Propagation: germinate, grow and plant seedlings for a long season of bigger harvests

Propagating your own plants can give you so many benefits in the garden rather than sowing seeds direct and maybe losing them to insects or animals. You've got everything is controlled, a nice environment to bring your little seedlings on and then you can plant them out and this video is looking at different ways of doing it and some quite simple methods that you can use without great expense. And we're starting here in the house because a windowsill gives many options, mainly for temperature because you've got the ambient warmth of the house which can get your seeds underway. Seeds need a bit more warmth to germinate than they do seedlings need to grow so that's why it's a very efficient way to germinate your seeds where there's already some warmth like in the house and it's even warm overnight if you do it say in a greenhouse you've got quite cool nights often that really slow the process down. So here's some examples, there's lobelia actually flower seeds that we sowed a couple of weeks ago and they're so tiny these seeds that you can hardly see them and that's why we've done them in a tray that we're going to prick out, we'll see that in a minute and they keep the little hood on, keeps the moisture in and similarly here we have basil which we sowed just two days ago and you can still see the seeds actually they're on top and there are some just in that two days already starting to germinate you can see the little roots coming out. Seeds don't need to be buried deeply and you can see what's going on I'm doing a little trial here with some vermiculite as well so different compost and let's head on out to the greenhouse now and have a look and see what's going on out there. This is my greenhouse where I'm raising in this area here which is not huge enough plants for a quarter of an acre thousand square meters you can do a lot of propagation in really quite a small area partly through using trays that are very efficient use of space for example a module tray like this which has 60 cells and so you can fit a lot of plants into a tray like that and it's made of plastic so it doesn't fall apart after one use. These trays you don't need to rinse them out or clean them or do anything after each use we just pop out our plants and then refill them and plant again and this greenhouse that we're in here is a very nice warm space if the sun is out but today it's actually not sunny at all and it's not a lot warmer in here than outside in fact it's wet at the moment it's 12.5 centigrade Fahrenheit and so protection though and out there is a cold frame which I use occasionally for plants that's another option and that at the moment is only 10 centigrade 50 Fahrenheit so this is early spring it's early April and if the sun does come out then boy do things get going other options for modules for example polystyrene if you can buy it it's not easy to find these and in fact this tray I've kept going since about 1985 when I bought it and it's been reused many many times since two or three times a year maybe and so heading for 100 uses now and still going it's been losing a bit of its edges but basically trays like this you can raise lovely plants there's enough compost in there for example those lettuce and peas that are ready to plant out in you know the size of planting is another factor whereas these module trays the plastic ones they don't have quite so much compost in so they're very suitable for for example for a tray of lettuce like that and you see how pretty these lettuce are as well so that's different varieties of lettuce that we pricked out into the compost in this little plastic tray and then they're quite easy to pop out of there and it means you can plant them without any damage to the root ball so this propagation is all about getting plants underway in an efficient way lots of them in a small space and planting them out you know the you're saving time you're gaining productivity this is a just called a seed tray that's a simple option for filling with not too full with compost and then sowing seeds there's a little seeds that work well for pricking out which we'll also have a look at and you can see for example here i've got a seed tray we grow a lot of french marigolds so that's dwarf french marigolds that we're going to be pricking out next week into little module cells and then they'll be planted out amongst tomatoes and around the garden and there's a few rudbeckia as well so you can do different sowings in a tray like this we often do them in lines across and get lots of seeds coming up at once and it's quite efficient way of doing it because you you can sow your seeds on one day different sorts all in the tray together like that and finally in terms of these trays i'll show you this one so we can come back to this in a minute so that's celery celery is a very small seed so it's you can hardly see them and they also don't want light on them so we just scattered them on top there and that was on the 22nd of march so uh eight two weeks ago just over and they've i germinated them on the windowsill in the conservatory and now they're growing on here over the hotbed that we'll look at in a minute and they're going to be pricking out i'll show you a little bit of pricking out of celery finally there is an option if you with all of these things i've shown you so far these are all plastic and not ideal you can reuse them many times but even so if you want to get away from that this is a soil blocker and it's a simple little device that you fill it with you push that down into a bucket with wet compost get it really full lift that out and have a tray to hand and press out the little blocks in there and then you've got in this case 20 little blocks these are this is probably a bit on the small side actually but they uh they have worked and in fact um then you sow your seeds in the little blocks and that was how i started off these onions for example so these are i multi sowed the little blocks with onion seed and then transplanted the little blocks into this tray of potting compost so there's another option you know there are so many ways you can do this once you understand the principles of what you're doing you can play around with different versions of events but one one simple way um to avoid work is to raise your plants um in as little compost as possible really and that's why i love these trays probably they're my favorite because that's 60 plants there's not much compost and these plants are ready to go out at this stage so we shall see i'll show you planting little plants like that in a minute how to provide the seeds need to get them going so that's the critical time the first two weeks between sowing and germinating and then the first little period of growth and here i'm doing it with a hot bed so this is actually a a frame filled with fresh stable manure that's horse poo and straw which heats up within two days to 60 centigrade 140 fahrenheit and the warmth from that is rising up through we've got a wooden frame on top of it which is supporting all these different trays with seeds or young plants and it's just helping them to get going and so mostly we're using this tray for our seedling stage for germination and seedling stage and then we move them off to an unheated part of the greenhouse or another bench or they can go on this pallet this has proved a useful option in the spring because often as plants get bigger you can start off germinating a lot of seeds on in a warm area and then you suddenly got many many plants and where do you put them all before they're quite ready to go out and so that's we've just put this pallet on top with actually a crop growing underneath still so it's sort of stacking use of space there if you don't have a hot bed which i suspect most people wouldn't then electric propagator, sog, warming cables, any variation on the theme that you're using electricity is a very viable option or the windowsill obviously that we've already discussed and actually for many gardens a windowsill is probably enough because you can germinate so many seeds in such a small space for example here we have tomatoes these are some home safe seeds actually from last year and they've come up really strongly and they were sown 21st of march so it was on the equinox and it's now the 8th of april so that's 10 18 days and boy these are ready to be pricked out so the advantage of germinating seeds in in a small tray like this and then pricking them out is that you've managed to use the precious warmth to raise a lot of seedlings i mean i won't use all of these but there's as many as 60 tomatoes in there 60 tomato plants and they've all started the first two weeks of their life in that amount of space you know it's a very efficient way to get a lot of seeds underway that is as long as it seeds which can be transplanted which actually is most seeds and just by way of contrast here we have the celery and celeriac so you know in there there's probably 200 celeriac way more than i'll use as it happens but i wanted to make sure there were enough and just finally on this little part of the propagation video we have a tray here where we sowed basil two days ago and this one we did cover with a little bit of compost and i'm not seeing any movement yet but i wouldn't really expect to i actually know there is a seed there on top which is just germinating so they're benefiting from the warmth i can feel the warmth from the hotbed in fact on the thermometer here we have the temperature of the greenhouse is the top line 13.4 now it's gone up a bit and the bottom line is from a little insert into a module tray which just allows me to know what the temperature is actually in the compost here and that one's reading 19.4 that's 67 fahrenheit so you can see how the hotbed is giving quite a lift to the warmth of the compost in which these seedlings are starting life mostly how you actually sow the seeds depends on what the seed is how big it is and obviously all the other options what you have to hand multi-sowing is something i've covered in a lot of my videos so do have a look at them but here's an example of beetroot beetroot seed are quite big so they're easy to count out and we put four made little hole in the compost there put four seeds in lo and behold we have four plants that doesn't always happens some beetroot seed germinate more than one and you get more so you have to thin them out but anyway we're aiming for four beetroot in each cell if you think that this is a 60 cells in a tray like that that's 240 beetroots you know so you can raise a lot of seedlings very efficiently using multi-sowing techniques for example multi-sowing that doesn't work for everything like these celery seeds that are so tiny or tomatoes even which also because here what we did was sowed lots of different varieties all in one tray and even some peppers there this was about two weeks ago and they've been on the warmth of the hotbed since then and you can see they're well germinated now they've got a bit leggy actually they started life in the conservatory and that's why some of them the ones that came out first have got a bit tall and this is something you can do with pricking out is you can bury the stems so pricking out gives you a way of redressing some potential issues and making the plants a bit more sturdy so all these different varieties of tomatoes we're going to now prick out into module trays and after that we shall pop them on but that won't be for another two or three weeks but the pricking out stage is it's very very simple you're just pulling seedlings out of a seed tray like that there's a celery for example and i've already filled this little tray with compost and i'm just simply pushing it in it's nothing precise you know that a little bit of root gets lost on the way maybe although hopefully not too much and you just make enough of a hole to to pop it in the there we have celeries that are going from there to there it's quite quick and easy and then they will grow on and these will be ready to go in the garden probably in about another four weeks from now for example so what is a good compost to use well there's such an amazing choice out there it's actually quite difficult to choose or know which one is a good one and they do vary year on year there is a little bit of potluck about this we're talking here about potting compost or what in the usa apparently is called potting soil so it's some kind of compost that's going to have good amount of nutrients in and also good drainage and that's where sometimes you might be looking at adding something like that which is the vermiculite to improve drainage but mostly you should be able to buy what's called a multi-purpose or all-purpose compost which is good for everything from sowing to pricking out to raising a small plant even to potting on and when you find a good one it's maybe not a bad idea to stick with it i've been using the west riding for a long time now it grows great compost but here we're doing actually a little trial i'm always trialing new ones it's fascinating to see the differences these are four different composts which you can buy at the moment in the uk and you can see there's quite a difference in in the size of plants there and of these four little trays with six plants in each the biggest plants at the moment are the only one of the four that's not organic that does quite often happen i've noticed that you know you've got incredible flush of nutrients from the chemical synthetic nutrients but what can then happen is they suddenly run out and your plant maybe then isn't so good in the long run so you know it's a bit swings and roundabouts they can choose but it'll be interesting we're going to keep these plants going for a bit longer and see what happens i mean here though we have a tray for example of less is that's organic compost so you can see in the end there are plenty of nutrients in there with the organic compost they sometimes just take a bit longer to get going so you've raised these lovely plants and then the moment of decision comes when are they ready to go out in the ground and i'm often planting quite small so i'll give you some examples of of the stages at which i plant to give you some ideas for example um look at these fellas they're not very big these are actually turnips multi-sown turnips and we've planted the bigger ones already and and left these in the tray for another few days and i'm very happy to plant these turnips out when they are no bigger than that this works so don't be afraid of putting out plants when they're small if your ground is ready if the conditions are correct outside and maybe you're running out of propagating space inside as well so planting small plants can be a big saving in many ways and small plants also take better in the ground if your plants get really big or slightly outgrow the module you get this kind of thing happening these are cabbage cabbage are big hungry plants or potentially are and you see how the lower leaves there the cotyledons just behind my finger are going pale color that shows how the module compost is starting to run out of nutrients now this obviously is a very small block and that's already quite a big cabbage plant so we have planted out as many as i'm going to need actually of these we're probably not going to use these in the end but i always hang on to them in case that's another good thing to do is just keep a few in reserve but as a result these have grown on for a week since we planted the main batch and they are now getting a bit too big for the compost that's in there if you wanted to grow them on some more you could put them into a slightly bigger module but it's often actually a lot quicker simpler and cheaper just to put them in the ground before they get too big and you can see the effect of having a bit more compost on a very similar plant so this is calabrese and these were sown at the same time as the cabbage but we pricked them out into just a slightly larger block of compost so that has made a slightly larger plant so that's that's an example of the options you got but the small plants work as well there's a plant of rocket for example which was again grown in the same amount of compost not quite as big as the calabrese and then here we have peas from two different sowing dates and you can see the same effect as we saw on the cabbage where the older pea plant is just going a bit yellow at the bottom it's running lower nutrients really needed to have gone in at least a week ago for me anyway more at this stage so this was sown a week after the one i just showed you so that's a younger sowing that was sown on the 20th of March so that's just under three weeks old that's plenty enough time for a pea to be ready to plant so i'm very happy to plant peas out at that stage or smaller i've done a video on how to grow peas and you'll see in there that i'm planting quite small peas and also what we were doing in that one is we took the pea plants off the hot bed and put them straight in the ground so that's another way you can simplify this process particularly if you're growing in a full light environment like this where plants are quite stocky anyway you don't need to harden off you can put them in the ground and cover them with fleece straight away as we're going to see in a minute from the greenhouse i've brought out a selection of the module trays we've just been looking at to show this is great size all of them for planting they could even be a bit smaller but hey and i've made a little garden here and it's ideal planting whether it's the right time of year for all of these plants which is early spring these are all early vegetables so beetroot you can see how i've made i use my dibber to make a little hole for each of the modules that's very quick and simple it's in the compost which is on top of a no dig bed and i'm then just popping in the module and you can see going in quite deep especially where you've got a plant like cabbage with a long stem you can push it right in bury the stem there lettuce doesn't want to be quite so deep because it's not got a long stem so just going like that broad bean even you can grow almost every plant every vegetable from a module like this to plant out the only ones i don't do are carrot and parsnip that's turnip i'm going to lean right over here onion and finally spinach so this is a crazy little planting here lots of different things spinach onion turnip broad beans the idea the turnips and lettuce will finish a bit sooner and then the broad beans will fill out the space and coriander dill i've got here as well between these cabbage and beetroot and there we are i've just uncovered some plants that we put into this bed a mere eight days ago but you can see they were therefore pretty small at the time we put them in because actually they've barely grown but they they've done the hard yards of getting established and without too much pest damage little bit of slug eating but nothing too severe so this is still only early april nothing's barely grown yet and yet already we have a bed planted up with mature seedlings that with the weather now warming up finally and with this fleece cover on top which is helping to keep the even today when it's not sunny but there's enough brightness and this compost feels warm the fleece is trapping the solar radiation and turning it into warmth there for these plants so it's a very efficient way of getting your young seedlings going and i'd be confident now that within six to eight weeks we'll be harvesting spinach and lettuce and some spring onions and things so plant raising is a great way to start the season