5 Biggest Mistakes Made When Starting Seeds Indoors

Hello guys, today's video is very simple. I will do it as quickly as possible, going over the errors. Five initial

mistakes

that many new people make. I'm going to give a bonus at the end of the video because they can. avoid all five

mistakes

and if you make the last one, you will need all the work you have done over the last few weeks to get your

seeds

going, it will consume them and render them absolutely useless, so just hang in there, okay, let's get started, let me. Know in the comments if you have

made

any mistakes and how to fix them that I am not mentioning today.

The number one mistake is

starting

to plant too early. Many people make this mistake. I still do it sometimes because you get the catalogs in the winter you order your

seeds

and you are so eager for spring that you want to start, the problem is you can't rush the weather and if your last frost date is 12 weeks from the day

when

you start planting You will be caring for seedlings that will become real plants

indoors

. Now many people have space to grow seedlings. In this tray there are several hundred seedlings. This table could not hold several hundred mature plants and that is exactly the problem you have.

We're going to go in if you start too early, four to six weeks before the last frost date, if you don't know the last frost date, I'll put a link below or you can just Google your zip code, your city, uh and The last frost started too early and you won't be able to grow them in these seed containers, so you will have to CAU all the plants instead of just taking them out and putting them in the garden.

when

the time is right, mistake number two, heat a lot of times, you know, I don't have anything fancy here, it's just in a garage, but in some climates garages freeze or you certainly don't get the level of heat that's needed to that some seedlings germinate cool season crops that you're not really going to have problems with, they like to germinate in, you know, around 50 to 60°F, unless you have a freezing garage, then you're still going to have to warm it up a little bit, but certainly seeds like tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, all summer crops but especially those that need hot peppers, sure if you are going to try to grow peppers

indoors

or start them indoors they need heat so you need to invest in a heat mat, preferably one. that has a thermostat so you can choose the temperature you want to choose about 75° fah and what it does is it warms the soil in the pot enough to give that seed its start in the world, whereas if you didn't it's not You need them to be able to sit until wherever you're growing those seeds end up producing the temperatures they need now if you just had a couple of trays and you had an appliance like a refrigerator, or a window sill over a radiator, most seeds don't No it needs light to germinate so you can place them in warm places until they start sprouting and then they will definitely need sunlight and that brings us to number three: the third mistake people make is not having enough light.

For your seedlings, first of all, there is no grow light, no bulb that is as powerful as the sun. If you have a south-facing window that gets 6 to 8 hours of direct sun every day, then you can grow them in that window. If you have a greenhouse that is heated depending on the weather and receives full sun, you can grow them there. I don't have any of those things, I think most people don't, so now I have to go with grow lights that don't have to can be a scary proposition, you can use any type of bulb, it doesn't matter if it's a long fluorescent tube, if it's a CFL, if they still make those LEDs, the shape of the bulb doesn't matter and you definitely don't have to say it. grow light or

made

for plants, it doesn't have to say any of that, they'll actually charge you more just for those words, you can go to any light bulb section, go to Home Depot Lowe's wherever and you're just looking for the label. in the box to give you certain numbers, you're looking for the words lumens and Kelvin and you want the number between lumens to be 500 to 2000 lumens, which is the intensity of the light, the brightness of the light and you want 4500 to 6500 Kelvin. is the color temperature, not the snooze temperature, but the color temperature on the spectrum from blue to red. uh, you want to mimic the same color temperature as the sun.

Now I could say Kelvin, I could give you the numbers and then say. Daylight, that's what you're looking for, so as long as both numbers are where you want them, you can use them to start your seeds. Now I have a professional grow light here that is a little different and is now more powerful than the other one. type of bulbs, if you have Lumin and Kelvin, they will work, but you should have the bulb about 2 inches maximum 2 inches. I would say to get your plants the amount of light you need, so you can do if your light goes down and up, you can raise the light along with the growth of the plants or you can place them on brick boards so they are close to the light and then lower those things, take out bricks or whatever to lower the trays as the plants get taller, but you always want the plants to be about 2 inches from that light source.

With professional grow lights like this, their intensity is much stronger than any other type of bulbs, they are more expensive but they also illuminate a wider area, so you have to calculate how much area you want, how many of those other types of bulbs you would need to cover that area and see if this doesn't make more sense. I'll put a link to it below so you can at least check. By the way, it's not sponsored by the way the fourth mistake you can make is to care for your plants so much here that when they come out they will be thrown into a completely different type of environment and possibly not die, but they will regress.

One of the best things you can do is use something like this, an old fan. I haven't had it on during our conversation here because it's loud, old and creaky, but look what it does to these seedlings here. an oscillating fan, so as the fan moves they start to blow in the breeze, okay I'm going to turn it off because it looks like it has arthritis, so why do you want your plants to blow well in the breeze? Because that's what they do in nature, when those plants shake back and forth and bend in the breeze, they strengthen their stems and make the plant sturdier, so when you put it outside it will work great. better than a plant that has I've been completely in this environment still nourished, so it's big and you don't have to have anything special.

Any oscillating fan, even if it's on its last leg like this one, will resolve the fifth bug before we get to the fifth bug bonus. is watering your seedlings from below, now there are many reasons for this: you don't want to have the top of the soil in your containers constantly wet, it causes fungal diseases like damp, it attracts fungi to lay their eggs there and that completely causes a problem. different, many problems, the least of which is the annoyance of having mosquitoes flying everywhere, it also keeps moisture away from leaves that you don't want to get wet in an indoor space, now the fan helps with both.

I should have mentioned that it keeps the leaves, dries the leaves, and dries the surface of the soil, so the fan does double duty by watering from below and making sure the bottommost part of each of those cells is wet makes the roots grow downwards instead of staying on the surface now you can do this by placing your seed tray in a tray that doesn't have holes in it that you can fill with water, place it there when you see it soaked to the surface of the soil, take it out, you don't want it to If they stay sitting, they will drown.

I have fallen in love with these seed trays. They are self-watering trays from Gardener Supply. There is a water tank under here. There is a stand that holds the tray. elevated out of the water, but then they have an absorbent mat that absorbs the water, distributes it across this panel, and allows the bottom of the tray to absorb it so they always get the perfect amount of water again. Not sponsored, but these Cher has been a game for me and I'll leave a link down in the video description so you can watch them. They are not cheap but they are worth it.

They are very strong. They will last a long time. the advantage is that we have spent four to six weeks germinating the seeds, caring for them, getting them to the right size and our outdoor climate is ready, the frost is gone, it's time to move them outdoors, but you have to do it slowly in a certain way. way called hardening them off if you just take them, even with the fan, they've been in a very different protected environment than where you're going to put them in the sun, even with this grow light, the sun here is much more intense than them. have ever had in their life and they have to develop thicker skin, literally, they have to develop their sunscreen to be protected, they don't, they can't just go out for a full day of sun, they probably don't use it either. for uh the temperature fluctuations that you're going to have outside this time of year, so there's two ways to do it: the traditional way and the lazy way, so the traditional way is to take them outside every day for an extended period of time. the time each day gets a little longer start with an hour in the shade bring them back the next day two hours in the shade bring them back the next day uh maybe 2 hours to 3 hours in partial sun bring them back to the next day 3 to four hours in partial sun, bring them back the next day.

You can leave them outside for five or six hours in full sun, then bring them back in and then it's a 7 day process. Where are you going? to finally get them used to all the different variables outside and then they can now be left outside and planted in the garden. Well, I don't know about you, but I think a lot of people have jobs, so if you're not home every day. day all day to take care of this process uh there is a lazy way or maybe I would say it's a smarter way to do it look at your next 7 day forecast and find a time period where you have three days in a row of cloudy weather when you see that that's your 3 day window, you're going to take them outside, outdoors, where normally it would be full sun, but you have that cloud cover to protect them for three full days of cloudy weather. that's all you need to do, so put them out when you go to work, bring them when you get home, definitely don't leave them out overnight and after that 3 day period they will be ready to plant in the garden, I already did that. mention fungus gnats real quick if you have ever had little black FL flying things around your plants indoors, those are fungal webs and can really do a lot of damage to the plant's root system, plus they are super annoying as well If you have that problem, click on this video here.

I will give you several ways to deal with them to prevent them and get rid of them once you have them. See you in the next video.