Our Approach to Seed Quality and Germination Testing

How We Test Seed Quality at Elfland Nursery

Over the past months, we turned one of our old office spaces into something much more interesting — a dedicated germination room. It’s now filled with trays, humidity domes, and rows of seeds slowly coming to life under controlled conditions.

This is where we test everything.

Every new seed lot that we harvest gets evaluated here. At the same time, we’re working our way through the inventory we took over from Anderson’s Seed Co. — tray by tray, lot by lot. It’s not a quick process, but it’s an important one. We want to actually see how these seeds perform.

Some of these trays are already pushing up strong, healthy seedlings. Others take longer. And that’s exactly the point — you learn a lot when you watch seeds grow instead of just relying on numbers.

For larger, freshly harvested lots where we have significant volume, we also work with a professional lab that provides certified germination testing. That gives us standardized results and official documentation.

But the in-house testing is different.

It gives us a real, hands-on understanding of how each seed behaves — how quickly it germinates, how uniform it is, how the seedlings develop in those first critical stages.

And honestly, it’s hard to beat the feeling of walking into that room and seeing trays like this come to life.

This is what gives us confidence in what we’re selling.

Not just data — but direct experience. We’ll continue to share results and observations from our germination trials here.