*** I added an update on the status of the plants here: ***\r
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I conducted an experiment to see which technique works the best (germination rate and speed) for growing passion fruit from seeds. \r
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There is a lot of mixed information online about what technique works best for growing passion fruit from seed (passiflora edulis). Some say you need to soak the seeds, some say this does not matter, some say just plant it naturally, others say you dry and clean. There are also many other suggestions.\r
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So to test some of the more common suggested germination techniques I took a large number of seeds and conducted an experiment using a block design with five groups:\r
1. Natural - seeds straight from fruit to dirt\r
2. Natural dried - seeds straight from fruit but with juice removed\r
3. Cleaned seeds - all pulp removed\r
4. Cleaned and soaked seeds - same as 3 but soaked in warm water for 24 hours\r
5. Cleaned seeds small batch - a control to see if the number of seeds in the planter had an effect\r
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The results are posted at the end of the video. It was found that cleaning the seeds produced the best results. There is no difference in germination rates from soaking and not soaking. This substantiates the claim from Purdue that says that soaking has not proved helpful. \r
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The soaked seeds sprouted slightly faster but I suspect that this is likely due to random variations in the seeds (you can see this by comparing the first sprout date of the small batch #5 to the large batch of the same method #3).\r
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This experiment was conducted beginning on 12-30-new indoors in Washington DC. The indoor temperature ranged from 70 to 85 F. Soil temperatures ranged from roughly 70 to 75 F.
