(upbeat music) - Seeds are precious. And it's coming up sowing time now, this is actually January. And I'm always saying, please don't sow anything in January, I don't sow anything in January, unless you don't want to eat anything. That's the old saying. Sow in January, you won't
have to eat anything. It's generally not a good month because there's not so much
light, there's not much warmth, but more than anything
it's about thinking ahead to what conditions will be like once you've got some
little plants to plant out. 'Cause that's what we're doing in here. And this is about raising plants to transplant outside, mainly. Or under cover like behind me, are salads that we've been
growing in here all winter and picking from already
three or four times. And we keep picking leaves
off the same plants. So that's under cover growing. But I'm talking mainly in this video about sowing seeds to go in the garden. And therefore you don't
want to sow them too early 'cause it won't be warm enough
or light enough even outside until say at least spring. So what I want to do, though, is set you up with the
knowledge that will help you to be more successful in sowing. And there's many factors to consider. Like where should we start? What you're going to sow the seeds in, the actual tray or container,
there's a selection here. I've got seed trays, module trays. So this seed tray, why
is it called a seed tray? It's used for sowing lots
of little seeds often. One feature of these trays is they don't have very good drainage. Here's another one, old dirty one. I'm very happy, by the
way, to use old trays. They work really well. You don't have to wash or
sterilise them in between use, so that'll save you one job. But you do always want some drainage. So at least the few holes there is better than one like this. So this would be a tray you'd never want to use for sowing seeds because you'll water and then the water will just sit in the bottom, it can't escape, and your seeds will rot. Drainage is really important
for successful growth of germination and growth of seeds. And I found I actually get better results from sowing in a module
tray than in a seed tray. Because do you see the holes? They're quite substantial in size so there's more chance for
the water to drain away. There's going to be more air in the mix. Air is as important as moisture. There are bigger module trays as well. And I'm going to explain
in different situations or for what seeds you
would use larger trays, or trays with larger cells. Trays with smaller cells,
but more cells per tray. Or seed trays. So those are some options. Then we have consideration, actually, no. I should mention these. Two more things here, homemade. So rather than buying a module tray, you can make your own using an egg carton. That's what this is. It's something I sowed
pea seeds in just to see. This is just for trial. I wasn't aiming to get
these plants in the ground. Or I could do in here. Still early for outside growing. But you can see that's worked nicely and I'll explain also a
little bit about multi-sowing. So this I put two seeds,
home-saved pea seeds in each carton cell there. And here I made some little
pots out of rolled newspaper. Which was not ideal. It's not an easy thing to manage because of how you fill
them to get it in there without getting compost all around. Which actually doesn't matter, but then you get to the point
where you want to get them out we'll do that in a minute
and have a look, but yeah. It's not as easy as actually
having a module tray where you can pop it up from below. That's the idea of the module cell. And then you can see the
little roots at the bottom, which is fine. They could sit in there
for quite a while yet, or they could be planted at that stage. You've got many options. What this is about is getting seeds going in the best conditions so
that the seed germinates and succeeds with its germination. That's more difficult often than actually growing on a seedling. Seeds need more warmth for germination than they do for actually
growing as little plants. So that's where often can be a problem, especially in the spring, we're sowing seeds directly in the soil. The soil's still very cold. Whereas often you can put
a transplant in the soil at the same temperature
and that will grow. And if you sow direct,
you might lose your seeds. This is the issue. So with doing it like this, you can have close to a 100%
success from what you sow as long as the seed was
good in the first place. And this is actually something
that's harder to deduce, because how do you know
the seed that you bought is a good, fresh seed? Does it tell you anywhere? And on the packet it actually
will say packeted year ending, at least in the UK that's what
the law says it has to say. It tells you when it went
in the packet, basically. It doesn't actually tell
you how old the seed is. There's a minimum germination rate, but the germination rate is often measured in a laboratory with perfect conditions, which we can rarely achieve
even in a greenhouse. So we just have to do our best. But generally giving
warmth is a big factor. And these, until just now,
have been in the house on the windowsill of my conservatory. Which is not super hot, but when the sun comes out,
it gets warm overnight. It's maybe 12, 14 degrees, 50s Fahrenheit. Whereas in here, greenhouse,
ah, should be warm, eh? It's okay at the moment. At the moment the
temperature in here is about, it's about 12, actually. Last night, it went down to
below -2 centigrade in here. We had a frost. So even in enclosed structures,
it can be cold at night. And this is one issue
with seed germination. Cold nights stop the germination because the seed is taking in that fact. It's all, whoa, this is too cold, I'm not going to germinate now. It needs constant day night temperatures to be at a reasonable level. Now that these peas have germinated, because I've managed to
keep them warm at night, It was about 10 days ago I sowed these. They can stay in here, and
these could freeze at night. That will be fine. I'm not saying I want them
to, but it won't kill them. So that's the difference. It would have stopped them germinating, but it won't stop them growing. It'll slow down their growth. Pretty much all the seeds
I'm going to show you are seed I've saved myself. And that links back to what
I was saying about seed age. When you save it yourself,
you know how old it is. And not all of it's fresh, actually. Like these peas, as it happened, that was three years old, 2018. Gosh, you know what that was four years
old, I saved the seeds. It was a good year, 2018. And the quality of the seed was good. And I'm just keeping them in
a spare room in the house, getting a nice result. But normally I find it
worthwhile to sow young seed because then you know that
all the time and effort you're putting into
getting your tray together, filling it with compost, looking after it, watering, blah, blah, blah, you're pretty confident
you're gonna get a result. And fresh seed will give a nice result. And that's like what we got here. Slightly leggy seedlings. Again, that's the effect
of the windowsill. These were sown at the same time, so that's lettuce, that's peas. The lettuce is home-saved seed
from two years ago, actually. I would say pretty much
every single seed's come up. I find that generally with home-saved seed the germination rate is very good. And this was using the
other end of the egg carton. So the partition bit had the peas and the open top lid I
just filled it with compost and scattered lettuce seeds on top with not much on top of them using... Don't cover your seeds too much, that's a key thing I
want to emphasise here, is don't bury them too deep. And this leads me onto
type of compost to use, because in the compost
that I sowed these in, you can see quite a bit of
this white, flaky stuff. And that is called vermiculite,
which is an expanded rock. And it's very light and free-draining. And that's coming back to drainage. It's what particularly
seeds, germinating seeds, and their little tiny
roots really benefit from is having some air, plenty of
air around those little roots. It doesn't want to be completely moist. Too much moisture is
often what kills seedlings much more than too little. So be careful about
watering, don't over-water. Like in fact, this is a good example. Is this tray I have not watered
since I sowed those seeds. So what I do is, when
sowing, get it really most. You know it's 100% as full
of water as it can be. Not totally dripping, dripping, 'cause thanks to the
vermiculite, but moist. Then I scatter seeds on top, a little bit of vermiculite on top, and it's been in the conservatory with a little bit of glass over
the top for the first week. And that kept the moisture in and then the seedlings came up. And like I said, no water in
the 10 days since it was sown. Compost wise, there are so many options. Sometimes I despair. They change every year, and
you can have sacks of potting, or seed compost as it's called, which have the same label year on year, but change the contents. So you don't always
know what you're buying. In fact, you often don't
know what you're buying and it's very confusing. I can show you two physical examples here and how they can vary in terms
of structure and content. This is one that's made from
a material called digestate, and I'm not recommending this, but I'm just pointing it out to you. Because I've noticed that digestate is getting very common now, and that's purely because
people are very subsidised, producers to make the methane, ferment it. This is plant material,
though, maize and grass stems, make the methane and then
they got the dry matter, the solids, what do they do with them? They worked out they can
sell them as compost. They're not rich ingredients. And what they do have is good structure, a lot of fibre in this, that's fine. But compared to more traditional composts which have more nutrients, in fact I can show you exactly the result of what's happened with that one. It's one that I was sent to try. And so five weeks ago
we sowed broad beans, and this end is the digestate compared to broad beans sown
in the compost I normally use, which is from Yorkshire. It's called Moorland Gold. I'm not necessarily recommending
that one either, actually, just because it's a small company. So don't everybody rush
out and try and buy it. But you know, there are
other good composts around, like Daleford, say. But what I'm really
wanting to show you here is just that difference. And if the only compost you'd used for your sowings was this one, it would have been a
disappointment, to say the least. You know, that can really compromise you. You'll have spent a lot of money on seed. I'm not saying these won't grow, but quite a few of them
are not going to grow to their full potential. One like that will just
about make it, I reckon. One like this, I don't know. So do the best you can, is all I can say. There is one more option for those of you who are pretty organised in other ways. Here, this compost is
some from my own heaps. You can use your own
compost if you make it. Nicely enough, and if you can sieve it, so we put this through
a four millimetre sieve, you can see it's pretty fine. And it also sieved well
'cause it's quite dry, 'cause I've got a roof
over my compost bay. So there's all these
different factors to consider. It's not just so simple as going out and getting a bit of
garden compost to use. You need to think ahead a bit
and do a bit of work on it. And partly because we're talking about putting compost into
quite small compartments, the cells of a module tray. So it can't be big, lumpy stuff. It needs to be reasonably fine. Fine, but fibrous. You know, that's the bit where the digestate it is
doing well, it's fibrous. So what I've done, actually,
with my recent sowing is I've mixed the two, the Moorland Gold, which is quite black and quite
a bit of green, most compost and the fibres of the digestate. And at the moment, just to see, I'm always trying different
mixes, combinations. And that's what I'll be
using when I fill trays. So we're looking to raise
a nice, strong transplant. But to get to that stage, this is often rather than
sowing in a module tray, one often starts with a seed tray. Why? Why not sow direct into modules? Well, because some seeds are so small that you actually can hardly hold them. Hardly see them, let alone hold them. And so it's physically not possible to sow a certain number
of seeds in module cells. And also there are some
seeds and seedlings that really like this kind
of compost that's not rich. Generally speaking, I'm
using the same compost for all my sowings. And the only difference I'm making is adding a bit of vermiculite, particularly when I'm
sowing into seed trays where the drainage is not so good, or there's two vegetables
I'll mention, three actually. Particularly basil. I find that basil really
doesn't like having wet roots. So I'll always have more
vermiculite when I'm sowing basil. And lettuce to some extent, as well. The seeds and seedlings
of lettuce like it light and not too dense and watery. So what I want to do at this stage is get this tray with its
compost fully saturated, and then I can sow seeds
on it, mostly on it because you don't want them
to be too deep at this stage. And if I show you some examples. Generally speaking, I try not to water too much
before I'm handling seeds, because I don't want to get the seeds wet. That's why I'm slightly hesitating here. But just for purposes of the video, I'm doing all of it together. These are some old seeds, actually, that's why I'm slightly sacrificing a bit. This is celeriac, and it's not the time
of year to sow celeriac. Best time of year to sow
it is middle of March. Same for celery, first sowings, you can find all these
dates in my calendar, we also produce a timeline that you can have on a wall chart, or you can find the dates on
my website on the page there. That is celery seeds. And I'm pretty sure you
can hardly see them. And it would be very difficult to actually pick them up individually. So what I do with tiny seeds
like this you can hardly see perhaps not many is in
there, it's just a few. I'm just gonna sprinkle them over the top of the compost there. And tiny as they are, that could well be 30
or 40 fell down there. And that's absolutely fine, because they can then germinate and then they can be pricked out. And pricking out is where
you need a little tool. I think that might be
a special pricking out, a bit of plastic. You could use a pencil. I used a pencil for many years. And then you're going to lever
out the little seedlings. Like that, hold it by the
leaf with a bit of root on. I'll just pretend I'm doing it there. You're going to make a hole in
a module cell and push it in. So if I talk about pricking
out, that's what I mean. It just means moving a
seedling from a seed tray to a module cell so it's
got it's own little area or volume of compost to grow in. But this is a very good
way to start seeds out, certain seeds, lettuce seeds as well. Actually what I do is after sowing them in a tray like that, I'm not going to cover
them, but I'll do that. And the water on them
helps them to settle in, make sure there's contact
with the moist compost. And then I need a bit of
glass, which is here somewhere and I can't see it anymore. It's disappeared. So basically I'd put
a bit of glass on top, or you could just lay a bit
of polyethylene bag on top or anything just to hold the moisture in. And this then I would put
in the house to germinate. I do that a lot in the late
winter, early spring sowings. For the first week they're
indoors, literally indoors because of the nighttime temperatures being so much higher. So we have the next step,
which is say a module tray, filling a module tray. So this one I like. It's actually one that I designed myself, and that's why I like it. Because it was basically... Over 38 years of propagating, I'd never really found a tray that quite fitted all the specs I wanted from what I found works really well. It's really solid polypropylene. I'm afraid it is plastic, but it's a once in a lifetime plastic. This is going to last forever, you know. You can walk on these,
they're really solid. And then it's got a decent
sized hole at the bottom. So they're good drainage, and that means also you
can pop the modules out. And it's not too big, it's
got a tapering bottom. I prefer the shape of it to that one. Do you see how much smaller
volume that is compared to that? And actually for a lot of seedlings, you get a better result for
giving them less compost. Don't assume that putting a
seed or seedling in a big pot is going to automatically
make a big plant, because it's got a lot of growing to do before it's able to use
that expanse of compost. And often that gets too wet at that stage. It's so easy to over-water
in enclosed space containers. So with this one it's very unlikely you're gonna saturate
those roots with water. And it means you need less compost. One of these trays, the amount
of compost is two litres to fill a tray like that. That's less than half a gallon. And I did this one yesterday, and I also made little
holes in it, still dry. You can see it's quite dry on
top, I haven't watered it yet. And that's holes for sowing. So that's ready to go, ready to sow. This one I'll just mention
why have I got this here, it's for larger seeds. This one serves for most vegetables. This one I'd use for large seeds like, I think I've got a few here somewhere. Don't know if I'm going to find them. Kidney beans, for example. These are some home-saved. You know, they're so big that they, well, you probably could do it in there, but you'd be struggling a bit. And broad beans or fava beans. Whereas these ones the
slightly smaller trays, they can work for peas, and
sweetcorn, and French beans. Middle-sized seeds as
well as smaller seeds, like here for example. These are some home-saved onion seed, which I'm pretty happy with. With home-saved seed, you
often get a few imperfections, little bits of debris. And it doesn't matter,
actually, I'm not selling them. As long as there's not so many that they're going to get
in the way of the sowing. And here I'm going to do
something called multi-sowing, which is dropping up to six onion seeds. Generally speaking, I don't have time to count them out individually, but I'm putting in a pinch, which from my experience
approximates to six. So what'd you do with seeds that are leftover in your hand, if you haven't got many, well, put them back in the seed packet, but it's not ideal because they picked up a bit of moisture there already. You know what, I'm actually
going to throw these out. I wouldn't normally be
quite as careless as that, but it's to make that point, and keeping them dry really helps. That's probably the factor
in conserving your seeds that's more important than anything. What's next, we have some coriander here. This is home-saved coriander, as well. This is a great example for multi-sowing. They're seeds which are
easily large enough to handle. And I'm going to pop three. Why multi-sow? It takes up less space. You need less compost for
the same number of plants. You're raising more
automatically in a given space. And you, you get the
advantage of proximity. Oh, doubled up there. So the seedlings, they're
germinating with their mates, and they're going to go in
the ground with their mates. It's a kind of companion
planting, if you like. And all I can say is from
experience, it works really well. Okay, peas, that's certainly
different, very visible. Now, because these are
bigger, how many would I sow? I would often put two,
even in these small cells. So you just literally put them on top. With companion planting, you can put them separately or they might end up
together in the middle. You know, in terms of
actually, they can go back. Where they actually end up,
it's entirely up to you, but it's not going to
affect how they grow. 'Cause I know I've been
asked this sometimes, do they have to be spaced out when you're companion planting? No, you just put them in, basically. Broad beans, yeah, okay, let's have a go in the
very small cells here. It's also a point about
sowing large seeds. I'm often asked, do they
need to be pointy end down? That's actually the end where
the root's going to come out. It doesn't matter that
they have to be that way. It works very well with
all these flat seeds to put them in flat. That's quicker and easier, and you don't have to worry about where the roots
are going to come out. Okay, what have we got here? Oh, now this is something I'm
not going to sow, actually, 'cause it's so out of season. Just to make that point as well. French beans. These are home-saved French bean seeds. I don't sow them until
the middle of April. Sorry, even late April. Late April for the very first plantings. Here we can have a frost
until the middle of May. Those are really warmth-loving
plants, French beans. So just don't sow them too
early, nor runner beans. Tomatoes, I've got some tomatoes here. Yeah, Red Brandywine. So I would say tomatoes are a good example of where you could either sow them... See they're decent sized
tomato seeds, like that. And it could be one or two. But then I would thin to one. Or you could sow them in a seed tray and then prick them out. They handle nicely. I mean, you could prick anything out. The only seeds that you
wouldn't want to prick out and are difficult to raise as transplants is carrot and parsnip, because
of their long tap roots, and they'll tend to break
when you transplant them. Everything else you're seeing
here is totally transplantable and the extra, and I don't
think it is a lot of extra, but the extra work involved
in raising the transplants you easily get back in terms of the quality of what
you've got out there. You've got a full bed,
it's all nice and even, and maximum use of space,
and maximum growth of seeds. These are home-saved lettuce, which I'm not going to sow there. But you could actually. If I wanted to sow
lettuce here, I'd do two. Two ideally, often three land. They're a hard one to count out, especially home-saved with
the bits of debris in there. Generally speaking, I personally, anyway, I want to grow one lettuce
in a station in a space. And so we'd thin those out. This is another thing you can do. You can so more seeds
than you actually want and then thin to the strongest. You could do that with
chard as well, for example. If you want one chard seed... Spinach, actually, we could do next, because that's a bit similar. You know, with spinach,
this is a spinach plant which actually has two plants there. And this, in an ideal world,
especially for the spinach, this would have been in
the ground last October. This has been sitting
here all winter, actually, it's testament to the
quality of this compost, the plants are still quite green. They haven't been fed or anything. You know, you can still plant these. And as two plants that
will make a nice clump where you can pick quite
a few medium-sized leaves, or if you took that one out and then you just planted it as one, then you'll have bigger
plant making bigger leaves. It would be difficult to
divide them at this point, but you could try. I often grow spinach in twos, 'cause I don't want enormous leaves, but lots of medium leaves is nice. So part of the thing with the multi-sowing is about being clear what
you want from your plants. It's not like saying this is the rule that you have to follow. And you can try a few things. And here's a good example
this spinach, actually. Why it's a little bit interesting where you get these clumps. This is home-saved seed and we see it developing
on the stalks of the plant. It's not like a classic seed. It's a sort of little clumplet and it makes it a bit
hard to sow with precision if you want a certain number, because you're often putting in a clump. And I'm aiming for three seeds in a cell, which in turn is aiming for two plants. I'm going to thin out,
pull out the weakest one. So that's how they would run. I've nearly got to the end now. I just want to see what
else I've got here. I'll mention radish. Radish is such a good seed
to sow at this time of year. This is going to be my
last sowing of this video. And it's a nice one to finish on because it's the first
one that you want to do. I recommend from the middle of February. And when you grow radish
at this time of year, it's much less pungent. It's mild and juicy. And this variety, Rudi, R-U-D-I, you can allow to grow quite big and it doesn't get woody or hollow. So it's a very versatile
vegetable to have. It'll sit there, and with
multi-sowing like this, I'm putting in five or six seeds, aiming for four plants in a clump. So you get them all growing together and then as soon as you've got
one that's the size you like, you can twist it out gently and the rest of them carry on growing. So from one sowing, especially
early in the year like this, you can get quite a few harvests. Ah, there we are. So just in terms of
covering up these seeds, the old saying is to cover the seed with as much compost as the seed is thick. And so with a broad bean,
that would be quite a lot. This is one disadvantage of doing lots of different
seeds all together, like I've done there, which this can work. It's easier generally, and because also you'll be
planting all out at the same time to have your same seeds together. And we, for that reason partly, we've brought out smaller
versions of this tray. So this is a 60, and it's going to be
available in a 30 and a 15. In the UK that will be
available from February, and in the US from March. We have a distributor in the US now, the link is in the description. We have a distributor in
Europe as well for these trays. So I'll just finish with
covering the compost to show you. So I actually take some
new compost at this point and just sprinkle it over the top, more or less I'm judging
according to the size of the seed. And where it was lettuce, I'm not actually going to
put any new compost on. I'm just going to flick the
existing compost over it. With broad beans, I'll ladle
on as much as I possibly can. I wouldn't normally sow them in this, but it's just to give you an
idea, you know, how it works. What the principles are of sowing seeds. That's what this has been
about so that you understand how you can get the best
from your precious seeds and how to look after the seedlings a bit, but it's more about sowing
them in the right conditions, at the right time, in
decent material compost, and in a suitable tray. And on that note, I'll
finish and hand it to you. Enjoy your sowing season, which goes on right the way through until September, October. (gentle music)
