How I Start Tomato Seeds & Separate Seedlings

[Music] hey y'all what's up today i thought i would talk to you a little bit about how i start tomato seedlings sewing them densely and then separating them and kind of show you that process because i'm going to start separating them today so i start my tomato seedlings in the house um underneath grow lights this isn't strictly necessary and in years past there have been times that i started them out in my unheated greenhouse but usually when we get to mid to late february i'll kind of assess the situation and see how the weather's going and kind of look at the forecast and see if it's going to be really overcast or really cold and if so i go ahead and start my seeds inside and then once they get to the point that they are currently at i will go ahead and move them out to the greenhouse and separate them now i have one of these shelves which is from i think we got this at sam's club it's been like a handful of years ago i want to say that these run about eighty dollars uh we have a couple of these shelving units that we use for like storage in different places and they're very very sturdy my dad has some of these that he's had for like 15 years so that's why i buy this particular unit but i think they sell very similar kinds of things at different hardware stores and i have this outfitted with multiple different grow lights these are from the hidden harvest company i have some viva sunlights down on the bottom i have just some plain led shop lights as well as these little strip grow lights on the top they all work well i don't have like a specific suggestion being like this is the grow light to buy because in my experience they all work fairly similarly and there have been times where i've had this whole shelf filled but this year i'm only starting these plants from my own garden rather than starting to sell so i didn't start as many now you can see here i have uh these trays these are bootstrap farmer trays i've been using these particular trays for a few years like this is probably about the fifth or sixth time that these cups and trays and stuff has been reused and i do bottom water trays whenever i'm starting seedlings i feel like that's really helpful in keeping your moisture right in your soil and you'll notice that these seedlings are about six inches away from the grow lights they're kind of starting to stretch a little bit not too bad that probably has more to do with how closely they're sewn together but i wouldn't want to leave them like this for much longer i've got them sewn in so so densely because that's how i do this but it does mean that i have to start separating when i get to this point or else they're really going to start to struggle and get really leggy i'm actually about to grab one of these trays we're going to head out to the greenhouse to shoot the rest of this video i just wanted to give you guys a look at this setup so you know how i started these what i'm going to show you that way that i do you could also do this outside i just do it inside uh because it was a really cold february and very overcast and i don't think they would have thrived as well in the greenhouse without additional heat and light all right i'm in my greenhouse now i've got one of my trays of seedlings i actually have some seeds that i need to start for a variety that i missed whenever i was starting my seeds and i'm going to show you guys kind of from start to this point how i do this this greenhouse does not have any additional heat or light i do have a very small heater which i can put on out here if it is going to be getting kind of close to freezing and it's been an overcast day so therefore there's not a lot of extra heat that's built up in here but usually it's not necessary right now it is the middle of march and i started my seeds a couple of weeks ago i think it's actually been just like right at two weeks that these have been growing and mostly it's okay that i don't have any additional light out here if you are ever in a situation where you're trying to grow your seeds in any situation like by a window under grow lights in a greenhouse heated or not whatever the situation is if your plants are starting to get leggy which is that they're stretching out towards the light it doesn't matter what what the circumstances are all those plants are telling you is that they need they need more light they need to be closer to the light and however you solve that problem if i were really noticing that out here what i've done in the past if i kind of see that is i just move them up to the top shelf um and if i needed to i could take those grow lights off that shelf and come hang them out here but it's never been necessary before so the way that i do this does add an extra step in seed starting but i want to tell you why i do it this way so you'll notice each one of these cups has a lot of seedlings in it i do have the bottom water tray so you see some roots hanging out the bottom and like this is one variety each of these cups in this tray is a different variety because i do start a lot of varieties of tomatoes i really like to grow a different you know an array of tomatoes and here i've got some brandy ones and i think there's probably about 12 little plants in this cup and what i used to do when i would start seeds is i would get all of my containers ready and i would you know either using these little cups like these bootstrap farmer ones or i would use like red solo cups i actually have some red solo cups that i may end up putting some plants in but what i would do is i would set up let's say i wanted to start 10 brandywine plants i would set up 10 cups or pots fill them with soil i would take 10 little labels and i would write brandywine on each one and i would put one in each of the pots or cups or i would write on each cup and then i would put one seed in each cup or if i was feeling frivolous i would put two or three seeds in each cup and when those seedlings came up because you only need one per cup so that they're not competing with one another i would pinch off the extras at the soil now i've only put one seed in the cup and it didn't come up i had the choice at that point you know two weeks after the rest of mine were looking like this do i want to go ahead and put another seed in there and those plants are going to be kind of behind the others or do i want to just toss that soil back into the to the bin and then you know at that point i've wasted a tag um if it was a cup i've written on the cup i've got to mark that out and so normally i would air more towards putting extra seeds in just thinning them out but what i found was that i was wasting materials and i was wasting time because then i'm having all of the cups where something didn't germinate or i'm having to thin out and kill a lot of seedlings which is adding that extra step and somewhere between like not liking all of the waste of that and starting to start things inside therefore i had a limited space and i couldn't just put 200 pots on one shelf i started doing it like this so i had you saw i had two trays um in there that was all the tomatoes that i'm growing this year which i'm growing i think 28 varieties of slicers and like 10 varieties of cherries and then there were also some other odds and ends in that tray and the way i'll do it is i'll get whatever pot i'm going to use i also if i'm trying to start a lot of the same kind i might use these little five by five containers or something that's a little bigger that has more surface area and i can start a lot more seeds in it since i'm not selling plants this year these small pots suffice i'm gonna start these climbing triple crop seeds these are actually seeds i saved and i couldn't find them when i was starting all of this and i was like am i really not gonna grow one of my favorite tomatoes this year but i found them and i saved them to do this video i'm going to put soil in my pot i'm going to take one tag and write climbing triple crop on it and put it in the pot and i really like this tomato and i like sharing it with other people and i remember saving this particular bag of seeds and so i know they're at least like three or four years old so since the germination on these is probably going to start declining a little bit i'm going to sew quite a few of these so i'll have extras of these plants i'll probably grow several myself and i'll give some to friends and i'll make sure that i save more seeds this year so that i have fresh seeds now this bag i'm not going to sew every seed that i have i am going to save a handful okay something goes wrong that way i'm not completely out i'll have another chance to make more seeds so if you'll look here i've just placed about 20 seeds on the surface of this soil obviously can't grow them very large like that but i can start them this way and i usually just take a little bit more soil pack it on top i'm not pressing down super hard uh but that way i've just got a nice layer of tomato seeds and i'm going to put these in a tray where they're going to be bottom watered and then in a couple of weeks they're going to look like this now this one only had about 12 but some of these i did sew as heavily as i just did those triple crops like here's a variety that there's probably about 20 starts in this little bitty pot so now two weeks later these need to be put in new pots so i have added an extra step of work for myself here whereas had i just started out with as many pots as i wanted plants and put seeds in each one i could have already done this writing out the tags and all of that but i would have just been doing what i'm about to do two weeks ago and what i like about doing it this way is i know exactly how many pots i need i don't have to re-sew anything i know how many plants i'm getting at this point there's just less waste and materials so what i do now is get another tray ready and i'm just going to fill these up with soil [Music] all right so that's tray ready now each cup is full of soil this one's a little too low when i'm doing this not for a video uh usually i'll get like eight of these trays ready at the same time i'll dump multiple bags of soil into a big tub and i'll just squat down on the floor and just fill them super fast and super messy but try to keep it a little a little more put together just for the sake that i'm just showing you this right now i don't have time to do all of these at this exact moment what i do now is i pull the soil and all of these plants out these are my brandywines i'm just going to go ahead and stick this brandywine tag in one of these cups well tomatoes are pretty forgiving plants you'll notice these are a little on the tall side uh i would not really call this leggy because their stems are not super weak this this stretching is not caused by a lack of light necessarily it was more caused by the fact that there are so many plants together they're trying to grow up to get over the other plants so their stems aren't weak but they are they are a little stretched and had i continued without separating these they would have gotten really leggy i'm actually i like the fact that they're this long so what i'm going to do is i just start separating these out and i grab one and just sort of tease the roots away to get as many roots with uh the plant as possible i'm just gonna set that down right here and then i take my pot and i stick my finger all the way down in the middle uh make a really deep well there and i'm gonna drop this plant i'm always holding these tenderly because you can break them but they're also pretty forgiving and i drop it all the way down in here tighten the soil up around it and i have one seedling in the pot and i actually just repeat that process with all of these seedlings and put each one in their own pot now if i had like really great germination i didn't want all of these this is where i would discard any extras but i i didn't start just a ton if you end up pulling and you don't get a whole lot of root with one it's okay tomatoes are extremely forgiving they grow new roots off their stems so planting them deep is actually a great benefit and that's why i don't mind the fact that these got a little bit a little bit tall because it's actually a benefit to them to be able to be planted deeply and if you'll notice when i can i'm putting these all the way down to their top leaves in these cups now i use potting soil for all of my seed starts um it's loose enough that like right now i'm not having any problem pulling these apart i actually just made a mistake and i'm going to tell you guys what i just did that you should not do so i took that that wad of plants and i set it on top of here and you shouldn't do that because there may be some seeds in that soil that have not germinated yet and if you go mixing that soil in with your other plants you'll have late germinators and you might have it pop up like in another cup that has another variety in it so you'll mix up your varieties if you do that so what i usually like to do is actually save the soil from the original group of plants keep it in a cup and put one of them in there i didn't do it this time but do as i say so now i just took that one pot that had all those plants in them separated them each into their own individual cup and i can now take my markers i can write brandywine on each one and mark each one of these and then i'll move on and i'll do the exact same thing for every one of these varieties and and i'll take this this big tray of of plants here and turn it into ten trays of plants by separating them all out now a lot of people will ask me uh can i bury other things deep if they get a little leggy brassicas or peppers or tomatillos or whatever and you can most things aren't going to be hurt by that by burying them a little bit deep but it doesn't have the same benefits as tomatoes tomatoes actually grow stronger plants whenever you bury their stems deep so i i do this when i up pot them just to give them a little boost in root growth and then whenever i plant them in the ground i'm going to bury them as deep as well i have a video showing how i plant tomatoes out in the garden i'll link that down below and you don't have to do this you don't have to up pot them and plant them deep and plant them all together but i have found that this works for my needs i also do my peppers this way i start multiple peppers in one cup and then just separate them from what i found most things peppers eggplants tomatoes herbs even a lot of flowers things that you're going to be starting indoors early they're actually extremely forgiving of forgiving of being handled this way and so you can actually you know separate them just be really gentle just tease those roots apart try to keep as many roots as possible intact now if you're starting things like cucumbers melons squash those are not quite so happy when you mess with their roots so when it comes to all of those things i usually start those maybe three to four weeks before i plan on moving them outside and then i usually will use some sort of biodegradable pot or if i do start them in something like this when i transplant them i'm just very careful to break up the roots as little as possible because they they don't like that they'll shock and then they just don't grow as quickly tomatoes however this won't hurt them um they might droop a little bit today but they usually recover really quickly so after i fill these trays up with plants get them all marked i'll put some water in these bottom water trays and i'll just set them up out here in the greenhouse to keep growing for the next probably four weeks or so in four weeks these will be just the right height to start moving out to the garden we'll start hardening them off that's about when our last frost date is is the second week of april this year and i'll keep an eye on the forecast and once i feel confident that we have no more near freezing nights i will go ahead and harden these off and transplant them into the garden and in just a few months we'll be doing garden tours harvesting lots of tomatoes and having breakfast in the garden so i hope this helps you guys um i get asked about this a lot because people will see that i have so many seedlings in a cup and be like wait what are you doing there is that okay to grow them like that and it is if this is your plan and how you're planning on finishing growing them thank you guys i bless you until next time

Channel: Roots and Refuge Farm

Views: 246,894

Keywords: roots and refuge, roots and refuge seed starting, roots and refuge tomatoes

Id: Siqd7DVojso

Length: 17min 14sec (1034 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021