Make Your Own Seed Starting Mix

Spring is here. It is time to start thinking about starting seeds. We've already been doing some here at the homestead. In this video, I'm going to go over three different ways that you can create a seed starting mix from easy to epic mode. So stay tuned and let's start off with the easiest way to get your seed starting mix off the ground. Getting your seed started means having a specific mix. So what really is seed starting mix? In effect, it is just a lighter mix, meaning that there aren't all these large woody particles in it. And that's kind of what makes it a seed starting mix in my opinion. What you'll see though is you can just buy a seed starting mix much like this one. This one's from Ebystone Organics. I'll read you off the list of ingredients and you can start to see what it's made of. So first of all, you have sphagnum peat moss. We actually just did a video on peat moss, something we're trying to cut down on a little bit here. For the sake of example, this has peat moss in it, perlite and dolomite lime. The reason you need the lime is because the peat moss can tend to be a little bit acidic and you need to buffer it up with some lime. So what you don't hear in this is any kind of nutrients at all. There's no worm castings, there's no compost, there's no fertilizers of any kind. And that's because most seed starting mixes that you buy are fully sterilized inert mixes. So that's really the big question is why should they be? And in my opinion, I actually really don't think seed starting mixes should be sterile and probably they should have some sort of nutrition. And so what I prefer to do is if you're going to buy a seed starting mix, rip this bag open just like this. We'll dump it through. And I'm going to add two amendments. There's a couple of different ways you could approach this, but these are mine. Then I want to take worm castings. So we actually offer worm castings from Urban Worm Company on our store. I'm going to cut in about, I would say five-ish percent by volume. So this was eight quarts. I'm going to put in about half a quart or so and not stress too much about the amount. So I'm going to let that fly in there. Helps with some moisture. Also very light on the NPK, but does add some nutrients and does add some microbial activity. So in this particular mix, most of the time with worm castings, you're going to see it be like a 0.00 or a 1.00. This one is 0.67% nitrogen, 0.1% phosphate and 0.05% potassium. So really not super high. We're not going to burn these seedlings. Most of the time they're getting most of their nutrients from the seed itself in the beginning of their life. I'm also going to add a little bit of azomite. You don't need to overdo it with this. Azomite is effectively a rock dust product and it's been, you know, it's been very powerful for us here in the garden. So I'm just going to sprinkle a tiny little handful of this in. And what you're seeing me do here is just amend slightly this mixture with some level of fertility. Now it's going to look pretty much the exact same. That's your lightest weight way to make a seed starting mix is take a rack off the shelf seed mix and then just amend it slightly because I personally feel having a little life in that soil, having a little nutrient in that soil is going to set it up for success. It's kind of weird to have a sterilized mix for a living organism that you're then going to put into a completely unsterilized garden. Might as well start it off in an active mix. Your next option instead of bolstering up a seed starting mix is actually to thin down an existing potting mix because most potting mixes have roughly equal parts of what a seed starting mix needs. So you've got aeration components, something like a perlite. You've got some kind of retention component like a coir. And then you have some sort of forest product or fertilizer-ish like product. So this is Recipe 420. We've had some success growing with this in the past. Obviously it's probably geared for a particular kind of crop if you know what I'm saying, but we're growing it for seeds. So let me break down what's in this first and I'll show you what I do to turn this into a seed starting mix. So first of all, what we have, aged forest products. We talk about that all the time now on the channel. Really aged forest products can become compost. It just depends on which point they've been broken down to. Really hyper-aged forest products effectively have become compost or humus or whatever you want to call that there. Then you've got coir and peat moss. We talked about that a bunch. Now here's where a potting mix adds a little more than a seed starting mix. You've got oyster shell lime. That's going to buffer the pH for that peat moss additive. But then you have things like bat guano, alfalfa meal, kelp meal, things like that that actually do add a little nutrient. So what you want to do here is pop this open. All you're doing is you're just cutting this down. You're saying, Hey, these larger particles, I don't want those in the seed starting mix. Effectively everything else I do. So I've got this screen here. This is quarter inch screen. So all I'm going to do is exactly that. Filter this through and you'll see what's left both on top and down below. So I have most of the material through and this is actually why I particularly like this potting mix. Because if you take a look, I'll show you, there's not a lot of crazy wood particles in here. They're all pretty small, pretty broken down. Unlike some mixes where all this would be like almost big pieces of bark. Now let's see what we're left with down below. You have this beautifully thin and fine mixture that the roots aren't going to hit and get all tangled up and messed up and still got enough nutrients in there. Just like we bolstered up that seedling mix, we've now cut down the large particles from the potting mix and sometimes that can be pretty cost-effective. I would say though, try to buy the highest quality potting mix you can if you're going to use this strategy. And now we get to the epic strategy, which is just making your own seedling mix. So now we're in the big boy and girl club of making our own seedling mix, which we do from time to time when we have the ingredients at hand. So here's what we're going to use for this one. And just keep in mind, you might be able to find some of this stuff near you, whether it's pumice versus perlite or coir versus peat and et cetera. So try to find the stuff that's the most local to you, that solves the problem I'm going to talk about in a seedling mix. Oftentimes the most local thing is the most sustainable to you. So I'm just going to put that out there. But here's what I'm going to do. So I've got some pumice here. Pumice effectively takes the place of the perlite in a solution like this. And this is going to provide the aeration and the drainage that young seedlings are going to need. So I'm going to go in. With basically just this bag of pumice at one third of the total volume. So this is eight quarts. So I'm going to put in eight quarts of this. That's my one third of my whole mix right there. Next up, I've got this brick of coir. Now one of the advantages of coir, if you're going to use it, is that it can be compressed unlike many other materials. So that's great because from a shipping perspective, it's a lot more economical and cost-effective and resource less intensive to ship it. But you do have to expand it. So Jacques here in the background, I'm going to have him expand this while I chat about some of these mixes. So we're going to do that. And then the final thing is going to be your fertility component. So I have some compost here. Of course, if you can make your own, you probably should. For the purposes of this, I just have this Malibu compost here just to show you really simply. So this will be the final one third. That coir is going to provide that water retention, that water capacity holding onto moisture. And then this compost is going to provide the fertility and some of that long-term growth. So this is going to go in at about a third or so, but I'm actually going to split this in half. I lied. I'm going to do about half of that third. Now we're getting complicated, is going to be the compost. I'm going to do a little sprinkle of that azomite that I mentioned earlier, just for those trace minerals, trace nutrients. And then I'm actually going to use the other half of that third. So a sixth of this mixture is going to be worm castings. So there's really a lot of different ways that you can approach a seedling mix as long as you don't violate the principles of how to create a mix in general. About one third of retention ingredients, coir, moss, et cetera. About a third of drainage ingredients, pumice, vermiculite, perlite, that kind of thing. Vermiculite probably more on that retention side than the drainage side. So I would skew away from that sometimes. And then about a third of filler, compost, fertility materials like compost and castings. That's what I personally do. In go the castings. And I'm just going to add a tiny little bit more compost in here before I start mixing. We still have to wait on that coir. We have our coir. Like I said, you got to rehydrate it. You got to squeeze the water out, make sure that it's nice and ready to go. But I have roughly eight quarts. So in goes one, in goes another. Really easy to do. And all we have to do now is hydrate and mix it, preferably at the same time, because you really want to hydrate a seedling mix before you get seedlings into the mix. So I want to show you the components again really quickly. It's not mixed. So you've got your coir, you've got your castings, some compost down in here, some azomite dust. And then of course, the pumice. You can get fancy or you can get simple. You can mix it with your hands. I'm getting a little weird and fancy. I'm using this power planter auger here, which is actually on our store. We used it to plant hundreds of potatoes in this side yard over here. I'm just going to use this to mix because my other hand, I'm going to hydrate it at the same time. So I'm just going to dump some water in and then come in and just mix this all up really simply. It's starting to look like a proper seed starting mix there. Let's get our hands dirty now and just get all the stuff in from the edges. Kind of like you're making a bread dough. This is really all you need to do. Get a little water in that mix, mixture going, make sure that it's all well incorporated. And then at this point, you really are good to go. You have a nice, fertile, powerful, well mixed seed starting mix that yeah, it took a little more effort, but if you can get those bulk components in bulk, you save a little money and make big batches at once. This is probably for a gardener who's more on our scale, but certainly it works really, really well. So three different ways to make seed starting mix. I'm going to keep getting this going and get some seeds to start this afternoon. Until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.