synex wrote:
I'm looking to start a few Bonsai from seed

There's the easy way and the more complicated way. The easy way is to
plant seeds in some pots in fall and let them spend the winter outside.
That way, they get their cold requirement the old-fashioned natural
way, and they germinate in spring when they ought to. If you do
anything else, you risk having delicate seedlings at the wrong time of
year (for instance, you're just asking for problems if you germinate
maples during the winter and have to keep tiny seedlings alive until
spring). However, if you're trying to grow something that's not
Scotland-hardy, you have no choice but to go the other route, which is
to stratify the seeds according to the directions you can get in a book
like Dirr's "Reference manual of woody plant propagation". Right now
I'm studying Viburnum, and I need a bunch of seedlings of different
species. So I have a refrigerator at 4 C and an incubator at 20 C, and
I follow the directions on how to treat the seeds (soak for 24 hr, or
abrade to break the seed coat), then I put the seeds in moist
vermiculite in a closed container (a ziplock baggie would be fine; I
use Petri plates) and store them so many months at warm temperature and
so many months at cold temperature, and then plant them (I have access
to a greenhouse, luckily). I've been planting straight into turface,
which is working fine since I have an overhead mist system. If you
don't have something like that, you need to use a plastic-covered
seedling starter kit (in which case, beware of moldy conditions)or a
heavier potting mix (beware of damping-off). You may also want to
invest in a bottom heat mat, since seedlings germinating into cold soil
will be slow-growing and susceptible to damping off.

Nina

Well,a lot depends on what you want to grow from seed. Some such as hawthorn, whitebeam, i.e trees with berries, require stratification. That is the seed will not normally germinate until the hard seed coat has been softened by an outside influence. The natural way is for birds to eat the fruit, seed and all, the evacuate the seed onto our clean washing which, if it falls onto moist soil, may germinate.(the seed that is, not the washing)
Another way is the seed gets exposed to heavy frost which breaks the shell and lets water in.
We can do this ourselves by putting the seeds in the fridge for a few weeks or months,depending on the species, or putting them in a pot of sand and leaving the pot outside all winter. This takes longer of course but as the year wakes up (soon please!) the seeds break dormancy and grow!

Of course having posted the above you're probably wanting to grow seeds from Field maple (simple enough, just like regular seeds in a pot now) or pine which cant be grown from cutings by the layman. I've not had experience with pine seeds(well, Ive had one bad experience) but I'm sure theres plenty on here that have!

hope this small book helps,
Larry