What's up my friends? Welcome back to the show. Today we're taking a question from a

classic, an original gangster, an original gardener of the Epic Gardening

podcast. That would be my friend Phil Koster. He asks, why do viable seeds sink and

non-viable seeds float? Does that hold true for all plants or only certain ones?

Does it still work on old seed packets or does that only work for fresh seeds?

And then he was kind enough to say that he loved the last two series or guests that I had on.

Thank you so much for that, Phil. Okay, so the quick answer here is that it all depends, right? So some seeds just float because they float. Every single one of those seeds pretty much will float. Things that come to mind for me,

oftentimes charred or beat seeds will float and they just have a structure in which they are

buoyant, so they float. A general rule of thumb though, and that's why

Phil is asking the question is that when you're doing a germination test, especially when you're

soaking your seeds, you want to remove the ones that are floating out of the batch because the chances are high that they will not germinate.

And so let's think about this for a second.

What makes things float? Well, density. The more dense

that something is, the less likely it is to float. And so if something does float, say a

seed, there are a few reasons why that might happen. Number one, they might lack viable

embryos. They might not have for some reason or another they may have not

developed the structures within the seed. That means that there's nothing there which means that they will

float because they are less dense right maybe they don't have enough nutrient

stores let's say in the case of a bean or something like that.

Now they simply might have some air pockets inside and that doesn't necessarily mean that they

are a bad seed.

That doesn't mean that they're not going to germinate for sure.

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