Start Seeds With Us: Spring Flowers, Summer Crops, and More!

On our last seed starting video, we did not start nearly enough seeds. So the Straw Hat boys are back for another round. Yes, we are back. I'm wearing a straw hat. Jacques, your signature straw hat. I don't know who looks better. I honestly think you look way better in a straw hat than I do. Please let us know in the comments. But last video, earlier this year, we did a seed starting video together, kind of just starting stuff for both our garden here at the homestead, but also your garden. Jacques in the garden, his YouTube channel. We didn't start anywhere near enough seeds. Yeah. And it's the thing we always run into. So I'm going to start it out Jacques with some flowers. Okay. These ones come from Antonio Valente, who I think actually has a YouTube channel. He got in touch. And he shipped out a ton of flowers. Yeah. I'm actually going to start with a little bit of flower as well, because the only thing I have at my place are peppers and tomatoes. I have like a full pepper flat, a full tomato flat. I was like, Oh wait, I'm missing everything else. And I'm going to start with one of my favorites that go with tomatoes, which is the Elizum or Elizum. I never know. I actually had it. I haven't seen you grow that variety. So this one's called Royal Carpet from San Diego seed. So it's purple instead of just white. And the nice thing about this in particular with tomatoes is that it actually attracts those parasitic wasps. Yeah. The bracketed wasps. Yeah. That attack the tomato hornworm. So they'll actually take care of your tomato hornworm problems. It looks disgusting. I'll tell you that much. It does not look attractive, but it is doing something very valuable for your garden. So I'm going in with the sunflower first. This one's Panache. So with Antonio's flowers, I think he's growing mostly for cut flower applications. So maybe a lot of these varieties you and I might not have heard of before because they're for a use case we typically wouldn't see. If you are like allergic to pollen, for instance, a lot of the cut flower varieties like the ProCuts have no pollen. So it's great for like putting inside if you're allergic usually and you want a little color. Yeah. In fact, I am going in with this one, which I've never seen before, ProCut Plum, which I'm only, I can only assume either the petals outside of the main or the actual interior itself has some sort of plumish color, which would be fantastic. All these seeds are kind of small. With sunflowers, I do depress the soil just a little bit cause it's a large seed, but you don't have to soak. You certainly could soak, but um, it's not mandatory. As long as you keep this, this seed starting mix here well watered, they'll germ and they'll germ actually quite well. So the next one I'm going is another San Diego seed, which is Golden Yarrow. This is one of these that are sort of really drought tolerant. So last year when I planted them, I put them on like the edges of my garden where I didn't have any irrigation. The only downside is they take a really long time to actually like flower. So I think I waited like six months or something ridiculous. So I want to start a little early at this time. I think you have a special little term for what I'm doing over here. Oh yeah. Oh yeah, I do. So Jacques, what are you, what are you adding there? This is vermiculite. So we call it verm for the germ. Verm to improve germ. Verm germ. So I'm putting it on these because they're really small seeds. And I actually also noticed on the Golden Yarrow that it says that it requires light to germinate. So the cool thing about this is that it does let light through on like soil since it's like semi-translucent. And then once you water it, it becomes like a sponge. So it's a sponge that lets water in, makes germination like basically much more guaranteed than if you don't use it. Especially if you're in a zone like we are right now, where we're not going to be moving all these trays indoors in mid-April. We're just going to let them be out here. If you do that, what's great is you have the warmth that you need to germinate. You have the light you need to germinate. But like we have this cross breeze coming over right now. If it does dry out after germination, the roots, which are very sensitive at that point in time, can dry out and immediately die. And so you germ and then immediately kill. If you put the verm on top, it's like just a little moisture buffer. Yeah, exactly. It's a little bit of insurance. And I bought a giant bag a year ago and I'm still like only a third of the way through it. So it's, it's, it's lasted me a pretty long time. By the way, all the seeds we're starting today are going in our Epic 6 cell trays. At least these ones right here. We've got a couple new models out that I think I'm really personally going to like. I think you, tomato pepper, Poppy over here is really going to love. So we have the four cell model, which is three inch deep. And then we have this new one, literally got it today in the mail. This is a four inch deep model, which I'm going to be potting up some tomatoes in as an example, but also starting directly some melons and squashes, which really just want a little more room to start out with. So right now I'm going in with another alizum, but this one it's called Allure Pastel Blend. So it looks like there's like a yellowish, a white, pink and a purple, a little blend. I like having different colors in the garden. It just makes it more kind of pleasant to walk around in. Jacques found some research suggesting it was a great interplant between tomatoes, which it tended to be. I think in your garden it did a little better. I did basil in between mine that tended to perform better. Who knows why, but both work really well. I just did Pro Cut White Night, by the way. So I don't know what that one looks like. We'll put it up on the screen. Could look really cool. So the last one I'm going in with sunflowers is a Pro Cut Orange. So it's just an orange variety or version of the ones that we've been planting before. Sweet. So now I'm going in with a, this is like one of these classics. It's called the Purple Coneflower. I got it from Seed Savers Exchange. This is one that, again, I started last year and it still hasn't flowered. It's been sitting in my garden all winter. I was just reading it. It says it usually flowers in late summer. So I think I'm going to have an insane echinacea or coneflower explosion in a few months, but I'm going to do a couple more for backup. So earlier this season I started Queen Lime Zinnias, the QLZ as I call it. And it is one of my favorite flowers actually of all time. I'm not starting that right now. I'm starting Oklahoma Salmon, Oklahoma Pink Zinnias. If you're a flower beginner, Zinnias I think really are some of the easier ones to grow, honestly, no matter what your zone is. Yeah. They seem to actually, for us at least, they do well in the winter and summer. And the summer. All year. Yeah. But as an annual, if you're in a colder zone, I mean, right about now is probably an okay time to get them going. Yeah. They kind of do this thing where they look like they've fully bloomed and they have this sort of flatter structure to the flower and then the petals start to develop underneath. And it really comes into this like bulbous type of look, which is honestly very, very pretty. And there's multiple flowers. Yeah. It's got like a second life when it expands. Yeah. It's very cool. This is Summer Savory. There's also Winter Savory. Winter Savory grows as like a perennial. I have like four of them in my garden, but the Summer Savory is like the true Bulgarian seasoning herb. It's Bulgarian. It's called Chubritsa. Ooh. Say it again. Chubritsa. Ooh. Chubritsa. Did I get it? A little extra on there. I don't know. I don't even know how to describe the flavor, but it's like this second element in a bean dish that like takes it to another level. It's used with like mixed salts to add on, like sprinkled on bread with butter. It's just amazing. So I'm going to grow a bunch. I might do two flats because last year I just didn't have enough. Two flats? Or sorry. Two six salts. Two six salts. Okay. Okay. Cause I actually want to give some to my family members as well as gifts. Yeah. So I'm actually really excited about this cause I got true seeds from Bulgaria. That actually brings us to an interesting point. You know the reason we're doing this video for you guys right now, number one, grab some seeds, you know, grab a drink or something and start seeds with us. But also it's because we simply didn't start enough seeds ourselves. And when you get all the gear out, you fill your trays up, you've got your seeds, you've got a little mascot down here. Bobka, you want to say hi? Look who came to say hi. Bobka, who used to be, according to Jacques, under his care, but honestly she ended up here. So I don't know what it says about your caretaking skills. Yeah. But anyways, where I was going with that is start extra seeds to the tune of maybe like 20 ish, 25% more than you think. Cause you can always give them to friends. And the chances are you probably won't cause you're probably going to need them yourself. So yeah, I tend to probably grow 50% more than I need, which is a problem. Yeah. That's a little bit of a problem. I just have a really hard time like getting rid of plants that I don't need. Yeah. I just, I'm like, I'm going to keep going even though I don't have anywhere to put it and I don't need it. Speaking of, what I'm going to do now is kind of show you the reason why we came out with this four inch tray here. So Jacques has an abundance of tomatoes, like he mentioned, and he brought these over from his place. These are in the six cell trays. So what you can do is if these aren't ready to go in the ground yet, which I would argue you could, you could definitely put these in the ground. You know, what you would do is you'd, you'd pop the tomato out here. Nice little easy pop there. And you could split these if you wanted, or you could just sacrifice. I might like take this one here off and just let the rest of these go. But I'd take the seed leaves off and I'd plant it to about this deep, right? So you could do that right now. But if you weren't ready or if it was too cold in your climate still, you could pot it up into one of these larger trays. This is a little fancy tool we came up with that is just something we have here at the homestead. But what you can do is just pop it in and you're ready to go. Now with tomatoes, you probably still would pot that a little bit deeper or you can just start seeds directly in it, which is what I'm going to do right now because I do not have a ton of tomato and pepper seeds. So I'm going to start those while you get into your Bulgarian styles here. Or is that Bulgarian? I got the summer savory now, but so this is a classic, the Amazing Gray Poppy. I have a bunch of poppies this year, like the Shirley. I don't know. None of them look as cool as the Amazing Gray Poppy. I really quite enjoyed this one. And somebody commented and said that you can't transplant poppies. I don't know. I have 12 plants in my garden that are all transplanted. So there's just like a lot of things where people will say, you can't do the X, you can't do Y, but just try it. Like there's a lot of things that turn out to be totally fine and it's just about practice. Can't is usually not the case. I would say with, with, um, with gardening things, it's more like, why would you? Yeah, that's true. That's more of it. It's like, why would you transplant a poppy? But the reason why is because we have them here. You might as well, right? For me, it's, uh, I just have, it's just too difficult to keep the areas where I want them moist enough to ensure germination. So by doing this, I guarantee my germination. I guarantee I'm going to have poppies and then I can put them wherever I want. Totally. Okay. Well, I'm, I'm popping the tomatoes out and I'm going with Margold F1 from Johnny's Seeds. So this, of course. That's a fancy one. Is it? Oh, is this a, that's a $15. Oh, is it? Okay. Okay. I just literally put $8 of your seeds in there. So sorry. It's all right. I already got them going. As you guys know, on Jacques' channel, he definitely has a different approach, right? You're a little bit more repurposed materials, a little bit more, you know, how can I stretch the dollar, I suppose, is a good way to put it. Yeah. And then you spent $15 on this one pack of seeds here. So why did you do that? So here's my thinking. It says, first of all, they're, they are a hybrid, so they tend to have a lot more disease resistance. And this one in particular has resistance to most of the common diseases that you would experience as a tomato, I guess. But the other thing is that apparently they're much more productive and they produce for longer throughout the season. So let's say for example, from that tomato, I get three X the amount of physical tomato fruits than a other normal heirloom variety. Well then by paying that extra money for that seed, I'm saving the space that I would otherwise have to put three tomato plants. The other thing about this one is that it says that it has exceptional flavor similar to like a heirloom tomato. So for me, that's why I usually don't get F1s is because the flavor isn't as good. But this one specifically called that out. So more productive, more disease resistant and still delicious. Yeah. It seems worth it to me. So I just did black crim, which as a darker tomato is one of the few I actually really do like. Some of the other ones I haven't had as good of an experience with personally. Yeah. There's some of those weird ones that are like, this is the most purple tomato. Yeah. Okay. Does it taste good? I'll tell you this though, for a while, I feel like there were a couple tomatoes that were talk of the town. Right. Uh, atomic grape, I believe. Yeah. Atomic grape. Atomic grape. And look, it's a beautiful tomato. It looks like, it looks like when you look at an oil slick from the side and you see that sort of, well, but, but, but that color, you know what I'm talking about? That coloration is kind of what goes across. Uh, and I have to say like, beautiful tomato. I did not have great experience with either the production of it or the flavor of it though. The flavor just wasn't there for me either. That's the thing. And so it's like, hmm, am I growing for beauty or am I actually going to use this stuff? And it's fine to do either, but it is what it is. Delicious Hunt did well for us last year, right? That's the one, uh, the germ is like a little spotty, but it's the best. That was the most flavorful tomato I think we grew last year. Okay. Yep. So I'm going to do that. That's going in. I'm going in with a mother of pearl poppies. I guess I'm just going with poppies today. You're going full flowers. I like what you're doing though. Cause you're going, uh, with the verm, the verm germ method. I'm doing it right away because the seeds are so small and it's kind of windy. I'm actually just scared they're going to blow away. Yeah. Why don't we talk about Jacques, your, um, your seed mix strategy. Generally I get high quality potting mix and then I'll throw in, maybe like if I filter like a whole, like one and a half cubic foot bag, I'll throw like two scoops of this, like this size, which is like 30 ounces of worm castings. And then I'll do like a scoop of that of azomite. So the idea behind that is that the worm castings give like a light fertilizer, not like anything that would like overfert a seed. Um, and then the azomite kind of gives it a little bit of that trace elements that it might be missing. Yeah. It's not anything that's like required by any means, but I personally have had good success with it. That's how I got my tomatoes to look so kind of luscious and large this year. Yeah. Well, here's what's interesting about that is it does fly in the face of what most people do though, which is buying, buying or sterilizing a mix. Yeah. Uh, which I've, you know, I've seen other people on YouTube talk about that. And if I think about it from like a first principles perspective, I go, why would you do that? Why would you sterilize the mix to introduce it into a garden that's full of life, both in the soil and above? Yeah. And the reason why I started doing that, cause I thought conventional wisdom says that that's what you're supposed to do, right? Um, but then I noticed as I was reading these books from farmers, like every single farmer will start, they'll make their own mix. And in that mix they'll almost always use compost and some sort of like little fertility boost. I was like, Oh, okay. So it's fine. Yeah. Like so I started doing it. It's been fine. I'm going with something a little special. I don't know if this is perfect timing. We've got 95 plus days to maturity, which puts us around July-ish. So maybe this is crop one of these, but this is a rainbow mix of pumpkins. So I'm going in with pumpkins. And this is why I want to use the, the four inch deep four cell. Yeah. Because it just makes way more sense to do it in a larger thing. Cause it's, it's a huge seed. So check out these bean seeds. Ooh. So this is, these are from Bulgaria, but it says Capitano, which I know look really cool. They look like Willy Wonka invented that. But what's funny is that I've had Capitano bean seeds before and they were not like this. I think they were like just white beans. Yeah. I don't know what the difference is, but they make like a, one of those like filet style yellow beans. I think you have a BMO. You have a Bulgarian modified organism right there. That's a BMO. I think I'm going to do two trays and I do transplant beans sometimes. I don't know. I think we did a trial actually last year. We did a trial. So here's what we learned. I can't remember. We did a perfect experiment, I would say. As perfect as you can get in the garden, at our scale. But we did a 50-50 transplanted in beans and direct sown beans and harvested at the same time. So we knew. So here's what we noticed. Basically they ended up evening out. That's what I read. Yeah. But the period before they evened out was like very awkward, right? Because the direct sown ones germed a little quicker, I think. And they didn't have that situation with beans where when you transplant it in, it's like, where's my nitrogen for a while? And then it finally hooks. Uh, so you get these lower leaves that end up yellowing. And then that's what ended up happening. So we thought, Oh, maybe the transplants won't work. And then they kicked. And then they kind of, they kind of matched. So honestly, that's another one of those things where it's like, does it, does it actually matter or not? I'm just going to go more pumpkins. This is the variety of champions. Go for the neighborhood record. Let's be honest. I've seen the neighborhood. I could grow a one pound pumpkin. I'd have the record. But we're going with, Oh, actually you're in the neighborhood. I'm still going to stand by. I don't know. I'm still going to stand by. I haven't gone hard on pumpkins. Yeah. Yeah. I think I could get you on squash. I think you could. Yeah. Anyways, Big Macs. So this one, let's see what it says. Big Macs. 120 days. That's perfect. We're going to do one more bean pack from Bulgaria. Yup. Uh, how about you pronounce this? I think you got better pronunciation than I did. Oh yeah. Yeah. There it is. That's pretty good, right? That's pretty good. So it looks like they're again, the yellow beans, but these ones are longer. So every time I've had beans like this, I've always thought they'd taste really good. So I've never grown them. So let's see if that holds up in the garden. So Sun Gold is an F1. This one's out of Johnny's, but I believe, I believe you can get it elsewhere, right? Yeah. They have them all over. Yeah. You can get Sun Gold elsewhere. Seeds are tiny and relatively pricey, right? Yeah. They're, they are like a hybrid from Japan. One of those that allegedly the genetics are slipping a little bit. Widely considered one of the best tasting cherry tomatoes that you'll ever have. Personally, I think they're the best cherry tomato I've had. Really? They're not just sweet. A lot of cherry tomatoes are like simply sweet. They're sweet, but they have like a savory and like a little bit of sourness, like tartness to them. Yeah. I was over at Jacques's garden when we did the tour of his place last year on, on the main Epic Gardening channel. And let's just say I did a little snacking. A little surreptitious snacking. He did not see it, but it doesn't really matter. Just hearing about it now, I guess. Yeah. Well, hey, I've seen him wandering off the property with some organic materials, let me say that much. I'll tell you right now, I'm going to be leaving with some loquats. So I don't know if there's anything. See what I mean? See what I mean? This guy, honestly, we dock it from his pay. It's all good. Anyways, I'm think I'm in a good position here. A couple of things. Jacques has his own YouTube channel, Jacques in the Garden. He's doing videos, I think every Tuesday and Sunday now. Yep. That's the plan. We have our Epic Homesteading channel. We're going to do two videos a week there, two videos a week on the Epic Gardening channel here. And of course, if you like the stuff we're doing here, you can actually support it. You can grab some of these Epic six cell trays. We have the four inch deep and the three inch deep four cells that are just flying right now. I'm going to tell you I'm going to fly over and get a 32 pack of those because I've got a lot of tomatoes. They're going to sell out. Anyways, thank you guys so much for watching. Hopefully this was like a fun little vibe with us seed starting session. And until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.