How to Sow Seeds in Modules the No-Nonsense Way

hello and a very warm welcome back to the garden it's the first of march and that means lots of sewing and lots of planting and that's exactly what i'm going to be doing today today i'm going to show you the full process that i do for sowing seeds in modules now growing undercover is fantastic because you can extend the season and you have that protection so it's easier to look after your seedlings because cold weather is still very much about now the first thing that you've got to consider when sewing your modules is what kind of module trays are we going to use so for decades us homegrowers have been having to rely on these second rate kind of plastic trays that unless you treat them with extreme care and caution will only last two or three seasons at most they very easily rip now in recent years due to increased environmental awareness and demand we now have much better access to horticulture or industry-grade module trays like this and made out of solid plastic many of which are from recycled plastic and these are an absolute game changer because these have revolutionized module sewn for home growers before they weren't available to us because you could only buy them in the hundreds of thousands but now you can buy them in the dozens and the fact that they can last up to 15 years potentially more is just absolutely amazing now there are four main module tray sizes that i use and if you want to know where i get these from these are from container white so if you're in the uk you can buy these from container wise they are obviously going to be heftier in price but the fact is you're buying quality and especially when you're gardening and the fact that you can work with these um quite quickly you don't have to be careful when you're planting out or sewing in them it's going to save you a lot of time in the long run so there are four different sizes here and the first size uh is a smaller size these are around 30 ml in width and this is great for smaller seedlings such as spinach lettuce fennel and perhaps things like flowers such as cosmos and then the next size up that i love to use this is around 42 millimeter width this is the one that i use the most i find it to be the most versatile whether it's your salads even brassicas uh root vegetables this is absolutely a dream to work with uh and i think i need to get more of these now this here is a much larger one and to be completely honest with you it was something that i didn't know i needed until i gave it a go so this is around 75 millimeter in width so it's like uh like the size of a standard pot and the strength of this is if you have particular seedlings that you want to grow on that can't go out because perhaps there's not enough space such as brassicas you can either transplant them from this and put them on into these or you can use this to start things like herb cuttings and you can keep them in here for as long as you want and you don't have to worry about them running out of nutrients and compost and then the final one which is absolutely brilliant this is a deep celled one that has replaced these root trainers root trainers are great but unfortunately they only for me last around five seasons even when i'm trying to be really careful so this deep cell one is absolutely brilliant for starting uh plants that like deeper roots for example your broad beans the next cool part of module sewing is understanding what kind of medium you're going to be sowing your seeds into and of course that's going to be compost now i honestly believe that the whole idea of sewing and compost has been over complicated over the last however many years i'll tell you something i only use homemade or multi-purpose compost i don't buy any sort of kind of special seed starting mixed etc i find it to be a little bit of a waste of money and everything seems to be working well from things like tomatoes and aubergines all the way through to lettuce but i'll show you a few things that's actually going to help so the first thing which is the best if you have access to it it's actually loads of beautiful homemade compost now this compost is made using the lazy composting method so you can check out the video in the corner to find out more about that all i do for using compost when sowing is to give it an extra few months whereas normal compost might be ready after six to eight months perhaps 12 on a particularly bad year i'll give this at least 12 months preferably just over a year to properly break down and the reason why i like it to properly break down is that it gives a chance to have a lot of biology it creates a good tilth um but one thing you might find is that you don't actually have that much homemade compost so what you can do is you can actually dilute it so you can have two handfuls of homemade compost and then add in a full handful of soil from the garden from one of your raised beds just to help the compost last a little bit longer now if you find that your particular homemade compost is drying out too quickly what you can do is on purpose make a load of leaf mold or if you have a local woodland or forest nearby get a little bit of leaf mold and you can do the same you can add two handfuls of compost to one handful of leaf mold or even one handful of compost to one handful of leaf mold mix it up and then use that as a brilliant low-cost and highly effective potting medium and that isn't going to dry out too quickly and we'll come on to tricks of stopping compost drying out towards the end of the video now another thing you might want to do is to actually buy compost and there's there's two that i would recommend the first is the soil association approved approved organic compost this melcort um this is really nice things uh to start off um your seedlings in again you can dilute this down with soil as well and another great one to use is stale foot as well dale foot is also organic so if you're out of homemade compost or you want to use your homemade compost for mulching the beds and then you can buy those just make sure that it's organic approved and you're good to go now something you might be wondering is do i need to sieve the compost and i never bother even if i'm sewing really fine seeds for example lettuce all i do is if i do see quite a big thing like that or that i just pull it out but chances are the compost is broken down so much they've got that lovely crumbly texture you hardly need to pull anything out i find sieving a little bit of a waste of time and it doesn't happen in nature so why do we need to do it in the garden it's now time to come to actually doing the process of planting seeds in modules so this is my potting bench really simple this here is kind of a potting bench tidy so you can either build your own out of some scrap wood or you can buy it um online the idea for this is when you're using your compost i'm using the melchor one here is you're not gonna spill the compost over all of the sites so it means kind of minimal waste and if you need extra compost you can just like scrape it all together it's just really easy to work with less mess and it means that you can work faster as well so the first thing you want to do is to grab whatever module you're going to be doing i'm going to show you firstly sewing radish in these and then i'm going to show you um sewing field beans in the deeper one so the first stage get it there and then you just want to basically cover it with compost so you basically can't see the tray underneath and then gradually you're going to press down and away so you can see that this is looking pretty good now there's another thing that i like to do after this i like to firm it in because uh it means it's easier to pull out the seedling with with a firmer soil and i can i can fit more in so i just kind of go in with my fingers like that pressing it down not too hard but you know a nice you know like a nice firm handshake it's kind of that kind of translation in terms of putting the compost in and then you do the same you place it over the top like that spread it out and that is ready for a soaking of water once you've filled it with the compost you want to actually give it a really good soaking because it makes it a lot easier after you soak the compost well and let it sit for about five to ten minutes so it properly permeates it makes it so much easier to make the holes in which you're going to plant the seeds otherwise if you don't do this method you'll find that the compost actually falls back in on itself so give it a good water let it stand for about five or ten minutes and then we can move on to the next step so this has had a nice soaking it's kind of been standing for about five minutes it's ready for the next stage and that's about making the holes so there's a couple of ways of doing it if you don't like to get your hands dirty you can use something like a pen um to make holes at whatever depth you want however i prefer just to keep things simple and to use my fingers and what you can do is you can use multiple fingers at a time to make the desired hole and i never strive for perfection people can really easily get caught up on how deep to make the holes as long as you keep it at an approximate depth depending on what you're sewing is still going to grow fine i'm going to be sewing some radish here so i don't want them to be super deep um so i'm just going to make some holes around the depth that i like so you can see quite easily how quickly just doing this method that these holes are ready and if any too shallow i just go back over and make sure that they're fine so next thing to do is to grab the seeds and i'm going to be using a multi sewing method for these for these radish multi sewing will be a kind of a whole video in itself the best person to find out about multi-sewing is charles dowding um it's been the method has been used for industrial horticulture for many many years as a way of growing multiple plants in a single cell so they can kind of grow apart from each other when you transplant them so it means transplanting less and growing more there's a real win-win so you can do it for things such as radish you can also do it for a lot of your root veg beetroot is excellent for more too saying you can even do it for things like leeks or spinach all of that so i'm just gonna put a nice decent load into my hand and then because i'm multi-sewing i'm going to aim for around four to six seeds per module but if i put a little bit more i don't mind i'm just going to crack on i don't ever try and do this perfectly it doesn't need to be done so just kind of go along making sure that i'm filling them up like that these are all sewn i'm just going to grab a load of compost again and just spread it over the top it's such an easy way of filling it like that now you can press just very gently down just like that not too hard though now that the seeds have been done and then the next thing to do before you forget is to label because very easy to uh think that you'll remember i've done it too many times and then end up forgetting what you've planted so here i'm gonna i'm gonna write radish and i'm also gonna write the date just as a nice reminder and that this i'm actually using um i like to use yogurt pots and and cut them down as my seed labels i never buy seed labels these work an absolute dream and i've got a video that'll be linked in the description which will show you just how easy they are to do so i'll put that in and then the final thing to do is just to give it a really quick water it's already had a deep water but i'm just going to give it a nice shallow water just to make sure that the surface is nicely watered after sowing your seeds the next thing to think about is where are you actually going to put your modules now what i love to use and this is what i'd recommend is some kind of shelving system a tiered shelving system that has mesh so it isn't like flat isn't like solid wood it has mesh because you want air to be underneath now the great thing about these container-wise modules is that there's a big gap underneath which naturally prunes the roots of your seedlings which stops them spiring spiraling around and becoming root bound and it helps to encourage a strong root growth so what you do is make sure this is actually just a simple mini greenhouse kit i've got patreon video talking in more detail about root pruning and using these mini green houses but you can just stack them and store them here now before i talk about the last few things i just want to give you a really helpful tip which is after you've sewn your seeds you don't want this to dry out because it is crucial that during the seeds germination process it doesn't dry out so for example if you have sporadic germination of say carrots or parsnips outside and i'll be doing a master class on direct sewing chances are it's a sporadic germination because the soil dried out and you want to avoid that so i've got a really easy method of doing that and it costs nothing so this is some cardboard all right super simple and what i do is i'll actually take off the label and i'll place the cardboard on top like that and the idea is is this almost acts like a mulch what it does is it stops water from evaporating so it means you don't have to worry about these drying out during really hot days so the next thing i'll do is i'll grab kind of some stones four stones on either side just to make sure it's all covered over kind of like that where you put a heavier one in the middle and then finally put your label under stone so it doesn't blow away or you could even write on it or hide the label underneath it's up to you and then what you do is after a few days you start checking underneath daily and as soon as you see the first signs of growth then you remove this and it means that the seeds have will germinate really nicely for you and there'll be a separate video all about seedling care so you don't have to worry too much about what do i do when that happens so that's just a really simple thing you can do you can also use newspaper so here's just a very quick demonstration with the deep module tray same again just pile the compost on top and you can see how having something like this helps keep it all of the compost around the same area push it down so kind of away and down like that and then push it in i'm going to do the same just to top it off at the top and then i'm just going to go push it down the next thing to do is give it a really nice soaking and then leave it aside for around five to ten minutes next thing to do is just to make the hole so i'm going to be sewing some filled beans which just like fava beans or broad beans so i want them around two inches or five centimeters deep so again you can use a couple of fingers like that you can get it done in half the time so i made the holes now we're going to get the seeds so you just drop it in like that to begin with now with beans you may feel that they don't get all the way down the hole so you can just help them on by just pushing them down to the base afterwards so that's all done last few things to do is suggest cover over the holes like that i'll give it another surface water and then don't forget to label so that's basically the basics to module sewing and how simple it is as a process there really isn't actually that much to it i think a lot of things get over complicated so i just thought i'd show you a really simple method to doing it now if you want to review anything you can use the chapters in the video just to go back and have a look there'll also be some top tips in the video description so you can read through those and just to let you know this is the first start in the series of just kind of basic sewing and growing things but in terms of more master classes so just trying to get into as much detail as needed i'm not trying to put too much information on you in one go instead i'm going to spread it out over a series of videos so for example ones that are coming up are going to be seedling care so how to look after your seedlings transplanting direct sowing things like that just to really help you as the season progresses so i look forward to seeing you again soon and happy growing on this beautiful start to this new growing season

Channel: Huw Richards

Views: 139,139

Rating: 4.9604206 out of 5

Keywords: charles dowding, gardening, growing seedlings in trays, how to sow seeds, hugh richards gardening, huw, huw richards, huws garden, huwsnursery, no dig gardening, planting seeds, planting seeds in trays, seed sowing, seed starting, seed starting trays, seedling tray, sowing, sowing seeds, sowing seeds in trays

Id: jhuPz6cLFV4

Length: 19min 3sec (1143 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 05 2021