Relating Seed Treatments to Nursery Performance: Experience with Southern Pines

Producing good quality seeds that perform well in the nursery continues to be challenging. High quality conifer seeds are obtained by optimizing collecting, processing, storing, and treating methodologies, and such quality is needed to consistently produce uniform nursery crops. Although new technologies are becoming available to evaluate seed quality, they have not been developed to the extent that they replace the more traditional methodologies developed over decades of trial and error. The most reliable approaches to predict nursery performance rely on obtaining high seed quality, applying appropriate treatments, and conducting germination evaluations that follow established practices.