Day 1 - Germinating the Jack Pine Seeds

After a small initial ordeal involving opening my box and noticing that the clay pot was shattered, my friend who gave me the gift managed to get it exchanged and today, I now have a kit in working order and I am finally ready to start growing my bonsai!

The kit comes with "everything you need to grow your own bonsai garden", which is a clay pot with a draining hole, a small disc of peat soil that will be rehydrated later, a pack of 5 Jack Pine seeds, and a pair of small trimming scissors. The instruction book that comes with the kit mostly describes the art of growing bonsai in general, with the last 2 pages dedicated to instructions on growing the Jack Pine bonsai in the kit. So here we have the entire ensemble upon opening:

And step 1 of this process is to first soak the seeds in water for 24 hours. After that, I'll be sticking them in the fridge for a whole week to "cold stratify" them, which is apparently for the purpose of tricking them into thinking it is winter. I've heard that some people have good luck with germinating the seeds, but some don't, so we'll see how mine goes. Luckily, there was a piece of paper inside the kit that tells me they will send me replacement seeds if I can't get mine to grow. I also only soaked 2 seeds instead of all 5, just in case things don't work out and I need to retry this step. When you are planting the seeds later, you only plant 1 or 2 anyway, so I didn't see a point in germinating all of them. Here they are soaking.