SIX Reasons Your Seedlings Are Leggy + Solutions

what is going on guys welcome to another very exciting episode right here on the my Gardener Channel do you have plants that are looking more like Stretch Armstrong than Stretch Armstrong himself well in this video I'm going to explain to you why that happens and how to prevent it let's go [Music] all right so if you've got seedlings that look like this these are leggy seedlings now leggy seedlings are not great for a gardener because leggy seedlings are actually a sign of stress now these are lettuce seedlings that we started about five to seven days ago and lettuce seedlings when they germinate should only be about a quarter inch to no more than a half inch tall when they first germinate and you'll notice that they only have their first sets of seed leaves the cotyledon leaves but they don't have any other leaves yet they have continued to grow and that stem keeps getting longer and longer and then inevitably they get top heavy and they fall over this is a really common problem that gardeners his face and it has a lot of causes and so in this video we're kind of go we're going to go through some of those causes because they are easily fixed and when you can reduce the legginess of a Seedling you're going to be reducing the stress and a less stressed seedling is going to be a healthier seedling in the long run and also when they get top heavy a lot of times they just sometimes bend over and die right away and so you're actually going to have more you know more success when seed's starting and you're going to have healthier plants in the long run so let's talk about some of the reasons why your plants are getting leggy so the first thing I want to show you guys are some healthy seedlings and some leggy seedlings now believe it or not we started these at the exact same time the difference is when they germinated you see we had all these in this tray and we left for the weekend and we had turned the lights off because they hadn't sprouted yet and I didn't want to just be wasting electricity and I thought by the time we get back on Monday they won't have sprouted Well turns out some of these sprouted a little bit sooner and so of these were specific varieties that just sprouted a little bit sooner these ones over here these are the Tango leaf lettuce these ones sprouted a little bit later and because of that these sprouted underneath light these sprouted in the darkness and that's the first thing that I want you guys to understand is that if you're using grow lights which you should be if you're growing indoors but if you have a very strong you know self-facing window this won't be as much of a problem but making sure you turn your grow lights on at the right time is the first reason and it's honestly such an easy way to prevent leggy seedlings because if you have the right type of Lights which we'll talk about and the lights are close enough to the plants which we'll talk about and you have all the soil right and everything else is right it really comes down to just turning the lights on seedlings do like Darkness to germinate however it requires you to be checking on them on a regular basis and if you go away for the weekend and you have your lights off but you just started some seedlings you may come back to some leggy seedlings because this is actually a skin stimulus of the plant looking for light that's why they get taller you see if the light is coming down and meeting them where they are they don't need to get leggy and so you have some beautiful seedlings right here that are again no more than a quarter inch to a half inch tall they are perfect they're exactly the way they should be whereas these like I said these are looking more like Stretch Armstrong than Stretch Armstrong themselves and we're talking like two two and a half inches tall they're never going to survive they're going to get Too Tall too top heavy and they're going to end up falling over so the first reason why your plants get leggy is you just don't turn your lights on soon enough alright so the second reason why your ceilings might be getting leggy is because you don't have the right type of light now a lot of gardeners when they're just starting out they assume that any type of light can grow their plants and this is not true now there are a lot of options for you when it comes to lighting but there's a few that I would suggest for beginning gardeners if you've never gotten into starting seedlings indoors there's so many options out there that it can become a little bit overwhelming but I'm gonna break it down based on kind of the the bare minimum because chances are as you get more advanced there's going to be more options for you and you might find something that's going to work better than what you're currently using but the best thing I can say is just getting started with something that will work rather than getting bogged down with things that you know that you don't really know a whole lot about so the first thing I want you to to really realize with lights is that you want to get either a compact fluorescent or an LED yes there are things like metal haloid or high pressure sodium you don't need those because there's a lot of infrastructure that's required and chances are if you're watching this video you probably have never even heard of those so if you see those just move past them and look for either a CFL compact fluorescent or an LED which is a light emitting diode and those two lights are going to be great for beginning for beginning seed starters because they give off a good amount of light they're fairly affordable and uh and the fact that you don't need a whole lot of infrastructure and and knowledge to be able to run them this is a compact fluorescent setup it's an eight bulb T5 T5 is just the style of light so you know you'll see like a T5 a T8 and stuff like that so this is an eight bulb meaning there's eight of them there's eight T5 bulbs and they each give out 2 000 lumens that's the next thing you want to look for regardless of if you're going LED or going compact compact fluorescent you want to have a minimum of at least 2 000 lumens per fixture so whether you're going with like two lights that equal 2 000 lumens so like one thousand each you can add your lumens if you're going with two lights at a thousand lumens each You've Got 2 000 lumens you've hit your minimum that is how much light is being given off light energy is what your plants use to grow less light energy the more leggy they're going to be because they're going to be stretching for that light so each one of these bulbs are 2 000 lumens I have eight of them so because you can add them together each one of these fixtures are 16 000 lumens that is super bright I mean I can basically get a Tans underneath these lights it's so crazy so uh these are again compact fluorescens same thing applies for LEDs 2000 lumens uh per fixture is the minimum but you can always go up from there the next thing you want to look at is the color of the light so you'll notice I look a little bit kind of like anemic under these lights that's because these lights are very very blue these give off a very blue spectrum light and that's what seedlings need to grow this is known as the basically the color temperature and you'll notice on every light there's a K rating it could be 20 2700 k 4 500k or 6500 K and that basically tells you where on the color spectrum that light will lie is it a blue light a daylight white a a warm white or anything like that and so you want to for growing seedlings you want to stick to a a like a daylight white or a bright white because that is going to give off the most amount of blue light which is what seedlings grow with if you go with something more like a 2700 Kelvin or a 4500 Kelvin like a a warm light something you'd use in your home to make it feel warm you're not going to have enough bright blue light to actually grow these seedlings and they're going to really be stressed and then the final thing the very final thing I want you guys to realize is that a lot of people will say things like oh compact fluorescence are you know they're dangerous because the bulbs have you know the gas in them you should go with LEDs these are extremely extremely safe yes they can break but you just have to be careful with them I mean these all come with very heavy mounting brackets I've had these for five years and I've never had a single light break so yes they are fragile yes they do have their downsides but these are very very affordable so if you're on a budget compact fluorescents are super affordable for anyone because they've been out for so long that the Technology's kind of gotten a whole lot cheaper LEDs are a lot more kind of robust they're not quite as fragile they are a little bit more expensive but they're more energy efficient so there's pros and cons to both but do your research see which ones you kind of you like and and also the size of these are four feet you don't have to go with a four foot light you can go with like a two foot light the biggest thing is just getting something that hits that 2000 that 2000 Lumen threshold and then just making sure that it has the right color and you should be fine all right and the third reason why your seedlings are probably getting leggy is because the plants or the lights are too far apart if you see here these lights are suspended from this top board and so they are quite a long ways away from these plants the reason why I can have them so far away is because the lights are so strong if I went with a standard kind of shop light with some grow lights inside of it I've got an example here for you guys this is just this is just a standard uh standard LED shop light and you can absolutely use shop lights to grow your plants again you just got to make sure they're at least 2 000 lumens in the right color light but these lights here are going to be much more dim than these grow lights here these only have roughly about 2200 lumens between these two lights so because these are a weaker light they have less light energy they're giving off and you can kind of look at it or it you can kind of imagine it like this if you had a if you had a like a a ball or something that you were dropping and you're dropping it from a distance what are the chances that that ball will hit the target right and that Target is the leaf that's the Target that you're aiming for so what are the odds that you can drop a ball and that it'll hit the target right the closer you are to the Target the easier it is to hit uh to hit the target and so the further you are the more light is being spread around because photons or light energy is just bouncing everywhere that's why even though lights here I can see the back of my hand just fine I could read a newspaper in here and so you're wasting a lot of light the closer you are the less light is being wasted so what you can do is either you can lift your plants up and get them closer to the lights or get some chains get some okay get some chains and attach some chains to your light make sure they're nice strong metal chains and you're not going to have a problem at all when you're attaching them to some S hooks just getting them down another you know foot or so and you can do that very inexpensively from literally any hardware store will have some metal chain that can get your lights down closer you can also go online they make like pulley systems I'll see if I can link some in the description box to a really good grow light pulley system that I've actually used and worked really really well I'll post that for you guys if you're interested but you know chains have worked for me for years as well and then you just move them up as the plants grow and get bigger because again the secret is just getting the lights close to the plants as close as possible now can you get too close yes you can you can get too close these lights do grab off some heat you don't want to be you know touching lights because you're going to end up burning the leaves general rule of thumb is for every thousand lumens above so every thousand lumens above two thousand so if it was three thousand lumens you want to be six inches away so that's the minimum is six inches right if the light was three thousand lumens it'd be about six inches if it were four thousand lumens it would be seven inches if it was five thousand lumens it'd be eight inches you can go down one inch for every thousand lumens because that's how much more light energy is being given off hopefully that makes sense so these are sixteen thousand lumens I can start at that threshold of you know the bare minimum and I can move down I can basically move down an additional 14 inches from that point and that gives me a really good distance between the lights and the plants so they have lots of room to grow so hopefully that makes sense all right the fourth reason why your seedlings are getting laggy is because you're letting your soil get too dry see leggy seedlings is not always because of Lights it really just has to do with a sign of stress and so one sign of stress could be that the lights are not you know not strong enough or too far away and stuff like that but it could also be that the soil is getting too dry you see seedlings require a lot of water to grow and when a Seedling gets too dry it'll essentially get thinner and thinner causing it to stretch so it can actually conserve on water it seems very counterintuitive because the taller the seedling gets it would almost seem like the longer the water has to get up the plant but that's not how it works when it's a Seedling it really has to do with the stem itself and a thicker stockier stem will use more water than a thinner spindlier stem and so if you're finding that your soil is dry and your plants are getting leggy that just means you're not watering them enough all right the fifth reason why your seedlings are getting leggy is because you have them on a heat mat now heat mats are not inherently bad we've talked about how plants can use them if you're very careful but if you don't know what you're doing and you're using a heat mat it can cause leggy seedlings why is that well plants do require some warmth to germinate the seeds require some warmth to germinate but if you leave the heat mat on too long once the plants start growing they don't like warm soil and heat mats if you leave them on and they don't have a really good way of regulating the temperature they just kind of keep getting warmer and warmer until they hit like a maximum threshold which is generally around 90 degrees imagine having this teeny tiny little cell heated up to 90 degrees if I was a plant and I was feeling sweaty I'd want to run and get out too and that's what these plants are doing they're trying to get out of there they're stressed from the Heat and so by leaving a heat mat on after your seedlings germinate can cause uh leggy seedlings so I I really want you guys to be very very careful and only use heat mats on seeds that require heat mats we'll have another video on that in a little bit but then also only using a heat mat until the seeds germinate so two things with using heat mats and they can be a really common cause for leggy seedlings all right and the sixth and final reason why your seedlings might be getting leggy is because you don't have a fan now if you haven't noticed indoors there's not a whole lot of Breeze and one of the reasons why seedlings get so strong Outdoors is yeah the sun's out and the Sun is much stronger than any grow light you're going to find but also there's a breeze and that breeze actually creates micro vibrations which help to strengthen the stem so this is the exact reason why if you plant a tree outside they tell you it's actually better to not stake the tree down not tie it down because the wind helps to sway it back and forth and actually sturdy up that stem you're actually creating a weaker seedling by kind of coddling it and taking care of it too long and so by throwing a fan on just a nice little gentle oscillating fan doesn't require you know a commercial strength you know fan to knock these over but something that's just gonna just have a gentle breeze that all it takes is all it takes is that and now you can't sit down here and blow on your plans the entire time but if you get something that's just like that that is what you want to look for now that will cause your soil to dry out a little bit so again make sure you're watching the moisture but that little breeze sometimes makes all the difference with kind of just strengthening those seedlings up so those are the six reasons why your seedlings might be getting leggy the final thing I wanted to touch on just really quickly is once you get leggy seedlings a lot of people ask if you can keep leggy seedlings in my opinion the only seedling that you can keep if it gets leggy are tomatoes that's because tomatoes are a Vine and you can bury them deeper you can just take these out of their cells if these were tomatoes you could take them out of their cell and you could plant them into a larger pot just a little bit deeper kind of back fill the soil up the stem and you'd be fine but with all other plants it's best just to restart these lettuce seedlings will never be what they would be if they were you know just healthy normal seedlings and so we're going to restart starting we're going to be making sure our lights turn on at the right time the other thing too just a quick little tidbit too is to reduce the error of your lights not coming on at the right time make sure you get a timer I prefer to keep my lights on about 16 hours on and eight hours off I probably should have mentioned that sooner but it's better late than never so I like to keep my lights on for 16 hours on eight hours off that ensures that they have a lot of light because again these lights even though they are strong it's nothing like the sun and so I like to keep them on for a good amount of time and then um you know a a good timer just kind of helps to regulate that so if you do happen to leave for the weekend and you do have seedlings that you're kind of sprouting you don't have to worry about it so with that being said I hope you guys enjoyed I hope you learned something new if you did make sure make sure to hit that like button subscribe if you haven't already and we'll catch you all on the next episode as always grow bigger go home bye

Channel: MIgardener

Views: 208,268

Keywords: MIgardener, vegetable gardening, organic gardening

Id: KscIXoMvgFw

Length: 17min 50sec (1070 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 10 2023