My wife started hybridizing Dahlias about 5 years ago. We've been collecting the seeds, drying them, and planting indoors in February. We're getting very low germination rates, ~10%. I think one of the main factors could be mold, we regularly get a white fuzzy mold growth in the seed starting phase. When we use commercial seeds in the same setup we don't have that problem, or not nearly as bad. The commercial seed germination rate in our setup is close to 90%. We do our best to keep the seed pods dry in the fall before removing them from the plants, we immediately dry the seeds once removed from their seed pods, and we've even tried dipping seeds in diluted bleach or h2o2. We usually do tests in batches of ~100 seeds and compare to a control sample of 100 seeds and look for a measurable difference but we're still stuck around ~10% germination with the different methods we've tried. We have other things we want to try, but my question is, are there resources out there that could help us that maybe i'm not aware of? Maybe even without mold, our seeds have some other issue and mold isn't the issue. Could we send seeds to some lab and get some insight? I'm not sure what we would even want to have tested. Any direction would be appreciated. Thanks, Travis