The coating will dissolve in time. Why are you dropping water on the pellets instead of just placing the pellets on a moistened media for seeds?

hc mcdole - thank you for the reply. The extra water is in addition to the moistened media. The pellets are not dissolving while sitting on the wet media.

Did you press the pellet into the seed bed (not cover it but do have it in good contact with the soil)?

I grew some pelleted begonias a few years back but I used Jiffy pellets and they germinated within a week or two. I would give your seeds a little more time.

Hc mcdole - Thank you for the tip, you were right, I was a little impatient - they finally started to soften today (5 days after planting). I was able to poke them with a bamboo skewer today to help loosen the coating.

Good to hear you had success with the Jiffy pellets for begonias from seed, I’ll give those a try next time.

The seeds were a little pricey, about 50 cents each, so perhaps I’m babying them a bit right now lol. I have them under fluorescent lights for 12 hours during the day, and using a heat mat to maintain warmth at night. I don usually sterilize, but even microwaved the medium (pro mix bx) this time. I hope this all works. :)

Good to hear! Wishing you the best of luck in growing these out.

We have a young guy in our begonia club who seems to be an expert at growing begonias from seed. Germination is the easy part but pricking them out to move them up to the next phase is my downfall - probably not enough patience since the seedlings are so small. I think that is why pelleted begonia seed makes it easier because I can actually drop one seed at a time instead of a hundred.

Update - seeds are now germinating, with excellent germination rates. Yes they are very small!

I got the macro lens to take some photos of the seedlings (surrounded by coarse sand), in the third photo I’ve placed a penny beside the seedling to compare:

I've had good and bad luck with pelleted seeds. If you buy a packet with only 3 pellets, I suspect someone has thinned them out to create two or more pkts for sale. However my first suspicion was not correct as I got about seven seedlings from this packet. but the second pkt with only 3 pellets failed to germinate. I found another pkt of pelleted seeds, probably semps, and probably several years old, stored away in my seed locker, and it looked like most germinated and quickly too (within a week). So go figure. This is a little off the subject, maybe I am too suspicious, but I've been wondering about these pelleted seeds and this is the first chance I've had to mention them. I much prefer natural begonia seeds, tiny as they are, a magnifying glass will show them clearly whether crushed or good.

I decided to re-order seeds which hadn't germinated for me (B. illumination mix) and found a seed catalog with these offered at $7.25 for 100 pellet seeds, pretty good price compared to what the failures cost (those which I suspect had been thinned out before being re-packaged ).

Woe,

Yes a lot better price than 25 for $3.95 at Parks and those are probably loose since it doesn't say they are pelleted.

https://parkseed.com/illumination-pink-hybrid-begonia-seeds/p/02728-PK-P1/