Sulfuric Acid Seed Scarification 

Not strong enough. But a bottle of sulfuric acid is less than $10 at Walmart and sold as a drain cleaner. Just keep something on hand to neutralize it and don't get it on marble/granite/concrete/metal unless you are okay having some of that eaten away by acid.

Nitric acid can be used, but I don't know enough about it. Nitric acid is harder to buy in our county under fear of making weapons. Nitrate and sulfate are both macro nutrients in plants.

The SDS puts it around 45% by weight. But I've done this with 98% sulfuric acid before. Odds are that there are research papers for whatever seed you plan on scarifying and you can try to mimic their procedure.

ANGeL GeARs 😂😂😂

Probs about 90-98% germination. After the scarification, I soak them in water. If they don't swell, I don't plant them because I know they didn't lose enough seed coat. There are numerous methods for that hydropriming stage. It speeds up germination even more. Soak any seed too long without enough oxygen and you'll kill them. But generally any seed can handle a few hours. There are methods that involve incredibly dilute fertilizer. There are methods that involve bubbling in oxygen with a fish aerator which can let some seeds soak for well over a day. And of course, you could just skip the priming and go straight to planting, but priming helps seeds come up more uniformly and in fewer days. My sprouts popped out of the soil in 3-5 days, no priming would probably be 2 weeks depending on soil moisture and temperature.

@@thecountrychemist2561 wow that's hi success rate. Do the seeds need any cold stratification, Also, do you recall whether did you used seeds from pale gray or dark brown pods? Darker is older, wondering if that's better or worse

@@Jason-Spice I just picked up any seed pods I could find and treated the seeds I removed. I did it with the dark ones, I did it with the light ones. I mixed them together so I can't tell you if one is better than the other, but it seems like there is no substantial difference. I prefer the dark ones since they crumble in my hands. I found that piling up seeds pods until they rot (not a wet rot), gets them to that dark stage faster, but it is just as easy for me to just grab the red seeds off the ground next to these trees since they pile up over the years. I will smash a bin filled with the dark pods and shake the bin. Typically the dried up, broken pods will rise to the surface while the seeds will settle on the bottom. You can also try water to separate them. If the pods are quite dry, they should mostly float while the healthy seeds sink, but I have not experimented with the floating and I don't want to encourage a mess. Of course, I did this with several thousands of seeds. I cared about speed. If you have less than 100, you might not care so much. With numerous seeds, you could plant them even earlier, but it requires a lot of effort on your end. In seed development, seeds typically mature before they dry. You can grab a green pod, cut it open since the flesh of the pod is still soft, and cut the seed coat while the seed is still "green". It doesn't harden until later. Do this too early, and the seed isn't mature yet. Do it too late, and you just have "normal" seeds. Due to various stratification requirements for many plants, this definitely isn't easy to apply to many species, but it generally works fine. But I don't like the timer it puts me on. I prefer to just soak the seeds in acid and be done with it. 10-20 minutes if you're stirring constantly. 20-30 minutes if you are not. In a course, we soaked those seeds for 2 hours and they still germinated. They are pretty hardy. Can't get away with that with something like a Texas Blue Bonnet, which also needs scarification.

The floaters have a higher tendency to not germinate. If you do an initial soak before getting to the acid, you can remove those floaters early. But you'll see them floating when you dilute and neutralize the acid as well. Be very cautious to NOT put wet seeds in with the sulfuric acid. Concentrated acids being diluted is incredibly exothermic. I have gotten my seeds pretty hot for very short time periods because I wasn't patient. Too much heat and you will kill them. Plants generally die before 130F due to membranes being too fluid and proteins denaturing. I had to toss in ice which doesn't work as well as you'd hope since that water is also causing a heat up to occur. Let the seeds dry before soaking them. I used a graduated cylinder before for this same sulfuric acid brand. The inside of the cylinder looked dry after dumping out the acid, but there was a thin coating of sulfuric acid on the inside of the glass. When I went to rinse the glassware, it warmed up quite a bit. You would be surprised how hot it can get. Keep things dry. This is such an issue that many chemical safety people say concentrated sulfuric acid should be rinsed off with diluted sulfuric acid before going to water. If you have a large bucket of water, not an issue. But if you have a very low flowing tap, it will get quite hot while you rinse it off. You can also have a bicarbonate or carbonate solution on hand. Mix in baking soda or wood ashes in water. The evolution of gasses should help slightly with temperature, but most importantly it destroys the acid rather than just diluting it. Be a bit cautious with wood ash too often unless relatively dilute. It is more alkaline than baking soda, and alkalines turn fats (including cell membranes) into soap. That is why wet baking soda feels slippery on your skin. Still better than conc sulfuric acid.

I do want to add that my success rate is a rough estimate of what I recall from what I planted vs what germinated. Since I removed floaters before soaking and I didn't plant seeds that didn't soak up water during the priming, my rate will be higher than if I scarified, soaked, and planted all seeds without any filtering.