I read somewhere on here someone made a special "tea" to assist in germination. I have no idea if it works on asian veggies, but I used the method on many of my seeds this year and it seemed to work when previous efforts failed. Don't take my word for it, and I apologize to the original poster for not citing specifically, but it's searchable on here.

You make a weak tea (as in, make a cup of tea, let it sit, toss the tea, use the teabag for a second cup to get a lot of the tannens in it) and moisten paper towels with it. I put squares of paper towels in a tupperware thing and put seeds between them.

Then the cool thing is, you put it in the fridge overnight. Something about waking the seed up from its hibernation when you remove it.

Then I let it sit out on the counter for a couple of days until the seeds germinated and planted them before anything could mold. (i waited too long on some peas and they didn't survive, but the beans and lettuce seeds sprouted marvalously.)

Hope this helps :)

-v

Yes I had the same problem with gourd seeds before. Nowadays, I scratch the gourd seeds first (withe nail clipper, gentle make a small chip on the side of the flat seeds), then place them in wet paper towel in a sandwich box. Keep the towel moist but not in standing water. After a few days, they would sprout and ready to be planted.

There are many other ways of helping germination of hard seeds on GardenWeb. This is just one way that's simple and work for me.