Wow I have never heard of anyone having those kinda results I mean serious a monkey could throw a couple beans in the dirt and make them grow. Start them all in a paper towel that's moist pull them out when they have a tap root don't damage them put them in the dirt a solo cup or a one gal. Water the dirt before you put them in. Don't water for 4 or 5 days until the pot or cup gets light. You want your roots to go to the bottom of the cup and branch out. When there sprouts they are fragile. they don't need to sit in water just moist dirt. If your using a heat mat or anything to germ seeds stop those aren't good and you will end up with a higher percentage of males if your growing regs.
How do you figure? And what benefit do paper towels offer as opposed to direct to soil/less?
72-80 is ideal, and whether the heat comes from a seedling heat mat, a lighting fixture that warms up the soil surface, or ambient room heat... pretty sure the seeds don't know the difference. In my experience you actually end up with a higher percentage of
females, if you start in an large enough container in ideal conditions.
Hey yeah while I have In the past I no longer use a dome.
I've heard of people sticking their growing medium in the oven, to sterilize it, any truth to this working? Maybe I should try germinating in a true soil base product then which over to coco coir.
I usually use SAM#4, with earthworm castings. The SAM#4 itself is (should be) practically sterile, or at least disease/pathogen free...with the exception of the added mycorrhizal fungi (spores). The castings (any healthy quality castings/compost) should be thriving with microbial life (but again, virtually disease free). IMO you don't want to sterilize anything, ever. The great majority of microbes in soil, earthworm castings and compost are not there to do the plant harm, and are actually found to benefit the plants and suppress pathogens that
would do the plant harm.
Good microbes serve an important purpose, even just by not being "bad", and taking up space and resources: thereby out-competing the bad microbes. It is also better to have a large number of different species of microbes (bio-diversity) as opposed to just a few. One of the problems with sterilization is that things like mold/fungal spores are ubiquitous- both the good and the bad. You can't sterilize
everything and you probably don't have a clean room (like the kind they use to make micro-chips in) available to you to grow in. But, once you have something organic like a soil/media sterilized, outside of a sterile environment, it is open-season for whatever microbes (good or bad) can get in there and reproduce first and quickest.
http://www.mandalaseeds.com/Guides/Germination-Guide