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I have planted Mammillaria herrerea seeds from my own plants and so far no luck after almost 14 days so I dried the pots out for a couple days then watered them and started again.

I'm pretty sure Mammillaria herrerea are stubborn to germinate so I'll keep trying different things but I won't keep them wet for more than 10 days because I think they will just rot in the ground.

A few years ago ( OK more than a few around 10 ) I had 100 % germination in a week. Steve Brack at mesa told me this was his experience with herrerea also, none or 100%. If I get them up I'll take a picture.

Not been my experience. I've planted them twice, the first time, with seed from Mesa, I got one out of 10 seeds (and it seemed pretty weak, didn't survive). Last year I ordered seed from Koehres, 7 out of 10 came up.

Here is my herrerae albiflora seedlings
But i ve lost many of them because of the red spiders.
Now only 9 of them alive.
Germination rate was really high and i just sowed without doing anything special.

https://flic.kr/p/21b11CJ

Fatich your seedlings look really nice . I'm not having any luck so far with the seeds but am happy with Firefox I just installed and this website. Google chrome was almost un- workable so slow and my computers fan was always on when trying to open this site. werid.

I have the same experience - out of 20 sown, 9 sprouted. 8 lived through 2 repottings. Seed source:Cactus Hobby Brno.
Although, I killed 3 semi-adult specimens over the years

keith wrote: ↑Fri Mar 15, 2019 9:06 pm I have planted Mammillaria herrerea seeds from my own plants and so far no luck after almost 14 days so I dried the pots out for a couple days then watered them and started again.

I'm pretty sure Mammillaria herrerea are stubborn to germinate so I'll keep trying different things but I won't keep them wet for more than 10 days because I think they will just rot in the ground.

A few years ago ( OK more than a few around 10 ) I had 100 % germination in a week. Steve Brack at mesa told me this was his experience with herrerea also, none or 100%. If I get them up I'll take a picture.

Koehres seeds germinated 7/10, but can't say the same for perezedelarosa, which only got 1/10.

I planted extra Astrophytum coahuilense seeds and Turbinicarpus pseudopectinatus seeds in the herrerea pot just to keep it interesting.

Astrophytums are germinating already after about 5 days. If the others decide to germinate this year or next I won't be throwing the pot out and wasting the seeds. In about a week I'll be drying the astro's out a little bit and in a few weeks they will be treated like adults but more shade. I've had seeds sprout years after I gave up on them, you never know.

I have found if you keep the humidity high trying for full germination the ones already up will rot. Wet dry cycles work better after the first 2 weeks.

Mixed results on the other pots of cactus seeds. One zero ( epithelantha) one 100% ( turbinicarpus) and one maybe 5% ( mammillaria guelzowiana) .

Just getting started though expecting a mesa order later sometime , next month ? Plenty of time to get them going mostly Lithops.

20 days in and I'm getting some germination on the Epithelantha seeds after a soak , dry out and re-soak sequence. these are seeds from Aiko ( thanks again ) so I was positive they were viable just stubborn. 10 day soak, 5 day dry out and germinating after 5 days in a re- soaked wet pot .

Since they are Epithelanthas so I will start drying out in 5 days by taking off the plastic sheet I have over the pot and bottom watering when it looks too dry. Mesa used to have all kinds of codes for different seeds like expose to drier air after germination. Sadly the codes are no longer on the site so it fades to tribal knowledge.

Two M. herrerea came up along with the astro's and I trans-planted plus some epithelanthas into the pot for saving space reasons.
I think there are some turbinicarpus puesdopectinitus also in there turning red. One of the herrerea is at the top with the white spines the other smaller germinated later and is on the right lower middle. .

Good enough the pots kinda full and now its just year by year until they get big enough too transplant. I think I planted 30 or more seeds of m herrerea so not as good as last time.