Biggest Mistakes Made When Starting Seeds Indoors

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what is going on everyone welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the mi gardener channel i am so excited about today's video because we're going to be talking all about seed starting mistakes that's right we're going to be going through as many as i can possibly fit in this video to help you guys uh to help you guys not make these same mistakes because learning from experience as well as seeing so many of these mistakes being made by other gardeners i just want to save you all the trouble and the hassle of failing when it comes time to starting your seeds indoors it can be extremely rewarding to start your seeds indoors but it can be extremely disappointing and discouraging as well if you make some of these mistakes so i just want to save you all the trouble and really point some of these out because they're so common and they're so easy to fix the first mistake i see so many gardeners making also is the biggest mistake and that's you're starting seeds indoors now it sounds crazy that i even said that because this video is about troubleshooting starting seeds indoors so i would want you to start seeds indoors right wrong i actually don't want you to start seeds indoors if there's an if there that's why this whole thing is going to make sense i do not want you starting seeds indoors if you do not have enough space enough grow lights or enough sunlight this is so important and this whole video won't mean anything if you don't have those three if you don't have those three if you don't have enough sunlight or enough grow lights or enough space starting indoors is the worst mistake you can possibly make i see way too many gardeners thinking that it is a prerequisite and a a vital step to having a successful garden and it just is not it does give you a leg up it does give you a benefit of having an earlier harvest but it does not period give you a successful garden every time guaranteed because prime example if you start seeds in a window without enough sunlight your seedlings are going to get laggy and they're going to die that means that the seeds that you spent money on and the time that you spent planting them had you just planted them outside when the weather was warm you would have been about three to five weeks behind schedule but you would have at least had probably enough time for most things to get a harvest starting from seed directly outside and likewise if you don't have enough grow lights say you don't have enough sunlight you have all the space well if you don't have enough grow lights or you don't have the right type of lights your plants are going to get stressed and they're going to die and so i see so many gardeners making this mistake that i just feel like it has to be first and foremost the biggest mistake i see gardeners making is just trying to make something work that will never possibly work the second mistake i see so many gardeners making when starting seeds indoors is they don't have enough sunlight you know a lot of gardeners they see light coming in a window and they put their plants in the windowsill that that light is coming through and then all of a sudden the seedlings get super leggy they start stretching and then they're dead and they wonder why they said well i started them in a windowsill they had lots of sunlight well was it enough sunlight your seedlings first and foremost should be getting four to six hours of direct sun direct sun does not mean filtered sun those two are vastly different just because you can you know open up your window and you can read a newspaper without a light on in your room does not mean that that is enough light that is not direct light and a prime example of this is like a north facing window a north facing window is one of the worst windows that you can have to start seedlings in because yes you're going to get light that reflects and bounces in but your plants they do not need that filtered light what they need is that strong direct light that strong direct light is going to allow them to generate enough energy to photosynthesize and not grow leggy see the problem is is that a plant has one of two options the sun can come to it or it can go to the sunlight and it will go to the sunlight until it finds it and that's one of the biggest problems is that you know if you have light that's just filtering around there's certain plants that will do okay like certain house plants but all of your vegetables all of your herbs all of your flowers stuff that you're going to be growing out in your garden all of those absolutely must have direct sunlight now if you don't have enough sunlight at all you don't have those four to six hours of sunlight what do we do well you need to get a grow light and that's where we come into the third biggest mistake i see gardeners making when starting seeds indoors is they don't get the right type of grow light you need to make sure that the grow light you're getting is going to have two things it needs to have lumens and it needs to have kelvin these two things are in my opinion the only important factors when it comes to a grow light the lumens are how much light energy is coming out of your light you might have say uh an incandescent light bulb which should never be used under any circumstances for growing plants because they don't give off any uv light uv light is required to uh to photosynthesize incandescent light might put out say 500 lumens or maybe 700 lumens these grow lights here that we're talking about they put out 40 000 lumens these grow lights are so bright and that's because the energy that's required to photosynthesize is really high you need a minimum of 5 000 lumens a minimum of 5 000 lumens is required to start photosynthesizing and creating energy if you don't have that amount of lumens your plants are going to need to be either far closer to the light like really close or you just need to add more lights you know you need to make sure that your lumens are over 5000 lumens and another thing is lumens can be added so if you take two uh 2500 lumen lights say like a like a t5 or t12 grow light tube you can add two of those together and you can get to 5 000 so that's not a problem but you need to make sure you do have at least five thousand lumens and that can be found on um on any box it'll tell you how many lumens come out of the box the other thing to remember is the kelvin the kelvin is probably the most important thing because like lumens i said you know you can put the you can put the the grow light closer to make sure that the plant is obtaining all of that growable energy if you have less than 5000 you can still kind of get by it's not preferred but you can get by by putting them super close but the kelvin is a guaranteed uh starter you have to have the right amount of kelvin and that is the color of the light you see the grow lights above me and this little grow light here by fairy morse these are all 6500 kelvin 6500 kelvin is uh basically a blue spectrum light that is the color that the light gives off you know people always say well i kind of want more of a warm light for inside my house you know i don't want to go with a really blue light make me look like i'm in a hospital that type of light that color that we're talking about that color is what is associated with the kelvin and the kelvin needs to be at least 5000 or higher these numbers can be found on the light itself or the box that you buy it in you're going to need to get something that has at least 5 000 kelvin because that is the color that plants can best photosynthesize with if you get something that is less than 5 000 you're entering more of like a warm daylight color or like a like a warm color that orange and red spectrum does not do good for photosynthesizing it does not do good for creating green growth and so that's why we want to go towards more of a blue spectrum light the fourth mistake i see way too many gardeners making on grow lights and one of the last ones i see is their plants are too far away from the grow light and this ties into kind of that point i made with the the lumens right so lumens are the amount of energy being given off the amount of growable energy there are the amount of uh light photons coming off of the uh the the light and those photons are touching the leaf right they're hitting the leaf all over the place well if you have the light up higher the chance of that photon missing missing the leaf is far greater right so it's like throwing a dart if you're throwing a dart from 20 feet versus one foot what are your likelihoods of hitting a bullseye right if the leaf surface is the bullseye you want to make sure that you're as close as possible because that's going to ensure that the target you're aiming for is being hit and that's really uh about distance and how much lumens are being given off if you're at 5000 lumens you can be about five to seven inches off the plant if you're at 10 000 lumens you can be about 10 to 12 inches off the plant if you're at 30 to 40 000 lumens like our grow lights are just unbelievably bright they're at 40 000 lumens plus the small ones are at about 27 000. the big ones are at about like 43 000 lumens those you can be five six feet away from the plant because they're just so unbelievably bright but if you're less than five thousand you need to be about three to four inches off the the top of the plants there so that your plants have the best chance of gathering as much that energy as possible so the fifth mistake i see way too many gardeners making when starting seeds indoors is they start their seeds indoors in too small of a container now if you do not know what you're doing this tray right here can be a death trap and why i say that is because if you start your seeds indoors with too much time uh to till planting time so for us we don't start our seeds until early march and that's because if we started our our seeds in a tray like this right now we would have a bunch of dead plants and that's because there's not enough uh there's not a space in these cells to allow for the plants to fully mature and and grow properly until we plant outside in early to mid april just not enough time there's no way in a million years we'd have enough space here and so starting seeds in too small of a container is a huge mistake you know a lot of people they say well i only have enough space or i only have enough grow light for say five or six uh normal size containers but if i downsize the containers i can get more plants it's all about space you know so this this right here is 72 cells so i'm getting 72 plants in the same amount of space as one of these basil plants here you know i'm getting i have i might have uh i don't know five plants worth here so the idea that you can simply downsize the container or the volume of soil that you're planting in and you can get five to ten times more plants in that same amount of space our inner greed kicks in and we think man that sounds like a completely winning proposition i don't know why i wouldn't do that the problem is if you don't have enough time or if you have too much time i should say you're going to have stress plants and they're going to die you know if i put a seed in this tray here i know that from the time this seed sprouts i have about a month to move it from this tray into either a bigger container or into the garden and so if i have say two months time there's no way i'm going to be starting anything in this and that's why i have to wait because if i you know if i don't if i just let greed get the better part of me and i plant seeds in here you could have everything going right for you but they cannot make the space bigger than the space that is already allowed the roots just can't it's not possible i mean they can't go through plastic you know the plastic does not it's not permeable so it just is like this confinement and they're going to get stressed they're going to get root bound you're going to have stressed plants that are never going to recover from that in my opinion the best thing that you can possibly start your seeds in are these three inch containers i absolutely am a huge fan of three inch containers they are by far the best size for all your needs whether you're starting lettuce or whether you're starting tomatoes if you're growing a plant indoors this gives you the most amount of time to get a plant started you can grow a plant like a tomato plant or a lettuce plant you can grow pretty much anything in this for at least two and a half months this gives you a lot of time to get something up and growing before you have to plant it outside and this compared to this you're getting about about three and a half times more growable space in this than in these small cells so i would much rather you don't try to don't try to just cram plants in a small space because you're just going to end up with stress plants the sixth mistake i see way too many gardeners making is they're starting the wrong types of plants indoors i can tell you i see this every day i can tell you this is probably one of the most common things that comes through our our inbox i see people starting carrots indoors i see people starting radishes indoors beets and doors things like that you cannot start these things indoors root vegetables do not belong started indoors when you transplant them what happens is you start the roots you know the roots start developing in your containers and if you have two or three seeds and you have to separate them out or if you pull them out and you damage the root system you're damaging the crop that you're harvesting now i do understand that obviously there are people that that have success and they have uh you know they do get harvests from doing this but i would say probably about nine times out of ten if you don't know exactly what you're doing and you don't have the timing down exactly right you're going to set yourself back these crops mature so fast i mean a radish matures in 25 to 30 days why on earth would you need to start it indoors there's really no benefit to it i would start them outside the first crop i would start our radishes and i'm harvesting them before i'm even moving my tomato plants outside that i started indoors i mean you're getting such a fast turnaround that starting them indoors is not going to give you any type of benefit and i would much rather you spend more resources growing things that are trickier like like uh you know corn or like tomatoes and peppers and eggplants and things like that and i also did kind of hint to the corn that type of plant is not something you want indoors they grow really tall they grow really fast they do not belong indoors crops like squashes pumpkins melons stuff that vines they don't belong indoors they grow so fast they get so big and you're going to run out of space and the seventh mistake i see way too many gardeners making is they're starting seeds way too early this is also a big mistake you know this kind of ties into a lot of different things we've talked about already if you start your seeds too early the amount of space that you need to continue to grow them increases so this is good for a month this is good for about two months this type of container which is like maybe like a half gallon container i don't know it's a tomato sauce container so so uh i don't really know this is a 91 ounce container so um yeah this is maybe like a half gallon or so and um this type of container here uh might be good for about three to four months depending on the plant obviously so if you start them earlier you're going to need to accommodate for more space a lot of people don't have that space and you're going to you're going to end up in trouble also if you start your seeds too early sometimes your stuff can start flowering before you even move it outside if you have your tomato plants flowering before you move them outside it is a big mistake that is not a good thing you do not want your tomato plants flowering that means they're mature if you're moving a fully mature plant outside what's going to happen is it's going to go through a lot of transplant shock and that transplant shock ultimately will either kill the plant or set it back further than had you just waited a little bit i can tell you from personal experience you can go back and find videos believe me i have them on youtube where i started my seedlings indoors i had tomato plants that were quite literally this tall and when i moved them outside they were so stressed that they lost a lot of foliage they dropped all their fruits and flowers so i didn't really gain anything there and then it took about two to three extra weeks for them to bounce back from that stress and by then stuff that my mom had actually bought and put in her garden from the greenhouse was actually further along and actually producing when mine was just recovering so it's not necessarily a benefit to have stuff so mature when you put them outside so those are the biggest mistakes i see so many gardeners making there's a lot of other ones as well maybe maybe make a part two i don't know let me know in the comments box below i have a ton more that i want to talk about but they're not as big of mistakes so uh they kind of cover like watering and fertilizing and things like that that a lot of people kind of have unlocked but if you want me to and you think it's value added let me know in the comments box below so as always i hope you guys enjoyed i hope you learned something new and we'll catch you all on the next episode grow bigger go home bye
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Channel: MIgardener
Views: 715,274
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Keywords: MIgardener, vegetable gardening, organic gardening
Id: l5o6LR81o_s
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Length: 17min 5sec (1025 seconds)
Published: Sat Jan 18 2020
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