Introductory guide to sowing seeds

Seeds are precious and it's coming out sowing time now. This is actually January and I'm always saying please don't sow anything in January. I don't sow anything in January unless you don't want to eat anything. That's the old saying, sow in January you won't have to eat anything. It's generally not a good month because there's not so much light, there's not much warmth but more than anything it's about thinking ahead to what conditions will be like once you've got some plants to plant out because that's what we're doing in here and this is about raising plants to transplant outside mainly or undercover like behind me are salads that we've been growing in here all winter and picking from already three or four times and we keep picking leaves off the same plants. So that's undercover growing but I'm talking mainly in this video about sowing seeds to grow in the garden and therefore you don't want to sow them too early because it won't be warm enough or light enough even outside until say early spring. So what I want to do though is set you up with the knowledge that will help you to be more successful in sowing and there's many factors to consider like, where should we start, what you're going to sow the seeds in the actual tray or container. There's a selection here, I've got seed trays, module trays, so this seed tray, why is it called a seed tray? It's used for sowing lots of little seeds often. One feature of these trays is they don't have very good drainage. Here's another one old dirty one and I'm very happy by the way to use old trays they work really well you don't have to wash or sterilize them in between use so I'll save you one job but you do always want some drainage so at least the few holes there is better than one like this. So this would be a tray you'd never want to use for sowing seeds because your water and then the water will just sit in the bottom it can't escape and your seeds will rot. Drainage is really important for successful growth of germination and growth of seeds and I found I actually get better results from sowing in a module tray than in a seed tray because do you see the holes there quite substantial in size so there's more chance for the water to drain away there's going to be more air in the mix. There are bigger module trays as well and I'm going to explain in different situations or for what seeds you would use larger trays or trays with larger cells trays with smaller cells but more cells per tray or seed trays so those are some options. Then we have consideration actually two more things here homemade so rather than buying a module tray you can make your own using egg carton that's what this is it's some I sewed pieces in just to see this is just for trial you know I wasn't aiming to get these plants in the ground I could do in here I still early for outside growing but you can see that's worked nicely and I'll explain also a little bit about multi-sowing so this I put two seeds home so pieces in each carton cell there and here I made some little little little pots out of rolled newspaper which was not ideal it's not not well it's not an easy thing to manage because of how you fill them to get it in there without getting compost all around which actually doesn't matter but then you get to a point where you want to get them out we'll do that in a minute and have a look but yeah it's not as easy as actually having a module tray where you can pop it up from below that's the idea of the module cell and then you can see the little roots at the bottom which is fine they could sit in there for quite a while yet or they could be planted at that stage you've got many options what this is about is getting seeds going in the best condition so that the seed germinates and succeeds with its germination that's more difficult often than actually growing on a seedling seeds need more warmth for germination than they do for actually growing as little plants so that's where often can be a problem especially in the spring we're sowing seeds direct in the soil the soil is still very cold whereas often you can put a chance plant in the soil at the same temperature and that will grow and if you sow direct you might lose your seeds this is the issue so with with doing it like this you can have close to 100 success from what you sow as long as the seed was good in the first place and this is a bit actually something that's harder to to deduce because how do you know the seed that you bought is a good fresh seed does it tell you anywhere and on the packet it actually will say packeted year ending at least in the uk that's what the law says it has to say it tells you when it went in the packet basically it doesn't actually tell how old the seed is there's a minimum germination rate but the germination rate is often measured in a laboratory with perfect conditions which we can really achieve rarely achieve in even in a greenhouse where so we could just have to do our best but generally giving warmth is a big factor and these until just now have been in the house on the windowsill of my conservatory which is not super hot but when the sun comes out it gets warm overnight it's maybe 12 14 degrees 50 fahrenheit whereas in here greenhouse half should be warming it's okay at the moment at the moment the temperature in here is about is about 12 actually last night it went down to below minus two centigrade in here we had a frost so even um in enclosed structures it can be cold at night and this is one issue with seed germination cold nights stop the germination because the seed is taking in that fact oh wow this is too cold i'm not going to germinate now in these constant day night temperatures to be at a reasonable level now that these peas are germinated because i've managed to keep them warm at night it's about 10 days ago so these they can stay in here the and these could freeze at night that will be fine i'm not saying i want them to but they won't kill them so that's the difference it would have stopped them germinating but it won't stop them growing it'll slow down their growth pretty much all the seeds i'm going to show you are seed i saved myself and that links back to what i was saying about seed age when you save it yourself you know how old it is and not all of it's fresh actually like these peas as it happened that was three years old 2018 gosh you know actually that's four years old i saved these seeds it was a good year 2018 and the quality of the seed was good and i'm just keeping them in a spare room in the house getting a nice result but normally i found it worthwhile to sow young seed because then you know for all the time and effort you're putting into getting your tray together filling up the compost looking after it watering blah blah you're pretty confident you're going to get a result and fresh seed will give a nice result and that's like what we've got here slightly leggy seedlings again that's the effect of the windowsill these were sown at the same time so that's lettuce that's peas the lettuce is home safe seed from two years ago actually but i would say pretty much every single seed has come up i find that generally with home safe seed the germination rate is very good and this was using the the other end of the egg carton so the the partition bit had the peas and the open top lid i just filled it with compost and scattered lettuce seeds on top with not much on top of them using don't cover your seeds too much that's a key thing i want to emphasize here is don't bury them too deep and this leads me on to type of compost to use because in the compost that i sowed these in you can see quite a bit of this white flaky stuff and that is called vermiculite which is an expanded rock and it's very light and free draining and that's coming back to drainage it's what particularly seeds germinating seeds and their little tiny roots really benefit from is having some air plenty of air around those little roots it doesn't want to be completely moist too much moisture is often what kills seedlings much more than too little so be careful about watering don't over water like in fact this is a good example with this tray i have not watered since i sowed those seeds so i did when sowing get it really moist you know it's 100 as full of water as it can be not totally dripping dripping because of thanks to the vermiculite but moist then i scattered seeds on top a little bit of vermiculite on top and it's been in the conservatory with a little bit of glass over the top for the first week and kept the moisture in and then the seedlings came up and like i said no water in the 10 days since it was compost wise there are so many options sometimes i despair they change every year and you can have sacks of potting or seed compost as it's called which have the same label year on year but change the contents so you don't always know what you're buying but you often don't know what you're buying and it's very confusing i can show you two physical examples here and how they can vary in terms of structure and content this is one that's made from a material called digestate and i'm not recommending this but i'm just pointing it out to you because i've noticed that digestate is getting very common now and that's purely because of people are very subsidized producers to to make the methane ferment it this is plant material like maize and grass stems make the methane and then they got the dry matter the solids what do they do with them they worked out they can sell them as compost they're not rich ingredients and what they do have is good structure a lot of fiber in this that's fine but compared to more traditional compost which have more nutrients if i can show you exactly the result of what's happened with that one it's one that i was sent to try and so five weeks ago we sowed broad beans and this this end is the digestate compared to broad beans sewn in the compost i normally use which is from yorkshire it's called more than gold i'm not necessarily recommending that one either actually just because it's a small company so don't go don't everybody rush out and try and buy it um but you know there are other good compost around and like daleford say but i'm just what i really wanted to show you here is just that difference and if the only compost you'd used for your sewings was this one it would have been a disappointment to say the least you know that can really compromise you you'll have spent a lot of money on seeds i'm not saying these won't grow but quite a few of them are not going to grow to their full potential one like that just about make so do the best you can is all i can say there is one more option for those of you who are pretty organized in other ways here this compost is some that from my own heaps you can use your own compost if you make it nicely enough and if you can sieve it so we put this through four millimeters sieve you can see it's pretty fine and it also sieved well because it's quite dry because i've got a different factors to consider it's not just so simple as going out and getting a bit of garden compost to use you need to think ahead a bit and do a bit of work on it and partly because we're talking about putting compost into quite small compartments the cells of a module tray so it can't be big lumpy stuff it needs to be reasonably fine fine but fibrous you know that's the bit where the digestive is doing well it's fibrous so what i've done actually with recent sewing is i've mixed the two uh the more than gold which is quite black and quite a bit of green waste compost and the fibers of the digest digestate and at the moment i'm just to see i'm always trying different mixes combinations and that's what i'll be using when i fill trays so we're looking to raise a nice strong transplant but to get to that stage this is often rather than sewing in a module tray one often starts with a seed tray why why not so direct into modules well because some seeds are so small that you actually can hardly hold them hardly see them let alone hold them and so it's physically not possible to to so a certain number of seeds in in module cells and also there are some seeds and seedlings that really like uh this kind of compost that's not rich generally speaking i'm using the same compost for all my zones and the only difference i'm making is adding a bit of vermiculite particularly when i'm sewing into seed trays where the drainage is not so good or there's two vegetables i'll mention three actually um particularly basil i find that basil really doesn't like having wet roots so i'll always add more vermiculite when i'm sewing basil and lettuce to some extent as well the seeds and seedlings of lettuce like it light and not not too dense and watery so what i want to do at this stage is get this tray with its compost fully saturated and then i can sow seeds on it mostly on it because you don't want them to be too deep at this stage and if i show you some examples generally speaking i try not to water too much before i'm handling seeds because i don't want to get the seeds wet that's why i'm slightly hesitating here but just for the purposes of the video i'm doing it all a bit together but these are these are some old seeds actually that's why i'm slightly sacrificing them here because this is celeriac and it's not the time of year to sow celeriac best time of year to sow it is middle of march same for celery first sowings you can find all these dates in my calendar we also produce a timeline that you can hang on a wall chart or you can find the dates on my website in the on the page there that is celery seeds and i'm pretty sure you can hardly see them and it would be very difficult to actually pick them up individually so what i do with tiny seeds like this you can hardly see it's just a few i'm just gonna sprinkle them over the top of the compost there and tiny as they are there could well be 30 or 40 fell down there and that's absolutely fine because they can then germinate and then they can be pricked out and pricking out is where you need a little tool i've got a i think that might be a special pricking out bit of plastic you could use a pencil i used a pencil for many years and then you're going to lever out the little seedlings like that hold it by the leaf with a bit of root on just pretend i'm doing it there you're going to make a hole in a module cell and push it in so if i talk about pricking out that's what i mean it just means moving a seedling from a seed tray to a module cell so it's got its own little area or volume of compost to grow but this is a very good way to start seeds out certain seeds uh lettuce seeds as well actually what i do is after sowing them in a tray like that and i'm not going to cover them but i'll do that and that the water on them helps them to settle in make sure there's contact with the moist compost and then i need a bit of glass which is here somewhere i can't see it it's disappeared so basically i'd put a bit of glass on top well you could just lay a bit of polythene bag on top or anything just to hold the moisture in and this then i would put in the house to germinate i do that a lot in the late winter early spring sowing they for the first week they're indoors literally indoors because of the nighttime temperatures being so much higher so then we have the next step which is say a module tray filling a module tray so this one i like it's it's actually one that i designed myself and that's why i like it because it was basically it's over 38 years of propagating i've never really found a tray that quite fitted all the specs i wanted and from what i found works really well it's really solid polypropylene i'm afraid it is plastic but it's a once in a lifetime plastic this is going to last forever you know you can walk on these they're really solid and then uh it's got a decent size hole at the bottom so there's good drainage and that means also you can pop the modules out and it's not too big it's got a tapering bottom i prefer the shape of it to that one you see how much smaller volume that is compared to that and actually for a lot of seedlings you get a better result for giving them less compost don't assume that putting a seed or seedling in a big pot is gonna automatically make a big plant because it's got a lot of growing to do before it's able to use that expanse of compost and often that gets too wet at that stage it's so easy to overwater always in enclosed space containers so with this one there's very unlikely you're going to saturate those roots with water and it means you need less compost one of these trays the amount of compost is two liters to fill a tray like that that's less than half a gallon and i did this one yesterday and i also made little holes in it still dry you can see it's quite brown i haven't watered it yet and that's holes for sowing so that's ready to go ready to sow and this one i'll just mention why have i got this here it's for larger seeds this this one serves for most vegetables this one i'd use for large seeds like kidney beans for example these are some home saved you know they're so big that they well you probably could do it in there but you'd be struggling a bit and broad beans or fava beans whereas these ones they're slightly smaller trays they can work for peas and sweet corn and french beans middle sized seeds as well as smaller seeds like here for example these are some home saved onion seed which i'm pretty happy with with home say seed you you often get a few imperfections little bits of debris it doesn't matter actually i'm not selling them as long as there's not so many that they're gonna get in the of the sowing and here i'm going to do something called multi-sowing which is dropping up to six onion seeds i generally speaking i don't have time to count them out individually but i'm putting in a pinch which from my experience approximates to six that's that then what do you do with seeds that are left over in your hand if you haven't got many well put them back in the seed packet but it's not ideal because they've picked up a bit of moisture there already do you know i'm actually going to throw these out i wouldn't normally be quite as careless as that but it's to make that point and keeping them dry really helps that's probably the factor in conserving your seeds that's more important than anything what's next we have some coriander here this is home-saved coriander as well this is a great example for multi-sowing they're seeds which are easily large enough to handle and i'm gonna pop three why multi-sow it takes up less space you need less compost for the same number of plants you're raising more automatically in a given space and you you get the advantage of proximity so the seedlings they're germinating with their mates and they're gonna go in the ground with their mates it's the kind of companion planting if you like and all i can say is from experience it works really well okay peas is something different very visible now because these are bigger how many would i sow uh i would often put two even in these small cells so you just literally put them on top with companion planting you can uh put you could put them separately or they might end up together in the middle you know in terms of actually uh where they actually end up it's entirely up to you um but it doesn't it's not going to affect how they grow because i know i've been asked this uh sometimes you know do they have to be spaced out or when you come home you just bung them in basically broad beans yeah okay let's have a go in in the very small cells here it's also a point about sowing large seeds i'm often asked do they need to be pointy and down that's actually the end where the roots gonna come out it doesn't matter that they have to be that way it works very well with all these like flat seeds to put them in flat that's quicker and easier you don't have to worry about where the roots are going to come out okay what we got here oh now this is something i'm not going to sew actually because it's so out of season just to make that point as well french beans these are home so french bean seeds i don't sew them until the middle of april uh sorry even late april late april for the very first plantings here we can have a frost until the middle of may those are really warmth loving plants french beans so just don't serve them too early nor runner beans tomatoes i've got some tomatoes here yeah red brandy wine so i would say tomatoes are a good example of where you could either sow them it's a decent size tomato seeds like that and it could be one or two but then i would thin to one or you could sow them in a seed tray and then prick them out they handle nicely i mean you could prick anything out the the only seeds that you wouldn't want to prick out and are difficult to raise those transplants is carrot and parsnip because of their long tap roots and they'll tend to break when you transplant them everything else you're seeing here is totally transplantable and the extra and i don't think there's a lot of extra but the extra work involved in raising the transplants you easily get back in terms of the quality of what you've got out there you get a full bed it's all nice and even and maximum use of space and maximum growth of seeds these are home saved lettuce which i'm not not going to sow there but you could actually if i wanted to sow lettuce here i'd do two two ideally often three land there are hard ones that count out especially home saved with the bits of debris in there generally speaking i personally anyway i want to grow one lettuce in a station in a in a space and so with pin those out this is another thing you can do you can sow more seeds than you actually want and then thin to the strongest you could do that with chard as well for example if you want one chard seed our spinach actually we could do next because that's a bit similar you know with spinach this is a spinach plant which actually has two plants and this in an ideal world especially for the spinach this would have been in the ground last october this has been sitting here all winter it's testament to the quality of this compost the plants are still quite green they haven't been fed or anything and we you know you can still plant these and as two plants that will make a nice clump where you can put quite a few medium-sized leaves or if you took that one out and you just planted it as one then you'll have bigger plant making bigger leaves it would be difficult to divide them at this point but you could try but for I often grow spinach in twos because I don't want enormous leaves but lots of medium leaves is nice so it part of the thing with the multi-sowing is about being clear what you want from your plants it's not like saying this is the rule that you have to follow and you can try a few things and here's a good example with spinach actually why it's a little bit interesting where you get these clumps this is home safe seed and we see it developing on the stalks of the plant it's not like a classic seed it's a sort of little clumplet and it makes it a bit hard to sow with precision if you want a certain number because you're often putting in a clump and I'm aiming for three seeds in a cell which in turn is aiming for two plants I'm going to thin out pull out the weakest one so that's how they would run and I've nearly got to the end now let's see what else I've got here I would actually mention radish radish is such a good seed to sow at this time of year and this is going to be my last sowing of this video and it's a nice one to finish on because it's the first one that you want to do and I recommend from the middle of February and when you grow radish at this time it's much less pungent it's mild and juicy and this variety rudy r-u-d-i you can allow to grow quite big and it doesn't get woody or hollow so it's very versatile vegetable to handle sit there and with multi-sowing like this I'm putting in five or six seeds aiming for four plants in a clump so you get them all growing together and then as soon as you've got one that's the size you like you can twist it out gently and the rest of them carry on growing so from one sowing especially early in the year like this you can get quite a few harvests and there we are so just in terms of covering up these seeds the old saying is to cover the seed with as much compost as the seed is thick and so with a broad bean that would be quite a lot this is one disadvantage of doing lots of different seeds all together like I've done there but you this can work it's easier generally and because also you'll be planting all out at the same time to have your same seeds together and we for that reason partly we've brought out smaller versions of this tray so this is a 60 and it's going to be available in a 30 and a 15 in the UK that will be available through from February and in the US from March we have a distributor in the US now the link is in the description we have a distributor in Europe as well for these trays so I'll just finish with covering the compost to show you so I actually take some new compost at this point and just sprinkle it over the top more or less how I'm judging according to the size of the seed and where it was lettuce I'm not actually going to put any new compost on it's going to flick the existing compost over it with broad beans I'll ladle on as much as I possibly can I wouldn't normally sow them in this but it's just to give you ideas you know how it works what the principles are of sowing seeds that's what this has been about so that you understand how you can get the best from your precious seeds and how to look after the seedlings a bit but it's more about sowing them in the right conditions at the right time in decent material compost and in a suitable tray and on that note I'll finish and hand it to you enjoy your sowing season which goes on right the way through until September October