Oooooh! How do you chit a seed and what is the benefit?
Seed chitting used to refer mainly to partially breaking down the seed coat of very hard seeds (like sweet peas) to assist with germination, whereas what we are talking about here is pre-germination of seeds.
If there is a "standard" way of doing it it's placing the seeds on a damp (not wet) piece of kitchen paper in a sandwich box or similar, covering with another sheet of damp paper, putting the lid on, and keeping in a warm place until the seeds start to sprout. Some very large seeds can be soaked for at least a few hours first, whereas some are just too small to be able to handle so are not really suitable.
With all of them it's important to plant in soil as soon as the first sprouts are seen, or you will potentially have problems with roots and shoots getting dried or damaged, or knowing which way up to plant them.
I tend not to do anything involving effort unless there is a clear benefit
, or the time potentially saved in future is greater than the time taken to do it, and a few years ago I didn't chit any seeds, but after sowing 35 sweet corn seeds and only getting 4 to germinate I lost confidence in them and now pre-germinate them first.
So, pre-germination is far from being essential, but can be useful if there is any doubt about the viability of the seeds, and is something to think about this year in particular given that the cold weather has squeezed the time available to get some of the early crops started (and therefore the time available to re-sow if things go wrong.)
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Reyt Tayty: how warm was it near your boiler? A temperature of around 20C is all you need for germinating parsnip seed - above that the germination rate declines quite rapidly.