How and When to Fertilize Seedlings

a lot of you have had questions on how to fertilize seedlings when what to use all that good stuff and today in this video i'm gonna hopefully answer those questions [Music] hey i'm brian with next level gardening if you're looking to join an online garden community that offers tips tricks and support to help take your garden to the next level you're in the right place get started now by clicking subscribe and hit the bell so you never miss anything now let's get growing we're back inside again which is a good thing because it's back to being over 90 degrees a lot of you had questions about how to fertilize your seedlings and when and what to use so today i'm going to go over what i use and how i do it um i'm also going to be switching out the grow light viper spectra sent me a p series it's the p4000 this is the xs-4000 i'm enjoying getting to try all these different lights out for you guys and for me to see kind of what the differences are so this is the p4000 it had it's pretty much the same exact size the pro series the p series is a little bit cheaper to buy initially they don't have the same leds or drivers as the xs series so while they're a little bit cheaper to buy in the beginning the xs series has samsung leds which are the best in the industry and so they're going to be more efficient to run so over the long term you're going to save money probably with the xs series versus the p series but if you're looking to just save some money up front the p series is probably the way to go so i'm going to switch this out i'm going to use this one in the garage in about a month to start a bunch of perennials to go outside next spring so let me switch this out and then we'll get to talking about our fertilizer and how to do it what i use and some other choices that you can use [Music] so over the next few months i'm going to give this one a try and i'll let you know how it came out how it worked and how it compares to the others as always we have links down below in the description for all the viper spectre products and discount codes so you can use those um on my website you can find under products i love you can find the stand here got that through amazon hey it's editing brian here and i totally forgot that i wanted to mention next week we're going to be doing another giveaway with viper spectra so we're giving away another viper spectre grow light so make sure you're subscribed make sure you have the notifications on so that when that video comes out next week you will get a notification you can watch it and then you can enter to win a viper spectra grow light now back to the video but now let's talk about fertilizing your seedlings so when do you fertilize well the first leaves that come up that you see when a seed germinates are the seed leaves those aren't true leaves so you don't want to do anything until well at that point you want to remove the the humidity dome if you have one and then just keep it watered from below go back to my video from last week on kind of how to do that if you haven't seen it already so those are the seed leaves the second set of leaves are the true leaves and those are going to look different a lot of the seed leaves look very similar to each other the true leaves when they come out that next set of leaves they're going to look like the adult leaves just in smaller form at that time when those come out you can start to fertilize and you can use any organic fertilizer half strength so of course i use the neptune's harvest and i use the fish in seaweed fertilizer if you already have rose and flowering or their tomato and veg formula you can use that as well so this is just what i use but whatever you have on hand make sure it's organic if you're using another brand besides this and you want to mix it half strength so for this is a tablespoon per gallon of water so we're going to mix a half a tablespoon per gallon so i'm going to mix mine in a quart jar because that gallon is a little bit hard to get under these trays a gallon watering can it gets messy so a quarter of a tablespoon per quart i really don't measure too precisely i just do a little bit in a quart jar fill the rest with water and water them again we water from below you want to make sure that you're getting the entire root zone and you want to keep the water off of the plants if possible so watering from below definitely helps with that once you get water them and you've let them sit and you can see that the top turn the top of the soil turns from light brown to dark brown you know they've had enough take the tray outside and pour off the rest hopefully into some plant that needs a little bit of fertilizer because you don't want these sitting in water or they're going to get mold mildew fungus gnats all that stuff that you don't want to have to deal with if you don't have neptune's harvest or you have a different brand that you like that's totally fine just make sure it's half strength and just make sure it's organic if you don't go with organic the chances of burning your uh seedlings are very much higher than if you go with organic just because of the way that it's synthetically made another reason i like neptune's harvest products is i've tried a lot of fish fertilizers in the past and the way they're made they stink and there's no way i would ever use them inside the house neptune's harvest they do have a smell to them but they're nowhere near as strong as some of the other brands and they definitely don't last as long so the only seedlings that are ready here for the actual fertilizer at least in my house are the sweet peas those have come up and grown really fast i was actually gone we went back down to or up to ventura county over the long weekend and i bought a new timer and i had said it wrong and so it only came on probably less than half of what it was supposed to um i had the the off as the on and the on is the off so it only got eight hours a day versus 16. so they are a little bit leggy but that's okay at least it's the sweet peas so it's a vining plant so that's not going to hurt them as much as if it was a different crop but as you can see here the beets are up the carrots are up the purple broccoli is up and the chard is up of course the sweet peas so we're still waiting on the cilantro and the spinach which in my experience are always they always take longer than everybody else so for today the only seedlings that i am going to be fertilizing are the sweet peas so while we were gone because i guess maybe there was not really any air flow in the house we did get started get some algae growth on top of the soil on a couple of these mainly the sweet peas ironically so i did add a oscillating fan so that i just have it off now because it was making noise during the filming but that stays on it's on the same timer as the light so it's on 16 hours a day and it just blows across the area which keeps the tops a little drier than down below the surface level um that's going to help with the fungus gnats the algae mildew all of that stuff and it also strengthens these so these needed it because they're so leggy it strengthens as they blow in the wind it's like a little workout and it strengthens their stem so it's stronger so when it goes outside it'll be able to handle actual wind so that's it i hope that answered your questions again all of my links are down below in the video description and i will see you guys next time

Channel: Next Level Gardening

Views: 112,177

Keywords: fertilizer, seedlings, indoor growing, starting seeds indoors, seed starting, how to fertilize vegetable seedlings, organic gardening, fish fertilizer for tomatoes, fish fertilizer, how to fertilize seedlings, fertilizing seedlings, gardening tips, using liquid fertilizer for seedlings, when to water indoor seedlings

Id: dCEYeT4-mUo

Length: 8min 8sec (488 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 09 2021