later the last of the black oats failed to respond. The experience with grass seeds was that the different varieties passed out of life between their eighth and thirteenth year. Of the cLovers' no red seed was alive in the eleventh year, and other varieties did not last much longer. Turnip seed lost its vitality in the thirteenth year.