Field notes: germination check at the Igatpuri nursery

Date: June 30 Place: Our nursery in Igatpuri, Maharashtra

At the end of May, we sowed strawberry seed at the nursery we run with our partner Higronics in Igatpuri — including our Japanese cultivar HARUHI, each batch tagged with its variety, sowing date and the name of the person who sowed it. On June 30, with the monsoon settled in over the hills, we went back to count what came up.

The honest number

Germination came in lower than we wanted. That’s not the note a brand usually publishes — but this journal is a record of how ICHIGO is actually built, and a low germination rate you understand is worth more than a good one you can’t repeat.

So the visit became an investigation. We walked the benches tray by tray, compared batch against batch — same seed, different sowing dates, different positions in the house — looking for the pattern behind the misses and narrowing down where the losses are coming from.

The seedlings that did emerge look right: compact crowns, true leaves opening, roots already knitting the plug together. The method works. The job now is to make it work at rate.

Picking up the pace

The second half of the day was spent on the calendar. Our sowing schedule for the season ahead is demanding, and a slow start compounds — every tray that fails is a tray that has to be sown again, weeks later. So we discussed concretely how to raise the pace: what to change at sowing, how to tighten the conditions the seed sees in its first weeks, and how to sequence the coming batches so the nursery keeps feeding the field plan on time.

Growing strawberries from seed is the hard road — we wrote about why we chose it in Growing strawberries from seed. Days like this one are what that choice looks like up close: count honestly, find the cause, adjust, sow again.

ICHIGO® is the premium strawberry brand of Vegibus India. Field notes are our running record from the nursery and the field — the unpolished part of growing a Japanese-standard strawberry in India.