Seeds provide 70% of global food resources, being the most valuable output from plant production. They also play a critical role in agriculture because the lifecycle of most crops begins from seed germination. Uniform germination enables growers to achieve optimal plant-spacing and harvesting time. Despite this importance, we do not fully understand how seed germination is regulated, which limits our ability to improve its properties. We have made much progress identifying regulators by traditional bulk-tissue 'omics approaches. Through these we have discovered transcription factors that control both gene expression and the progress of germination. However, the seed is a complex structure comprised of many tissues and cell-types, each of which have distinct properties. Changes in gene expression occur in these cell-types throughout germination and are expected to be context-dependent, to enable spatiotemporal control of cellular processes. To better understand how gene expression is controlled within individual seed cell-types we have developed single cell transcriptomic and spatial transcriptomic methods to study germinating seeds. We have applied these methods to the model plant Arabidopsis and the cereal crop barley. Through time series analyses we have determined how the activity of cell types changes as seeds germinate, how these changes relate to the distinct functions of those cells, and how the changes may be regulated. These discoveries may help us to develop practical solutions to promote the seed-to-seedling transition and to ensure germination happens uniformly at the right time.