Seed Starting Part 2: Seedling Care, Problems, and Pot-Up

welcome back to shock in the garden, today we are going to the second

part

on

starting

seed

s and caring for

seed

lings and today we will focus specifically on the

seedling

care

aspect. What you see before me here are all the seeds that I started in the spring, well not all, some, most, I have started transplanting, but I have more seats to start transplanting more and what you can see is that I have a couple of six packs of newer

seedling

s and I also have about four cells. These have already been planted in pots, so let's talk a little before we start potting about how to actually

care

for seedlings in their different stages once you get to the point where here's a good example, kind of like a pumpkin once that you get to your true leaves, so the leaves that really look like the plant you will end up with once you have one or two, this is the point where you will want to start thinking about repotting, but you will also want to get started. to think about fertilizing now, fertilizing is totally optional, you don't have to do it, but if you have ever wondered, for example, why the seeds you buy at a nursery are so giant on the same amount of land as you .

You're

starting

with your seeds, that's because they're growing in a very controlled environment, they're growing in greenhouses, they're probably fertilized daily in small doses, that's how you end up with things like this eggplant I bought, which is pretty gigantic. who knows when this started but it is quite substantial for its size at this time of year and that is because it was grown in artificial conditions and has been given a lot of fertilizer so when we fertilize the seedlings what do we want to do and with what frequency? Do we want to do it? I always use an organic-based fertilizer.

In fact, I already had an injection. In this case, this is a fertilizer whose standard dilution ratio is that you would use four ounces per gallon to water an established plant now if you are watering a seedling, you have to remember that they are quite small and don't need all that nutrition at this stage. You want to use a much more diluted dose, so this is just an ounce, so I'm going to take this ounce and Take my trusty metal watering can here and we're going to dilute it in a gallon of water. By the way, these little shot glasses are really useful for measuring all kinds of things in the garden.

I actually bought it at a garden center and it has all the little ounce measurements that appear now that we've diluted our fertilizer, I've got this watering can full of fertilizer ready to go, let's talk about what you need to do before you do it. First, you always want to fertilize the bottom watering, it's too difficult. which has to do with a watering can, you will end up uprooting your seedlings by pouring them from above. The other thing I want to mention is that you don't want to do it when the plants are at the dry stage that you want them to be at.

Water at least lightly first and that's because if you start with completely dry soil and you put fertilizer in it, it's going to absorb all that fertilizer and it's going to be too much for the plant to absorb, so you want to get started. It's already in a watered state and at that point you could then go in and water the bottom a little bit and every time I water the bottom with fertilizer I'm not trying to put in enough to fully water the plant. This is again, it has already been watered. I'm adding a little at the bottom so the roots can absorb some of those nutrients they might need.

The same goes for any six-cell versus four-cell plants or any larger plants that you don't want to eliminate completely. drown it in fertilizer now, when you're at a smaller stage like this, like these six cells, these plants are still pretty small, so they don't need as much when you're moving up to something like basically this, this is a fully established plant. plant, you could even increase your dosage and use maybe two ounces instead of one so you can play with the fertility a little and if you want your plants to grow a lot while they are still in their transplant stage, you are just going to have to fertilize they will never get there at this size just using a sterile soil mix just isn't going to happen that's how you get something like this in a nursery it's just been fertilized its entire life that's why it's so big so it's kind The main point for fertilizer is not to start with dry soil, make sure you thin it out and only give a little to the smaller plants, give a little more to the larger plants and you can do this every week, once a week, until repotting and then also water as you transplant, but we'll talk about that again later when we transplant some of these seeds.

The next thing I wanted to talk about is things you can do at the seedling stage to make sure your plant grows. it does very well once it is finally transplanted into the final location and a couple of things you could do here is an example: these are shishito peppers these are the exact same peppers that started at the exact same time this one is much bushier than this one and that's because I outgrew them about two weeks ago when I say top that means I actually went in and cut off the high growing point of that plant and what that does is once you cut it off, it forces the plant out of the sides because that is no longer the main growing point, the reason you want to do this now is because now I have this plant that has all these leaves, once I put it in the ground, it will take off because it has all the support of the photosynthesis you need now again, you can do this once you transplant it, but if you are waiting for the right time to plant or don't have your area ready, you can do these things like mulching while they are still in their seedling stage before.

They are in their final location. The other thing you should do when thinking about your seedlings is to start going through them and picking out the ones that you don't think are going to survive or maybe won't. It's not worth it, so in this case it's soybeans. I started with six seeds. It looks like only four of them germinated and these three look great, but something is going on here. It has very small first leaves and looks a little stunted, so if I were to pot them up or put them in their final location, I would probably get rid of this one here and just do these three, that's one of the main reasons you want Start with more seeds than you need because you never know what you're going to get and you want to choose the best of the bunch when you finally plant them in your garden, so you want to do a little bit of that rogue by choosing the best ones, you could do

part

of the preparation, how to cover your peppers. and all kinds of things like that that help promote the final plant that you want, in the end the next thing I want to talk about is tempering your expectations or maybe trying not to be so rigid about when a certain moment occurs when the plant should be ready. nothing is really predictable on an exact timeline and what I have before you are three eggplants that prove it so this eggplant here actually started on September 9th of last year so I started this in the fall and I've been spending winter, which means I've been potting it up and keeping it alive all this time.

Now, this eggplant here actually started on March 12, so you can see that they're actually pretty similar in size, they're basically exactly the same. The reason this happens is that it's all about the season, if you're a month late in the winter you're actually like three months late because there's just not enough sun or heat for your plants to thrive, now in Spring you still have plenty of time to catch up. Don't be discouraged if, for example, a whole batch of seeds dies every week, your seedlings will grow faster and faster, so even if you started something a month ago and you have an example of a tomato, these tomatoes were started literally ago. exactly 30 days, whereas these started about 90 days ago, so you can see they are already catching up as the primary growing season approaches, the plants are just going to take off, so don't feel like yes You are discouraged and you have to start at the right time or you give up and again you bought this at a nursery.

You could see that I doubt it grew much bigger than this, the only difference is that it was grown in a controlled environment. with a lot of fertilizer, probably artificial light and a lot of heat, and that's all I want to say about it, just keep starting the seeds, they will get better, they will get faster as the season comes, you are not everything. It is not lost just because you had a bad series of starts, the next thing we are going to talk about before we get into probably the part that interests you the most, which is transplanting and planting your seedlings, is identifying different types of

problems

.

So, unfortunately, I guess fortunately for me, unfortunately for you, I tried to cause some

problems

and the seeds did very well, so I couldn't force them as much as I wanted to, but let's talk about this here first. These are marigolds that I started on February 16th, so take a look at the plant right here, if you see this, this plant has been in this pot for three months and it looks the same, it hasn't grown any more, it is essentially completely stunted if it really were a plant. which has been growing for three months, I would expect it to maybe make it this far, so this is what happens when you don't repot your seedlings often enough, they will go into a state of stasis and won't grow any more. and they will also continue to root more and more, what you're seeing in this thing, roots here, I'm going to have a hard time if I repot this, there's a good chance it's an extremely unhealthy plant, so it probably isn't.

I'm going to bother with these, another sign you might see is, for example, this nasturtium here. I transplanted the other five and left this one. I thought maybe I'll find a place for it, but look how small it is. and it's already in bloom, now the plants I transplanted into the garden are now this big and have barely started to bloom, so again, this is stunted, it's like making a last ditch effort to survive now, the instruction might survive, but really It doesn't make sense once you reach a certain amount of stunting. I wanted to make a special note about Brassica plants, particularly once a Brassica plant has its roots attached like this, there are all these tangled roots down here and it's been sitting here and it's become stunted, this plant just won't go to survive.

I have given up trying to save brassicas that become overgrown or stunted and rooted, they just don't recover properly. What will happen is I'll turn this off and it will immediately fire. flower stem and then it will die if you have seen that happen to your brassicas, it is probably because they have become stunted or rooted and in the last ditch effort to save the plants, it is just not going to work with brassicas. It's almost always worth restarting to get rid of the plants. Here's another example of a healthier tomato and one that's not so healthy.

You can see right here. It is very obvious that it is unhealthy and the difference here is that I managed to create a problem. this was grown normally i put it in a pot i left it on the table it has been growing in the sun getting adequate water this one hasn't gotten enough light it hasn't gotten enough wind and what that means is that it is extremely weak and extremely fragile if a plant is in a fully protected environment, such as a greenhouse, for too long. What will happen is if there is no wind this plant will never become stiff and tough it will just droop like this, the other thing you will notice is that these two plants are exactly the same age but look how much taller this one is.

It was stretching to look for more light, so it just wasn't getting enough light and that causes it to stretch to look for more light and creates a leggy floppy. Seedling, this can be saved if you want, since it's a tomato and what you're going to do with a tomato is go ahead and plant it deeper, you can literally plant it like this and it'll be totally fine. It will root all the way down, but with something that is neglected you might want to place it and plant it in a trench like this and that's fine too, you can bury it straight away, lying in the trench either way it will recover and once it seeks the sun it will come back to shoot up, this is how you save a leggy seedling, just plant it deeper, many seedlings can be planted deeper, things like brassicas are totally fine if planted deeper, peppers can be planted deeper, they can be planted deeper tomatoes. deeper eggplant, there are certain things that just don't work as well, like I don't think you want to bury a pumpkin vine because it starts producing leaves right away and they don't really.

I think they would rot if you tried to bury it. Basically underground, but with most plants you can get away with just burying them a little deeper before moving on to the last interesting part which is planting and transplanting your seedlings. Let's talk a little about what a seedling looks likehealthy, so these are I think a brandywine tomato is a very classic heirloom tomato. I'm going to go ahead and push my finger in and pull this guy out so you can get a good look. I could see a couple of different things, first of all, you can tell I've been watering the bottom because the water comes up to here and now this top part is dry, okay, I actually took it out of the tray a little bit earlier before it was water completely.

This would be an ideal stage to apply fertilizer because it's already a little wet, so you'll get some fertilizer later. wick the other thing I want to talk about is the roots you can see the roots are all the way to the edges they come down and in this particular tray as there are cuts on the side what happens is when the roots They reach a corner, they actually prune themselves, so there are no roots wrapped around the edge, making it a healthy and very robust seedling to transplant. The other thing you will notice is that the roots are very white which is a sign of healthy roots if your roots are a little brown or black which means they have been rotting, been in too much water or been in too much water. dry and the roots simply withered and died.

What you want to see is a lot of pretty things. healthy white roots so this is a great example of a healthy seedling, no issues with the leaves, they all look great, they are a nice full green color, the plants are not very stretched out so that is what you want look when you're talking about a healthy seedling and the same goes for anything like dill, dill has a nice structure, all the leaves look good, these cucumbers once again, their true leaves look great, they're not too stretched out , there are no problems with the plant. obvious to the eye and again the roots here are nice and white so that's really what you want to see when you have a plant that's nice and healthy.

That said, those are examples of healthy seedlings, but now let's talk about when you should plant them. Lift and transplant all your seedlings now, this is probably the part you are most interested in: when to plant, when to transplant and how to do it now. I'm also going to point out a couple of reasons why they would want to do it. I transplanted maybe a little earlier than I thought I would have to and this is a good example of that right here, so this is an Aunt Molly ground cherry. What is happening here is that I let these seeds or soil sit too wet. for too long and what happened is that the surface has retained a lot of moisture and has been constantly damp, but now it has this kind of green mold growing on it, so in this case the fact that there is all this mold means that it probably it will get moist. seedlings, which is when some type of fungus or mold appears and pinches the stem of a plant and actually kills it, so we don't want that to happen, so we're going to try to rescue them by potting them up right now.

I wouldn't transplant them directly to their final location because they are so small that they probably wouldn't survive, so let's go ahead and do it as if it were a rescue mission, in this case you have to be very careful. What is going to happen when you have such small seedlings? They just don't have enough roots, so there's a good chance that when you try to pull the seedling out all the soil will crumble underneath because it just hasn't grown much. enough to secure the ground, so what we're going to do to counteract that is we're going to take one of these.

This is a four inch and three inch cell. It is ideal for potting most things. In fact, I'm going to fill them. essentially all the way down, I'm going to push it down a little bit to make sure the bottom has soil and I'm just going to leave myself a very small amount of room to work with, so you can see here, I've got like maybe a half inch of soil depth , so let's go ahead and try to rescue this now that there are holes in the bottom, so I'm going to move this label first, I'm going to try to push it out.

Well, as I mentioned, I tested this very carefully. You can see that the bottom half is not secured. There were simply no roots. The plant has not grown enough. You can see that little root there that's perfect. Take it, it's actually a little deeper than I had budgeted, I'm just going to arrange it like this, in fact I'm going to push it into a corner to make it easier for me to fill the rest of that pot here. I'm also going to take this time and scrape the surface to try to get some of that mold off the surface and give this soil a fresh start and bury it a little bit so that you have drier soil on top and that's it.

I'm very confident that this will work, but you just want to let it cool a little bit, so I'm going to put it aside for now and let's talk about a plant that I mentioned last time, which is poppies. So the poppies will never reach their full size in the original spot you planted them. This is another place where you have to transplant them gently, so we will do the same again, since they are small plants, I don't expect it. They can really hold so much dirt, so I'm going to go ahead, give myself a little room to work, push it up.

This one has a lot of seedlings that have sprouted up, so it actually has roots, so all I'm going to do is dig. If I have a delicate block of soil like this, instead of trying to plant it perfectly in the center, I'll opt to just push it into a corner, just like I did on the last one and then fill it in, I find that a lot. It's easier when you have a very loose amount of soil like that, to do it this way. We'll do it again right here. This has actually been overwatered. You could see that as I pressed that bit of dirt, a lot of water came out. that's not ideal so I just take the bottom off and put it in and fill it around so now I'm going to finish transplanting the best four of this here and we'll move on to the next one so that's how you handle small seedlings They may not have the full potential of roots to hold soil easily, you just have to be nice to them and estimate how the roots are going to come out, so let's take a look at the little ones.

Although I have separated a bunch of different six packs here, each of these plants here can be transplanted or potted at this stage right now, the reason is because they all have at least two or three of their true leaves. So what that means is, for example, let's look at I think this is a pumpkin, so this leaf here is the original seed leaf. You could say it looks different than the final true leaf, which is this guy here, so it has one, two, and one. third true leaf on the way, this can be transplanted directly, but I always prefer to plant in a pot at least once, planting in a pot for me is the best option because it gives you more time to finalize the location and helps you save a little bit of time. water because I end up with a more robust plant for when I transplant it and now I wanted to mention one of the things: I have many different pots.

I have been saving pots from every nursery purchase I have made, they are all different sizes, shapes, depths etc. The problem I've had with this is that if I say repot something like six, three or four individual plants, that means I have to write three, four, six different labels and put them in each separate pot now if you're like me, which probably What you did was you wrote one and you said, I'm going to be smart about this. I'm going to take my three pots, put them all next to each other like this and I'm never going to mix them up.

I'm going to know exactly what it is, but something inevitably happens. You take one out, put something else in, and then you say, "Okay, I don't actually know which tomato is which." and a bit silly as it sounds, one of my favorite reasons for something like this, where you have all your pots in one container, it makes my life so much easier. I have mixed so many seedlings in the past just because I didn't. I have enough tags and since I didn't want to write them down, what we're going to do here is firm up the soil, some very loud mockingbirds here today, guys, I hope you're okay with that, so what we're going to do is plant in I potted these first boulom squash, so I'm just going to push my finger to get them out and that's a perfect example of healthy roots, the roots are going all the way down.

There are a couple more coming out of the background. You can see that the roots on the bottom are a little darker because they sat in the water while it was on the bottom, but they all look very white, very healthy, there are no roundings in the corners. This is a great perfectly healthy transplant, so I'm going to put it in my soil and then what I always recommend you do is when you transplant or plant you want to press down around the base of the plant and really make sure it firms up, If you don't, you're not really sure that you have proper soil contact with the roots and that could lead to a little strange settling and a little slow growth, so always firm up your seedling, whether you're transplanting it or planting in pots so let's go ahead and plant all these guys in this case there are only three that's okay so there we have it I planted these three and again I only have one label and that denotes the whole package which is great, you can leave an empty space, no big deal or if you have a plant you can just put it in a pot and leave it with its own label.

Now I wanted to mention that these were started at the same time on the same tray. I see they look a lot smaller, they are still fine to plant in pots at the moment, the reason is because they have their true leaf, if I try to take them out, it's a little more delicate here, it actually has roots all the way down. all the way down, so it's totally legit. You could pot it up if you do it at this stage, it will also grow faster if you leave it there for another week, you might get one more leaf but if I plant it correctly.

It will now develop two or three leaves in the same amount of time, so potting your plants will dramatically speed up their growth, so do it often and as early as possible; Wait until the last minute to plant in pots. that's how you end up with stunted seedlings. Let's talk about one more container plant and this is one that I'm sure all of you at home are growing and that is tomatoes. Now tomatoes are one of those plants that could be very tough. with at the seedling stage and they will be totally fine, so this is a three inch deep pot.

You can see there's one that looks pretty nice and tall and the other one that's pretty short, so I'm going to continue casting. You don't need that and what I'm going to do is go ahead and remove all the dirt. This is not necessary, but I just wanted to show you guys that you can do something like this and the plant. It'll be totally fine, the reason I'm doing it in this case is because I wanted to show you how you can plant deeper, so what I'm going to do is take four inches. to create some solid soil at the bottom and now that I loosened the block of soil I still have all the roots that I was able to get it down and I could actually plant it much deeper than if I tried to plant it directly from three to four, I would only gain an inch, but by doing this, I'm actually going to get a much more robust root system, so the next thing I'm going to do is remove these seed leaves, the first leaves that sprout and then I'm going to go ahead and just bury it, you might think, oh, but by doing that, you've now stressed the plant, it will grow much slower, it won't really make much of a difference.

Tomatoes are very hardy and robust when it comes to their seedling stage, you could make a lot. I could have cut off half the roots and they would still have grown well, so by doing this I have now gained an extra two inches of rooting on the stem. It will make the plant much sturdier, it will make the root ball much more vigorous and larger and once you place this in its final location, it will be a stellar transplant and that's how I made all of these and that's why they really look. Wow, they all grew into a single six cells like one of these little holes and I divided them and planted them and that's what I got, so let's go ahead and take this to the final conclusion, which is actually transplanting a plant.

In your garden I took that four-pack of shishitos that I mentioned before and that have been auctioned off. They are perfect for transplanting. They have a great shape. Big size. Let's take a look at some of these roots. Yes, right there you can see there is one. nice root wall nice root wall so that's perfect right there. I'm going to put that in here and what we're going to do is just take a very, very simple trowel, especially with something like a pepper, a tomato, you could just Plant it as deep as you really want, but with the pepper you really want to stay level with the ground, so that's the size right there.

I'm going to dig it out a little bit more and then what I like to do is take some worm. droppings throw it in the hole, mix it up, I'll take my seedling, put it in, you can see right there, it's right at ground level, which is where we want it to be the last thing I like to do whenI am transplanting. For a good pepper like this, I'll take a can of fertilizer and water it directly into the hole. What this does is ensure that the roots have a lot of water at the beginning and also a lot of nutrition. case the bed is still settling or maybe I put compost in it that wasn't finished and then I was able to bury it and what's going to happen now is that That water that I just added and I'll add a little more will help pull the roots into the soil and direct them towards where the water flows.

That's the good thing about watering deeply at first. It encourages the roots to keep growing downward to find more water, so that's all you really need to know about caring for your seedlings, potting them, transplanting them, some of the common problems you may encounter and the fertilization and irrigation program that I like to follow. nothing set in stone, remember to keep trying different things, you might discover a new trick. Everything I've done in the garden has been trial and error, so thanks for watching. I hope you have collected a lot of interesting information and I See you next time