The No-Nonsense Seed Sowing Guide (For Vegetable Gardeners)

hello and a very warm welcome to my non nonsense super practical seed sewing guide time is precious money is precious and there's a lot of unneeded advice out there about seed sewing I'm going to keep it as simple as possible I'm going to show you exactly how I started every single the same process for starting every single crop that I grew in the self-sufficiency garden because as I said time is precious I don't have time to make these perfect potting mixes and oh I I just see a lot of confusing things on there so I'm going to just show you everything that you need to grow successful vegetables there'll be a few unusual things that I say but this is what I do and I'm sharing it with you today so the first question is why why sew in modules when you can sew direct well you can do both but if you live in a cooler climate that is dictated by a last average frost and a first Frost then you have a a growing season that has a limited set period so the beauty of starting things off in module trays is that you can start them 6 to eight weeks before your last average frost date so mine is in miday so it means when I start things ahead of time and this is more for for tender seedlings effectively I have cheated my way into getting two extra months of the groin season by starting seedlings off undercover so that means that I can either have a successful crop or have a failure the fact that I can start things off in modules and get that Head Start is a benefit over direct sewn seeds for some cases it also means that say if you're trying to maximize the amount of food growing in in the ground if you have a crop could be one example I gave recently was fennel it could be fennel that's growing you harvest it in August if you then direct sew something like pack Choy it might take a little bit of time to get going whereas if you module sewn and then transplanted four week old pack Choy the day or the minute after you've harvested those fennel you're going to get a really good harvest so that that's a useful part about module sewing I love direct sewing as well I will do a practical guide on that soon for the vast majority of the crops that your grin you only need as well as your seeds you only need five things first one is compost secondly you need a mod ual tray then you need some water and then you need your seed label and a pen now a lot of you have been asking what's the best pen so I will be sharing that with you very soon let's start off with seeds now there's many different ways that you can approach choosing what seeds to grow I'm not going to talk about that in this video all I'm going to say is there's lots of great seed companies out there for example I use real seeds vital seeds Tamer Organics whale seed hub uh she grows veg those are kind of the the main ones and then here in the UK the two main kind of companies I've had really good results with both Premier seeds and King seeds so those are just ones but what I love to do is just look at the all of the different options of varieties and pick out the ones that really interest me because I want to get excited about it if I see some like amazing colored tomato I'm like I want to grow it uh because that's that's how I enjoy gardening so that's what I need to say about seeds pick the things that really spark your curiosity and next up is compost and this is perhaps the most controversial thing I'll say today I never use seed compost I I think for most gardeners it's actually a bit of a scam it's so expensive there's two things if you're in the UK that I recommend and it comes from the same company so that's very useful this is not sponsored this is just me trying to make your life much easier first one like the the AAR grade would be this Sil silver grow melcot organic pea free multi-purpose compost they also have a more affordable just allpurpose Peak free compost I use both of these interchangeably and get great results now you must be a lot of things that I hear is um is oh yeah but but like seeds they don't want that much fertility so this is why I'd argue kind of against that they they don't need fertility to germinate but then quite soon after they they're hungry things so the thing that I like to do when starting off seeds and seedlings is I want to grow the seedlings onto a semi-mature stage without spending time pricking out all of those little seeds and potting them up into nice potting compost I don't have time for that I just want I want to sew something once I don't want to pot it on unless it's something like a tomato I just want to get it out and so by by growing in multi-purpose Petree compost it means that I do that sewing the seed germinates and then the seed has all the all of the fertility that it needs to develop to that stage if you live in quite a slug prone climate one of the best things that you can do to reduce slug damage is grow on your seedlings rather than planting out these little tiny ones that then get absolutely munched by slugs overnight so that's kind of the way that I do it I start off everything for example peppers tomatoes everything to beetroot brassa is all in this compost and get great results so it really doesn't need to be complicated as easy I promise you next up is a type of modules to start off with so there's a few different ones these are all from container WIS there um I do have my own trays these are the hr10 and hr20 which are mod modeled of my absolute favorite the 40 L module tray the only issue is if you have a small garden you don't need that many seed cells of the same crop that you know that would be a lot of kale so you can start things off in smaller um and also Charles daing has a range of uh of trays I use these for a few different things especially for like starting off smaller flowers just to plug gaps and stuff he also has smaller versions as well which are great for the uh small scale Gardener so you know don't get intimidated by these amount of module trades you can get ones which have like 15 or 10 the other the other part is going to be your deep root cell trays these are great I I only really use them for either growing on sometimes my tomato seedlings usually those will be transferred into like a 7 cm pot but I've had really good success with potting all my tomato seedlings into these but usually these are more exclusive for um deeper rooting crops like runner beans or broad beans or F beans so the ones that I've got planted up here I've got different F beans growing there and that's all you need the great thing about these is um they're pretty sturdy so you know I can I can stand on it and nothing's going to happen the next part is watering and there's a few different options for seeds are little bit bigger or you know ones that aren't going to really get displaced by a bit of water like broad beans or onion sets or Peas I will happily put a rose on the watering can and just water over like that my favorite one for when I have my main setup is and I am a brand ambassador for Gardina is just a any kind of sprayer gentle sprayer that just gives good coverage good soaking um that that saves me the most time the other option for starting things off in in module trays is to let's take this for example two different types of beetroots is you can get a tray and then you can fill a tray with water say a couple of inches pop it in and leave it for maybe 5 to 10 minutes it's going to act like a wicking process bring up all of the water it's going to be properly watered and then you can place it away and interchange the best thing about that is when you're watering top down just just cuz the surface looks wet doesn't mean that the underneath is wet so what I would suggest is you do two passes with watering you do one pass with with a with a a a sprayer come back say um 10 minutes later and then you do another pass and the reason why is that first watering is going to gradually bring it all down it's going to make the make the Surface more permeable for the second pass of watering and then you're guaranteed to have good results and then the final kind of two elements that you need uh your labels so these I've got these labels made out of recycled plastic you can get yogurt pots cut those into strips you can do all sorts of different things but the most important thing is the type of pen that you use cuz I know that there's a lot of pens I think even Sharpies that they they'll last for a few months and then they'll disappear if you want a pen that doesn't disappear I recommend okay I'm going to try and pronounce this now Styler loot lumo color permanent um they misspell color there's no u in color um but this pen is for the last few years being my go-to It Works a dream so let's go through the simple process of sewing the seeds and so it's easier for you to see I'm going to use peas as an example so the first stage of course for seed sewing is to start filling up your module tray now I will move any kind of big bigger bits but I never bother with sifting or siing I've never really found a need so I just make sure there's good spread and then I kind of gently firm it down like that and then I'll use some of of the excess just to make a nice level spread like that and then I'm going to make my sewing holes what I would say here is you might be thinking how deep do I sew my crops there is there's always like don't if it's a little bit deeper or a little bit shallower than what the seed packet says most of the times it really doesn't matter too much but I will put a table up on the screen now that you can pause just for a rough estimate based off different plant groups and how deep to make them the other thing that I'm going to do is cuz these are peas I'm going to be multi-wing them which is a great way to maximize how much of certain crops you can grow or start off like with with beetro you could have four or five different you could have four or five beetro per module so instead of say having 10 beetro from this whole tray you can end up with 40 to 50 so that saves a lot of compost so here I'm going to sew three PS per module and I can just count it out like that and also on the screen now where you can pause I'm showing module sewings for some of my favorite crop just so you can know how many seeds per sell put that in there and then that in there another thing that it's always a a question like oh should I not put these seeds back in because there's a bit of compost provided the compost is dry I've got absolutely no worries putting that back into the packet and growing them again I'll even do that for seeds so I won't use for another year and have great results that is now done I'm going to get another layer of compost just to put over the top like that and before I water it because usually I'm doing a few at a time I'm just going to make a label and put that in so I don't get confused now a little tip when you do your first watering of your new sewn module trays is that you can put them in between plants that growing in a poly tunnel to water so any of the excess water just goes to help these plants as well once you have sewn your module trays you then have a few different options of where to store them for the seedlings to then start sprouting the key though is to make sure that there's a lot of light so here in a poly tunnel there's plenty of light if you have a nice south facing window sill that works sometimes you might have to just rotate every day to stop them growing into the light or if you are very limited you can look at undercover grow lights I use those at the moment for my peppers and OB jeans CU I I need that to extend the grain season and they also need the additional heat inside now for a poly tunnel to maximize space you could either create like a simple shelving unit over the top of some raised beds and grow underneath or you can get a mini Greenhouse which is tiered shelves that lets in a lot more light and there's an option of having a covering so you get an extra layer of protection or another nice space saving technique is like what we've got here we've got this we've got this wire mesh that's attached to some bits of wood and we just whenever we plant something put it on top and this works really well whenever I'm watering the seedlings the crops underneath get to enjoy that water as well so you're you're maximizing the efficiency of that water um doing kind of two jobs in one what's the other thing that will guarantee you success in the garden once your seedlings have started growing well it's having a healthy soil and having a healthy soil is very simple this video here is a practical No Nonsense guide to having a healthy soil so you can enjoy amazing harvests

Channel: Huw Richards

Views: 104,438

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Id: sEmZAhZK9To

Length: 14min 2sec (842 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 28 2024