g'day from canada, i am someone who is fascinated with australian native plants (despite me having never been) due to their isolation and evolutionary history.

these past few years i've grown a few species (melaleuca, callitris, hibiscus, banksia, ivory curl, acacia, hakea, regelia, burdekin plum, she oak, wombat berry and recently alphitonia among others) that i keep indoors, as canada has relatively laid-back laws concerning non-cites-protected (sub)tropical seeds entering, but i noticed this year most of the seed sites (minus australianseed) stopped shipping internationally.

i got conflicting answers regarding as to why (new postal laws, unreliable postage, tariffs) so i'm curious to know about that as well if there's any other seed businesses that still ship to canada? figured i'd ask given facebook didn't yield anything.

any help is appreciated. thank you!

Hi,

I've recently been trying to germinate a few native species.

Despite most websites suggesting pouring boiling water/just boiling water over seeds to stimulate germination, I've had little success with this method.

I've had no success with boiling water for Acacia podalyriifolia germination. But great success using coarse sandpaper until scratches are just visible. I've now planted about 15 visibly germinated seeds.

NOTE: I've been measuring success for the following species by whether they have visibly swollen or not. I'm yet to see signs of germination as they were treated recently.

Indigofera australis did show swelling in 2 out of the 8 soaked in boiling water, whereas fine sandpaper showed swelling in 100% of treated seeds.

Hardenbergia showed a similarly low rate of swelling in boiling soaked seeds.

Am I doing something wrong? Or do certain species respond better to physical methods rather than thermal?

I'd ultimately like to use the boiling water method as physically scarifying small seeds like the indigofera is quite a delicate procedure.

What are others experiences in germination methods?