10 Beginner SEED STARTING Mistakes You MUST AVOID

hello there and welcome back to the Garden y'all I am having some serious second thoughts about making a video in this rain today so let's head inside and start some seeds that is better it is just raining cats and dogs out there all right welcome back to my garage this time where all of the seed starting Madness happens for us throughout the entire year today y'all I have a very simple video that I hope is going to be very helpful we are going to go through the top 10 mistakes that gardeners who are new to indoor seed starting typically make and of course how to avoid those mistakes because if you can avoid these and you totally totally can avoid them you're going to have beautiful seedlings ready for transplant come spring come fall whenever you are doing this all right 10 seed starting mistakes in about 10 minutes let's do this thing brand new seedlings like these ones right here they don't need food for the first few days because their seeds actually store energy for them but it is so important to remember that after those first few days they're gonna need to eat and it is actually really really easy to end up with seedlings that are deficient in some important nutrient take your pick if you start them in an inert medium like a store-bought seed starting mix or a DIY mix of peat moss and perlite or coco core plugs so what I like to do when I am using one of those inert seed starting mixes is take between say a third of a cup to half a cup and really mix it in there with the seed starting mix for each one of these 72 cell trays quick heads up if you are starting your seeds in a good potting mix you don't need to add extra fertilizer if they've already got everything you need already in there this advice only applies if you are starting your seeds in like a purpose made seed starting medium that is very low in nutrients I just wanted to make sure that was clear all right I admit this next one can be a little bit tricky to avoid at times but if you can try to plant together like seeds with like try to plant together seeds with similar germination rates similar germination times and similar growth habits to together and separate out seeds that have very different growth habits let's look at a quick example right here we have our rootstock Tomatoes these germinated very quickly and about two and a half days and you can see they're actually already getting their true leaves and I've already had to raise up the lights because they're getting so tall so quickly you can imagine if I had planted those together with some hot peppers well our hot peppers haven't even germinated yet so if I plant those in the same container so if I plant those in the same container pretty soon I'm gonna have to make some tough decisions things like which one do I optimize the lights for it is time we talk about lighting the biggest cause of leggy seedlings and the occasional bane of my existence here is what is happening when it seems like our seedlings should be loving life but they come out looking like these micro greens we take a look at these lights we bought we turn them on we turn them on turn them on and they are just absolutely blindingly bright look at this so we hang them up a foot above our seedlings two feet above our seedlings and you can see that has a lot of light actually reaching those plants seems reasonable right but in fact all of this light right behind me it's just tricking us because the usable spectrum of light for our seedlings does not match the usable spectrum of light that our eyes can perceive so these cheap LED shop lights that I use exclusively they actually need to be surprisingly close to the seedlings to work their best and maybe even more important they need to be on and available very very soon after germination after those seedlings pop up you can actually see here that I don't even bother planting things like tomatoes and peppers and eggplant stuff that need a lot of light I don't even plant them in these end rows just because my lighting setup doesn't reach that side well enough now I exclusively use these cheap LED shop lights to start my seeds because well I myself am a chief Gardener but if you are using something nicer like full spectrum grow lights or even just something hotter like fluorescent lights you're very likely going to need to put those higher up from the seedlings if they're down too low and they're running too hot or they're just too strong they can actually burn the seedlings one tool I do like to leverage though is the app Photon it's free on Android I gather it's not free on iOS unfortunately but anyhow it will actually tell you exactly how much usable light usable light for the seedlings again not for our eyes how much usable light they're actually receiving more important than anything else we're going to discuss today please please please be careful do not put your light solo down so close to the plastic so close to the plants themselves that you are creating a fire risk Nothing Else Matters more than safety please y'all please be careful after week lighting the biggest mistake all of us soft-hearted gardeners make is letting these seedlings grow in together right next to each other like this for too long and it is it is definitely the most understandable mistake as well it is it's heartbreaking like it hurts to kill these little seeds intentionally so what you need to do is either snip off the tops or if you want you can carefully remove the seedling altogether or what you can do is if you find that you have poor germination in one little container so for instance right here I have a Little Seedling that came in really really weak and it's just not going to survive so I'm just going to go ahead and take that one out and I'm just going to replace it with one of these much stronger seedlings that popped up on the same road hey there I have a quick request you probably already know the drill if you think that this video is going to help you in some way to get better seedlings this year if you're learning something useful from this video would you mind please hitting the like button down there somewhere it genuinely makes all the difference in the world to us it is so important I I really I really truly appreciate it thank you so much and thank you thank you just for watching Let's uh let's go ahead and get back to those seedlings fluffy and soft and Airy and loose those are the types of words that typically describe a really good seed starting mix but you can definitely have too much of a good thing on that front because these seeds they actually germinate better when they have good contact with the soil around them so what I recommend when you are planting into a really soft loose mix and ultimately you probably should be after you plant them in there just give the top of that soil a gentle Pat just to just to help make sure that those seeds are actually making contact with the soil beneath and above and then after you have planted in all your seeds and you've given them all that little Gentle Love Pat we're gonna just go ahead and go over to the kitchen sink and we're going to really gently give them an overhead watering with a really really soft Mist light Sprite just to help make sure that each of those little seeds that we just planted in there is actually touching the soil beneath and above and that's just going to help make sure that we get the best possible germination rate so the main watering mistake that you can make is continuing to water from overhead after that initial watering where we just did it to get rid of the air pockets after that first time we really only want to water from below and what I mean by that is we're actually going to take some water and we're just going to pour in to the little drainless tray the tray without holes in it that is actually holding our main seedling tray and the reason we do that is because watering from overhead causes three really big problems first off it can actually create this crust on the surface that over time will be so hard that plants can't germinate through it two it's going to push down that soil it's going to compact the soil in these little containers to the point where roots are going to have a harder time growing and you're going to get weaker plants and then three most importantly when you water from overhead you're really encouraging water to sit at the surface and to grow mold and to grow fungus right and that mold can actually kill your seedlings luckily watering From Below is super easy actually let's make that mostly very easy there is one thing to watch out for you only want to pour in as much water as the soil can uptake in about 30 minutes to an hour if you give them more than that basically what's going to happen is the soil will become saturated and then the remaining water is just going to be pooled here at the bottom and those roots are just going to be soaking in that water and over time they're actually going to rot like they will literally just rot or or you'll do the responsible thing right and you'll just pour out the excess water after 30 minutes or an hour whatever it is and that is totally totally fine to do a few times but if you end up doing that all the time every day every other day for weeks at a time what you're actually doing is you're systematically rinsing out all of the nutrients from the soil that sounded very very dramatic basically just don't over water only give them as much as they're going to uptake in about 30 minutes see y'all last week I was planning out my tomatoes and my eggplants and my Peppers all that good stuff and I had a bit of a revelation Revelation is way too strong of a word I realized that the longer I do this the more times I do this the fewer seeds I actually put into each one of these little containers see when I was just getting started basically I would take the packet and I would just be like dumping it in there right I would be planting three four five or more seeds in each one of these containers but the problem is if you buy your seeds from a reputable seed company and I'll list some of my favorites down in the description but if you do buy your seeds from a good place they're going to germinate at a pretty good rate so when you plant five into one of these little containers they're gonna pop up you're gonna have a big mess of stems you're gonna have a big mess of leaves and they're going to be fighting each other trying to reach that scarce light and more importantly underneath the surface all of those seedlings while their roots are going to be competing with each other for access to the dirt and the nutrients in the water and you're just gonna get this big Tangled mess I've done it so many times I have wasted so many thousand of seedlings so now what I like to recommend is plant no more than two seeds per container or even better what I like to do is plant half of them with only one seed and half of them with two seeds for a given variety of a given plant and when I do that planting on average one and a half seeds in each container for a given variety I actually end up still getting more seedlings than I need there is kind of an important exception to this Rule and there always is right when I am planting seeds of a plant that I don't need a lot of and I know they're going to have a hard time germinating I'm going to plant a ton of those suckers another way that I often end up with the leggy seedlings is by leaving my heat mat like one of these right here on for too long after germination basically if you are growing in a heated environment like say your home you probably don't need to leave those heat mats on after the plants have germinated otherwise if you're growing in an unheated environment like say my garage you can leave them on depending on the ambient temperature to be more precise you can basically assume that a Seedling heat mat is going to warm up the soil by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit so what you can do is take that ambient temperature plus 10 or so degrees Fahrenheit and compare that to the soil temperature preferences of whatever you are growing so y'all in full transparency probably a lot of people are going to disagree with me on this one and I just want to say that is okay there are a lot of good strategies in gardening and there's a lot of paths to success right but my advice my recommendation is to not use one of those planting calendars one of those generic planting calendars that only considers your local zip code my problem with them is they tend to over index on Frost dates and the problem with over indexing on a frost date as your main barometer is that is going to result in starting your seeds too early and then of course transplanting out your seedlings too early and then of course what happens is you're sitting there and you're in a situation where you have this big beautiful seedling that is ready to go outside but the way weather outside is not ready for it so instead what I recommend is try to find a local University AG extension office or a local Master Gardeners group in your county or even better your city or even better you're part of your city and see if they have their own planting calendar for your area I have found those are much much more accurate and much better to use one more critical bonus tip here please ignore me completely let me rephrase that a little bit if any part of this video made you feel intimidated by indoor seed starting or question whether or not it was something you actually wanted to try go ahead and pretend you never watch this seed starting is fun it's nice to avoid these problems but just get out there give it a shot and Learn by doing otherwise y'all thank you so much for watching I hope to see you on the next one and until then Happy gardening today gardening helper [Music] [Applause] make me feel fine

Channel: Nextdoor Homestead

Views: 14,581

Keywords: seed starting, starting seeds, starting seeds indoors, seed starting indoors, seed starting mistakes, how to start seeds, how to start seeds indoors, seeds not germinating, leggy seedlings, how to plant seeds in trays, how to sow seeds in trays, seed starting setup, seed starting mix

Id: kB8_oVa5rIE

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 18 2023