- It is a cold day
outside here in San Diego, Zone 10b, the perfect day
to come into the greenhouse and discuss with you some of the myths about seed starting that just aren't true. When you first start your seeds, it is very tempting to want to baby them and keep them in a perfect precious state, but you don't have to. They actually will be perfectly fine if you are a bit rough with them. And in fact, on some seedlings, like let's say lettuce, or actually onions is
a really good example, I can pop it out. And even if I lose a little bit of soil, and even if I wanna separate
these seedlings out, and plant, let's say,
you know this lettuce, and this lettuce in a separate area, I totally can. Now I can plant that lettuce as a clump, that wouldn't be a problem whatsoever. But you can be a little bit less precious with your seedlings than you want. In fact, sometimes with
something like a bean, or a lettuce, or broccoli, I'll just pop on my seeds outta my cell, kind of toss them roughly
in the place in the garden that I want them to be. In particular, this helps when, let's say you start seeds on
your own or you go to a nursery and grab some seedlings, you can oftentimes just
split those seedlings up. And even if you damage some of the roots, I think a lot of us gardeners, we think, well, we can prune the tops of our plants, but if you touch the roots, then uh-oh, that plant's gonna die. And the truth is, a lot of
the times you can even do some light root pruning or you can lose a couple of those feeder
roots on your seedlings when you're transplanting
them into a soil situation, and it's actually totally fine. So your seedlings might be tough, but what about your soil? - When it comes to growing
your own seedlings at home, choosing the right soil mix can feel like a really stressful thing, and you might be led to believe that there's only one
true type of soil to use, and that is something
called seed starting mix. Over here on my left, I have an example of what
that might look like. It's usually something like
peat, very fine grained. It just has a little bit of tiny pieces of pearlite for drainage. And the idea behind this is that it basically has nothing in there. All it's doing is keeping the soil moist so that the seeds can germinate and allow a little bit
of water to come through. Now, right 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 chunky material. And that can actually
hinder your seed starting. Think about a very tiny seed. If you were to put it on top of something like this big piece of bark, it's not gonna really have
a good chance of germinating 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
nice high quality potting mix, like this guy right here, and then I'll sift it using
a quarter inch hardware cloth and just get it down to this
really nice and fine texture. At this level, there's
nothing really in here that's going to impede germination, nothing heavy that's gonna
sit on top of your seeds, and there's plenty of
water access to that seed so that it could properly germinate. The only thing I'll say though
is that if you have soil that looks like this, and there aren't many soils that are sold that look like this, where it's all just
basically chunks of wood, that's just not gonna do well for a seed. In a forest, of course, a natural
environment, it does work, but those are not the seeds
you're growing in your garden, you're growing tomatoes,
lettuce, and things like that, and this just isn't gonna
give you a good time when it comes to seed starting. Just to be clear, there is nothing wrong
with seed starting mix. If that is what you're
used to growing with, you could of course keep doing that, but if you can't find a nearby, or maybe you just don't wanna buy that bag of seed starting mix, you could just get some potting mix, sift it down and make
your own little blend. I actually like to add something
like worm castings to it to give it a little
bit of extra nutrients, which a lot of people
think you actually can't 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. They sprout, the seed leaves, or cotyledons, as they're called, and those are sort of consumed while these beautiful
seedlings put out some roots and start to actually uptake
nutrients from the soil. But the truth is, a lot of seedling mixes
don't even really have fertilizer in them. And people will say, Hey, well, if you put fertilizer on,
you're gonna burn your plants. And in the past, that really was true, 'cause way back in the day, and sometimes to some degree today, you used to use a lot
of synthetic fertilizers that were really high in nitrogen, which is readily available by the plant and would actually burn the leaves. And so it wasn't a good idea. However, these days, I'll
show you what we like to do, and we don't go crazy with it, but we do touch our seedlings
with just a little taste of nature's magic, just
a simple fertilizer. You don't wanna go too
crazy on the NPK numbers, or nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. I put the fertilizer in first, and then I'll just heavily dilute it. When you go to a nursery and you see all of those
beautiful vegetable starts that look like they're
growing in a five gallon pot, but they're actually in something
not much bigger than this. The truth is those are fertilized plants. I mean, they're relatively
heavily fertilized plants in most cases. That's why they look so good. And if you remember the
early days of Epic Gardening, I actually started growing in hydroponics, which was growing solely
in water and nutrients. So I like to give a light dilute
fertilizer to my seedlings before I put them out. Now, not every seedling,
you don't have to do this, first of all, at all, but if you want a little boost, or you're growing stuff
that you've started indoors, that you're gonna be growing
for one month, two months, especially in small containers,
container plants like that need to be fed before they go outside. Otherwise they are really
depleting that soil of whatever nutrients were even
in there in the first place. So I would fertilize starting
at about the two week mark, and it's tempting to then come up with a schedule which can work in, let's say a commercial nursery, but in a home garden,
it's not that simple. - One of the most common questions I get when it comes to seedlings
is why is my seedling dying? And nine outta 10 times, it
always has to do with watering. A lot of people are tempted
to create a schedule, where I'm gonna go outside and water my seedlings every single day, but that can actually
lead to more problems than it does actually
benefit your seedlings. So now I'm gonna actually tell you guys exactly when to water,
how to know when to water, and how to do it best. There are a couple different tricks that you wanna actually think about. First of all, you do not
need the water every day. For example, today it's overcast. There hasn't been sun single
time throughout the day, and these seedlings are
not taking up much water. Now, if it was a warm,
sunny day, of course, they will be drinking up a lot more water and you'll probably get close
to watering every single day. So here's what you wanna do. One of my favorite things to
do is simply pick up your tray. Is it heavy? If it feels really, really heavy, you're probably over watered. If it feels like I have
some nice heft to it, it's probably fine. But if it feels like nothing, like it just flies right
up when you pick it up, here's a good chance it's
actually way too dry. One of the best ways to
actually know when to water is to just look at the
surface of your soil. If it is nice and dry on the surface, that means that the water
has now actually dried up at the surface. But beneath it, if you pick it up, there's actually still some heft, and that is a great time to
actually water your plants. If the top looks very dark and wet like this, then
they do not need water. It's really as simple as that. Instead of sticking to a
schedule, use observation, play around, look at your seedlings, and that will tell you
more than anything else. Now, if your seedlings look yellow, it's probably 'cause
you over water severely, and that's really hard to recover from. Too much water in the soil
can lead to rot of the roots and also suffocation of those roots. And those seedlings
aren't gonna bounce back. That's usually where most
diseases like damping off, that pinch the base of your seedling, and then they flop over come from. All that has to do with watering. So just follow those simple
tricks of weight and observation and you'll do just fine. Now, there is another thing
that I like to suggest is if you have a mixed tray
of seedlings like this, if some came up, like these guys here, move them to a separate tray, they're going to need
more water than the ones like this one here that
haven't even germinated yet. So this might go a couple
days without water, whereas this full tray of seedlings that has multiple seedlings in it are gonna be using quite a bit of water, and they will need water more regularly. But you don't need to
water every single tray, just split 'em up when you can. Now, if you have a lot
of seedlings in a tray like this guy here versus this one, this is obviously gonna
take up a lot more water than this one. And you might think,
isn't it a mistake to have that many seeds in a single tray? And actually it's a strategy. - We've all been in this situation before. You've got a tray, in this
case, one of our 16 cell trays, so I should see 16 seeds. I do not. I see about eight seeds. And that could be because
you are believing in the myth of one seed, one hole. Now, sometimes that's true,
maybe a bean or a pea, I'm pretty confident
that's gonna germinate, so I'll just pop one in. But in many cases, it's a really good idea to plant at least two, sometimes three seeds in a hole if you want to guarantee
that you get germination. And to understand that it's
actually relatively simple math. So all seeds have a
germination percentage. Let's just keep it simple
and say we're planting a hundred seeds of lettuce, and those seeds have a
90% germination rate. So on average, we should see about 90 of those seeds in a hundred
cell tray germinate. Now what happens if I actually
put two seeds in each hole? In that case, I will see 99
out of a hundred germinate. And that's how you sort of
guarantee your germination rate by just adding one more seed. And quite 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 thick these days. So there's one reason to do it. The other reason to do it is
some plants actually are just more space efficient when multi-sown. So if you think about onions,
or you think about beets, or shallots or things like that, that you can just plant 2, 3, 4 in a hole and actually never even separate them and just sort of harvest
them out of the garden as they size up, it's a
really, really good idea to be more economical when it comes to the
actual results you get outta your garden. Now, some plants have more
than one seed in a seed, and these are the ones you
hear that you can't transplant. - So why is it a problem to
transplant said root crops? Well, it's actually due to the fact that many of these plants,
including sunflowers, radishes, all other root crops have a taproot, that is a primary root that
is sent down into the soil. That is the majority
of where the nutrients are coming into that plant. Other things like tomatoes
have tons of branching roots. So it doesn't really matter if you even damage that root whatsoever. And the deal is, is like say the sunflower, if you were to transplant this and damage the taproot, it'll still grow. It just won't truly turn into the mammoth. If you want to grow that
12 foot tall sunflower, put this directly in ground. But if you're fine with
growing a eight foot sunflower, it's totally fine to transplant them. Same deal with the root crops like beets, and even carrots if you really want to, I'll get more on that later. The idea behind it is that as soon as they start to
germinate and have enough leaves, put it out in your garden. Don't sit around and wait, because all those tap
roots, the longer they sit, the bigger the chances that you're gonna damage
it during transplanting. And that's really the only
thing you have to worry about. There's even other things
like poppies, for example, that say you cannot do it. I've been doing it for years. It's totally fine. You just have to be a
little bit more careful. So let's pop out into the garden and I'll show you
exactly how to transplant something like that. Before me, you see a sea of carrots that I have growing in my raised bed, and a couple reasons why you
wouldn't wanna transplant them is a, you usually wanna
grow a lot of carrots. If I wanna transplant all those carrots, I'd be pretty tired of
carrots by the end of the day. And also they have a
more sensitive taproot. You're literally eating the
entire elongated taproot. So any damage to that,
and you're gonna end up with a little stubby carrot. So how do you actually
transplant the other things, like the beets that I mentioned? It's actually very simple. The only thing you have
to do is not much at all. You don't wanna mess with
the soil ball whatsoever 'cause that's where the taproot is. So all you wanna do is just
pull open a little pocket in your soil here, pop it in, and then heal back up around it. That's it. By doing that, you're not really having any
chance to disturb that tap root and it'll grow just fine like that. - One of the myths that I believed for probably the first
few years of gardening was that you have to
be like a surgeon here in your seedling setup, where I'd 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
sense to a degree, right? You wanna avoid some of
these fungal diseases, some of these pathogens
that can kind of creep along the surface of the soil. Those little spidery tendrils
that are the bane of everyone who starts their seeds, or something called damping off, where you'll get this
little bean seed right here, will get very, very weak
right at that stem point where it goes into the soil
and just kind of fall over. That's depressing. That's definitely sad. But to me, it doesn't make a lot of sense to keep a perfectly sterile environment, which, let's be honest, none
of us are getting close to that in our home gardens. And then bring these
seedlings out in 2, 3, 4 weeks and plop them into the ground, or into a raised bed setup, where we're trying to
cultivate the exact opposite, which is a highly biodiverse,
highly bioactive soil. You know, a diverse ecosystem above. You've got birds landing, you've got bugs all over the place. It doesn't make a ton of sense. So what we prefer to do is
actually have a seedling mix, or a DIY mix, that is bioactive already. We've got some warm
castings going on in there. We've got a little fertilizer. We're sort of cultivating
some life in there already and saying, instead of keeping it sterile and then deleting the one or two pathogens
that might show up, let's just have a lot
of life in this system so that they have more things
to compete with, right? It kind of reminds me of
that movie Bubble Boy, right? If you're in a bubble your whole life, then you walk outside,
you just get dominated by like the first disease that comes by, versus if you're running around, you're taking some scrapes,
you're in the playground, you're eating a little bit of dirt, your system is just simply more robust, and that is kind of what we're looking for with our seedlings. So don't freak out about
sterilizing everything. You can do it if you want, but we don't here at Epic Gardening. If you have stunted seedlings,
check this video out. We've solved that problem for you as well. And if you wanna mess around
with some of our seeds, go to 'botanicalinterest.com', some of our trays and
seed starting equipment, 'shop.epicgardening.com'. Good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
