[Eightball]

Tomatoes, Chilli peppers, sweet peppers, sweetcorn, courgettes, cucumbers and pumpkins I find germinate really well in a warm airing cupboard. Most of them will come up in a few days I find. Just got to get them into some light as soon as they break the surface.

[Mrs Bee]

Nearly all my French and runner beans and chick peas have come up.

I start mine by putting moist compost in small food bags and then adding the seeds. Seal the bags and put them in a warm place until they germinate. Then I plant them in pots of compost.

So far so good although I am not sure how they have faired in the *****y hail and wet we had today.

[strangerachael]

Beans have all done ok but my courgettes/squashes are suffering - germination was ok but many of them have started rotting at the stem before even developing true leaves. Never had that before.  Compost must be too cold/damp. Have had to re-sow and will ease off on the watering this time.

[barley]

I gave up with commercial seed for peppers this year. Despite three sowings with seed from different suppliers, and different varieties of peppers, the result was 'NIL POINTS'. I was preparing a salad one day, and decided to just throw the seeds from one of the peppers into some compost and see what happened. A few days later I had a pot absolutely bursting with pepper seedlings. Obviously, the fresher the seed the better the result, and I won't be buying pepper seed ever again.

snap I never buy pepper seeds mine are all saved from my own peppers , so to are peas , runners , pumpkins , cucumbers and marrows - free my favourite word , and cause they are free and plentiful you can plant as many as you like 

[Flowertot]

To add to the poor germination rate, I have another problem. Despite copious quantities of slug pellets around the base of my blowaway, I found a slug and a snail on my baby bean seedlings  some survived but I will need to sow more this weekend

[snowdrops]

Mine have done well this year, normally I struggle with them rotting away before they germinate. This year I sowed & put them in the conservatory




Hoping some more of these below make it through, I can see them pushing the compost up as they germinate so fingers crossed

[Floody]

It's sweetcorn with me this year - 60 odd seeds sown, only 8 came up.  Sweetcorn seems to be the one seed I read most conflicting advice about - don't pre-soak, pre-soak for a few hours, pre-soak for a couple of days, pre-soak for a week... 

[mumofstig]

Chitting is the way to go for sweetcorn, look here

http://chat.allotment-garden.org/index.php?topic=76184.msg862191#msg862191

[Floody]

Thanks mumofstig, will try that next year. 

[Goosegirl]

Just posted on Cadalot's Lark sweet corn failure so have a look at what my experiences have been.

[Bigrich]

I've resorted to chitting lots of things (sweetcorn, further attempts at French beans) and it's produced great results. Got a really good germination rate with sweetcorn and pretty good with the french bean batch as well.

Definitely be repeating that next year 

[devonbarmygardener]

I've never chitted anything and never normally have a problem.
I do soak sweet pea seeds overnight (as both grandads used to) and this year 1/4 of them have germinated - normally I get 100% germination so something is amiss...