Here is a review I found on another forum with 11 year old wheat stored with O2 absorbers. There are pics posted but I'm just copying the text. I'll post the rest when the experiment is finished.
Day 2: 2/25 Rinsed (tap water)
Not a lot of activity going on. Some seed has the first tell tell signs of pushing out the "tail". Most of it doesn't. Some is oozing gluten. Most is intact and healthy. It does not smell like "life". It smells like soaked wheat. I sprout on a regular basis so my senses are pretty keen to what should be happening and what shouldn't.
I'll give it a full 5 days as I have had old seed that took that long to sprout. New wheat in my house takes 8 hours to soak and 1 day to sprout. But this isn't new wheat and as noted it's been without a large percentage (almost devoid)of 02 for 11 years.
I'm not calling it yet as I do see some seed starting the signs of growth. But like storing any other seed long term, I would not expect a high percentage of germination after a long period of storage regardless how it's been stored. That's based on personal experience of storing commercial sprouting seed past 5 years.
In short it's too early to say dead or alive.
Day 4: 2/28/11 (sorry I missed Day 3- was remodeling the kitchen yesterday and "lost" the sprouts!)
So here we are Day 4. We have LIFE! My educated guess to go 5 days for old wheat I think is valid. Using guestimation, I think we are looking at 1 in 15 sprouting as of today. BUT, I will go a full 7 days, because some of the seed is sticking it's "bud" out, which is the stage before the "crows feet" and finally the "furry tenticals". I'm NOT a botanist, so forgive the less than technical terms.
Just for grins, I'm going to sprout a second batch and see if I can't get the sprout ratio up. Instead of a daily log, I'll just post everything in one post a few weeks from now in this thread.
THIS thread is a perfect example of WHY I never ever take anything I read online at face value. YOU do NOT know, unless you KNOW.
Does that mean 02 is the BEST way to store seed? I personally don't think it is. Negative 02 means DRIER seed. Great for grinding bread. Bad for making bread (takes more water and more time to absorb that water). Slow for germination as is shown above. I DO believe that seed is a living organism. I DO believe it needs oxygen. But I think this shows that .05% out of 99.5% is enough to let it live 11 years after the fact.
Way more opinion than "scientific fact", but it's learned opinion.
I'll update this thread at 7 days.
