This is Mike Wellik, the owner of this site. The info on this page had gotten stale so I decided to start over rather than editing the page. Over the years my germination methods have changed. Part of the reason is that I approached germination from a perennial grower’s perspective. I grew hundreds of thousands of various perennials and then started growing alpine strawberries for plant sales. It was always about volume. I over-sowed tray cells with more than one seed to reduce or eliminate cells that we call skips – no seedling in the cell. More recently I started selling seeds to home gardeners and those who grow less plants but I never went back to update my methods.
My methods as of April 2025 are a lot different from methods years ago. I am no longer growing large volumes of plants. I germinate seeds in petri dishes to check seed lots for germination. I also germinate seed that I will use for growing plants for seed saving. For years I used paper towels in the petri dishes but since 2023 I’ve been using course sand. Seedling roots got caught in the paper towels and sometimes broke off the ends of the roots. That’s ok if one is simply checking germination percentages but not good if the plants are intended to grow on. Sand holds the moisture but allows easy removal with tweezers either when simply removing them to count them or removing them to transplant elsewhere.
An added benefit of the use of sand is that issues with fungus gnats that I have fought for years has all but disappeared. I now see a fungus gnat once in a while in my germination area.
The other part of my method for germination is that I am using Jiffy 7C coir pellets almost exclusively for phase two of my germination process. Once the seeds germinate in the petri dish they are moved to one of two places. Either to a Jiffy pellet or to propagation trays, typically 38 cell trays with a 50:50 mix of coir and sand. This is another reason that fungus gnats are no longer a daily battle.
Newly germinated seeds are simply moved with a tweezer from the petri dish to its new destination. Their age ranges from seeds that germinated overnight to seeds that germinated 2 weeks earlier. I have virtually no skips anymore but I think the biggest advantage of these new methods is that the first seeds to germinate are many times if not most times very vigorous. Their progeny tend to be strong plants with quick germination and this is what I want to select for. I believe the seeds I sell now are much more vigorous and robust than seeds I sold 10 years ago.
I’ll mention one more thing that may not seem to be related to germination. I still grow one seedling in a Jiffy pellet. But, I now transfer 3 seedlings to each cell of a 38 cell propagation tray. These large plugs are eventually transplanted to a hydroponic system or to various sized pots. I call this “growing a clump”. A single plant in a pot will form a nice sized clump in a single season but will not be particularly productive that season. I typically transplant 3 plugs from a 38 cell tray into a 10″ pot. That’s 9 plants in that pot the first season. I wouldn’t say that 10″ pot produces 9 times more fruit than when growing a single plant but it is way more than double the productivity. I’m actually doing some testing on this now in 2025. Stay tuned. I hope to create a page on alpine strawberry productivity soon.