Don’t Make THESE Seedling Mistakes

It's a cold day outside here in San Diego's Zone 10B, the perfect day to get into the greenhouse and discuss with you some of the myths about growing seeds that simply aren't true when you start sowing seeds. It's very tempting to want to do it. take care of them and keep them in a perfect and beautiful state, but it is not necessary, in fact they will be perfectly fine if you are a little hard on them and in fact, in some

seedling

s such as, for example, lettuce or even onions, it is a very good example. I can take it out and even if I lose a little bit of soil and even if I want to separate these

seedling

s and plant them, let's say you know this lettuce and this lettuce in a separate area, now I can plant that lettuce as a group, that wouldn't be a problem at all, but you can be a little less precious with your seedlings than you want.

In fact, sometimes with something like a bean, lettuce, or broccoli, I just take all my seeds out of my cell. throw them in roughly where in the garden I want them to be in particular, this helps when let's say you start planting yourself or go to a nursery and take some seedlings, a lot of times you can just divide them and even if you damage some of the roots, I think Many of us gardeners think we can prune the tops of our plants, but if you touch the roots, then, uhoh, that plant is going to die and the truth is, many times you can even do that. some light root pruning or you may lose a couple of those feeder roots from your seedlings when you transplant them into a soil situation and it's actually totally fine so your seedlings may be tough but what about your soil When it comes to growing your own seedlings at home, choosing the right soil mix can seem really stressful and you may be led to believe that there is only one true type of soil to use and that is something called seed starting mix here at my left I have an example.

From what it might look like, it's usually something like very fine grained Pete and you just have a few little bits of prite for drainage and the idea behind this is that you basically have nothing there, all it does is hold the soil Moist so the seeds can germinate and allow some water to pass through right now. Here I have something that most of us have in our garden at all times ready to use and that is potting mix. The problem with potting mix is ​​that you end up having all this coarse material and it can actually

make

it difficult to start the seed.

Think about a very small seed, if you were to place it on top of something like this big piece of bark, it won't have much of a chance to germinate because there's no water transfer. from that to your seed and that's really what it takes to germinate seeds, but here's the deal: what I like to do is get a good, high quality potting mix like this guy here and then I'll sift it using a/ 4 in chicken wire and just turn it down to this really nice texture and F at this level, there's really nothing here to impede germination, nothing heavy to sit on top of your seeds and there's enough water access to that seed for it to germinate. properly.

However, the only thing I will say is that if you have land that looks like this and a lot of land is sold that looks like this, where it's basically just pieces of wood, that's not going to do for a seed in a forest, of course, an environment natural, it works, but those aren't the seeds you're growing in your garden, you're growing tomatoes and lettuce and stuff like that, and this just isn't going to give you a good time as far as seeds go. To start, just to be clear, there is nothing wrong with seed starting mix if that is what you are used to growing.

Of course, you can still do it, but if you can't find one nearby or maybe you just don't want to buy. that bag of seed starting mix, you can get some potty mix, sift it and

make

your own mix. In fact, I like to add something like warm molds to give it a little bit of extra nutrients which a lot of people think you can't really do with seedlings, it's often thought that you shouldn't give your seedlings any fertilizer because first of all, The seed is the fertilizer, the seed leaves or codons, as they are called, sprout from them, and somehow all these beautiful seedlings are consumed. put out some roots and start absorbing nutrients from the soil, but the truth is that many seedling mixes don't even have fertilizer in them and people will say, well, if you put fertilizer in it, you'll burn your plants. and in the past that was actually true because in the past and sometimes to some extent today, a lot of synthetic fertilizers were used that were high in nitrogen, which is readily available to the plant and that actually burned the plants. leaves, etc.

It was not a good idea, however, these days I will show you what we like to do and we do not go crazy with it, but we do touch our seedlings with just a small sample of nature's magic, just a simple fertilizer that does not No I want to go too crazy with the NPK or nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium numbers. I put the fertilizer in first and then I dilute it very much when you go to a nursery and see all those beautiful vegetable sprouts that look like them. They are growing in a 5 gon pot, but are actually in something not much larger than this.

The truth is that they are fertilized plants. I mean, they are relatively heavily fertilized plants in most cases, which is why they look so good and yes I remember the early days of Epic gardening. I actually started growing hydroponically, which grew solely in water and nutrients, so I like to give my seedlings a slightly diluted fertilizer before planting them. Now it is not necessary to do this with all seedlings. First of all, but if you want a little boost or you are growing things that you have started indoors and are going to grow for 1 month or 2 months, especially in small containers, potted plants like that need to be fed first. they go outside, otherwise they are really depleting the soil of whatever nutrient was there in the first place, so I would fertilize starting at the 2 we marked and it's tempting to then come up with a schedule that might work in, say, a commercial.

Nursery but at home Garden is not that simple one of the most common questions I get asked when it comes to seedlings is why is my seedling dying and nine times out of ten it always has to do with watering many people are tempted I'm going to create a schedule where I'm going to go out and water my seedlings every day, but that can actually cause more problems than it actually benefits your seedlings, so now I'm going to tell you exactly when to water and how to know. when to water and how to do it best, there are a couple of different tricks that you should think about first, you don't need to water every day, for example, it is cloudy today, there has not been sun even once during the day and these seedlings do not consume lots of water now if it was a warm sunny day of course they will drink a lot more water and you will probably be close to watering every day so this is what you want to do one of my favorites.

What you can do is simply lift your tray. Is it heavy? If it feels really heavy, you're probably overwatering. If it feels like it has a good weight to it, it's probably fine, but if it doesn't feel like anything, it just flies up when you pick it up, there's a good chance it's actually too dry. One of the best ways to know when to water is to simply look at the surface of the soil, if it is nice and dry on the surface that means the water is already dry. It actually dried out on the surface, but underneath, if you pick it up, there's still some weight and that's a good time to water your plants.

If the top looks very dark and wet like this then they don't need water, it's really that simple. like that, instead of sticking to a schedule, play the observation game, watch your seedlings and that will tell you more than anything else now, if your seedlings look yellow, it's probably because you watered too much and that's very hard to recover from. too much water in the soil. it can lead to root rot and also suffocation of those roots and those seedlings won't recover, that's where most of the diseases usually come from, like dampness, which pinches the base of the seedling and then they fall off, everything has to do. with watering, so just follow those simple weight and observation tricks and you will be fine.

There's another thing I like to suggest is that if you have a mixed tray of seedlings like this, if some came up like these guys, move them. in a separate tray are going to need more water than the ones like this one here that haven't even germinated yet, so this could go a couple of days without water, whereas this tray full of seedlings that has several seedlings in it is going to need more water. I'll be using quite a bit of water and they'll need water more regularly, but you don't need to water each tray, just divide them up when you can now if you have a lot of seedlings in one tray like this one here versus this one.

Obviously this will use a lot more water than this and you might think it's not a mistake to have so many seeds in one tray and actually it's a strategy we've all been in this situation before. I have a tray, in this case one of our 16 cell trays, so you should see 16 seeds. I don't see about eight seeds and that might be because you're believing the myth of one seed, one hole, sometimes that's true, maybe one bean. or a pee. I'm pretty sure it will germinate, so I'll just put one in, but in many cases it's a very good idea to plant at least two, sometimes three seeds in a hole if you want to guarantee that they will germinate and To understand that it's actually relatively simple math, so all seeds have a germination rate, let's keep it simple and say we are planting 100 lettuce seeds and those seeds have a 90% germination rate, so on average we should see about 90 of those seeds in a 100 cell tray germinates now, what happens if I put two seeds in each hole?

In that case, I'll see 99 out of 100 germinate and that's how you guarantee your germination rate by simply adding one more seed and, frankly, let's be honest. With ourselves, we all have some seeds to spare. I don't know about you, but my catalog is looking pretty dense these days, so there's a reason for doing it and the other reason for doing it is that some plants actually take up more space when combined. one so if you think about onions or you think about beets or shallots or things like that, you can just plant two three four in a hole and actually not even separate them and just harvest them from the garden as they grow.

It is a very good idea to be more economical when it comes to the actual results you get from your garden. Now some plants have more than one seed in a seed and these are the ones you hear you can't transplant, why? One problem with transplanting such root crops well is actually due to the fact that many of these plants, including sunflowers, radishes, all other root crops have a tap root that is a tap root that goes into the soil, which is most of where nutrients are found. are getting into that plant other things like tomatoes have tons of branching roots so it doesn't really matter if you damage that root at all and the deal is like for example a sunflower if you transplant this and you damage the tap it rots .

I'll still grow it, but it won't really turn into a mammoth. If you want to grow that 12T tall sunflower, put it directly into the ground, but if you're okay with growing an 8ft sunflower, it's okay to transplant them. The same goes for rud crops. like beets and even carrots if you really want it, I'll talk more about that later. The idea behind this is that as soon as they start to germinate and have enough leaves, place them in your garden, don't sit around waiting because all those tap roots, the longer they remain, the greater the chance that you will damage them during transplanting. and that's really the only thing you have to worry about.

There are even other things like poppies, for example, that say you can't do it. I've been doing this for years it's totally fine, you just have to be a little more careful, so let's go out into the garden and I'll show you exactly how to transplant something like that. Before me, you see a sea of ​​carrots I have in my raised bed and a couple of reasons why you wouldn't want to transplant them, since I usually want to grow a lot of carrots. If I had to transplant all those carrots, I would be pretty tired of carrots by the end of the day and also If you have a more sensitive tap rot, you are literally eating all the elongated tap rot, so any damage to that will end up with a chubby little carrot, so how do you transplant the other things like the rhythms I mentioned?

It's actually very simple, all you have to do is not much of that, you don't want to mess with M with the dirt ball at all because that's where the tap path is, so all you want to do is just open a little pocket in your ground here, put it in and then back around it, that's it, by doing that you really won't have any chance ofalter that tap route and it will grow fine like that, one of the myths that I probably believed during the early years of gardening was that you had to be like a surgeon here in your seedling setup where you sterilize everything sterilize the tray sterilize the bottom tray sterilize the soil put the soil in the microwave I've seen people do that and the logic makes It makes sense, to some extent, that you want to avoid some of these fungal diseases, some of these pathogens that can spread along the soil surface, those little spider tendrils that are the nightmare of everyone starting seeds or something called deadening where you're going to get this little bean seed here will become very weak right at the point on the stem where it enters. the ground and just falling over, that's depressing, it's definitely sad, but to me it doesn't make much sense to maintain a perfectly sterile environment, which, let's be honest, none of us are getting close to that in our home gardens and then take out these seedlings in 2 3 4 weeks and put them in the ground or in a raised bed where we are trying to grow the exact opposite, which is a highly biodiverse and highly bioactive soil, you know a diverse ecosystem up there, you have Birds Landing.

We have bugs everywhere, it doesn't make much sense, so what we prefer to do is have a seedling mix or a DIY mix that is bioactive. We already have some worm castings there. a little bit of fertilizer, we're already growing some life in there and saying, instead of keeping it sterile and then eliminating one or two pathogens that might show up, let's have a lot of life in this system so they have more things to do. competing with that reminds me of that movie Bubble Boy right, if you're in a bubble your whole life and then you come out you just get taken over by the first illness that comes along versus if you're running around you're taking some scratches you're in the yard recreationally you are eating a little bit of soil your system is simply more robust and that is what we are looking for with our seedlings so don't be afraid to sterilize everything You can do it if you want, but at Epic Gardening we don't listen if you have stunted seedlings.

Watch this video, we solved that problem for you too and if you want to play with some of our seeds, visit botanic lin.com. some of our seed starting trays and kits. epicg gardening.com good luck in the garden and keep growing