Seed Survival

It never ceases to amaze me how long a seed can sit in the dirt and still sprout. Recently I had a bird of paradise sprout. It didn't last two weeks but it still sprang up and said "hi" for a second.
This morning I had another visitor in a seed starting tray come up. I think it's a bean plant but I'll have to check the charts when I get home.
There are a lot of seets that lay dormant for years before sprouting. Typically seeds last a year or two. You can usually count on most of your seeds sprouting if kept for the usual time for the type of seed. Every year past that you can drop the number by half or more unless you have stored them well. The better you prepare the seeds for storage the better chance you have that they will sprout.
Some seeds seem to sprout on their own. I collected a bag of acorns one year and they sprouted in the bag. I watched it for a week and by the end well over half of the acorns were sending out roots.
My wife planted some coneflower seeds last fall hoping they would come up. Winter came and she forgot she planted them. We nearly removed all of the flowers since we thought we had contracted a bad case of some strange weed! Fortunately we hadn't gotten around to removing them by the time we realized what they were.
Citrus seeds store well since they have a hard outer coating. They can be stored for years and still sprout. Of course after a long period you will want to score the outside or maybe even entirely remove the outer layer so it has a better chance of sprouting quickly.

Updated

Well, as I feared, the bird of paradise sprouted and promptly died. It is being buried in the compost pile with everything else.
The kaffir lime tree has almost doubled in size in the last two weeks! I don't know what made it want to grow so vigorously but I refuse to complain. I checked to make sure it wasn't a waterspout and I even used a few of it's leaves in a red curry dish (beef) a few days ago.
My kitchen compost bin has gotten a lot of egg shells recently due to a lot of baking, but the recent eggs I have come in contact with had to be thrown away. No, they weren't the recalled eggs in the news recently but they were the eggs of my sweet little cockatiel Lacy. She laid two of them. They both cracked on the cage bottom since she doesn't have a nest. I plan to remedy that soon.

Bird of Paradise

I had just about given up on them ever sprouting but this week I noticed what I thought was a blade of grass popping up in a starter tray that I had just about abandoned. I didn't remember planting grass but I figured that it had come in some time when I had gone outside and planted itself like the rest of the weeds.
Yesterday I decided to look up what I had planted there since it wasn't growing like I thought grass should. Come to find out it was a bird of paradise seed and the green blade is actually a rolled up leaf coming up for the first time. The seed was probably over three years old since I got it in Hawaii nearly three years ago. Who knows how long it was on the shelf.

Now all I have to do is wait until it has a couple leaves and transplant it into a decent size pot. The biggest problem is keeping it away from the cats long enough for it to live.