Don’t Make THESE Seedling Mistakes

It is a cold day outside here in San Diego, zone 10b. The perfect day to come into the greenhouse and discuss with you some of the myths about seed starting that just aren't true. When you first start your seeds, it is very tempting to want to baby them and keep them in a perfect, precious state, but you don't have to. They actually will be perfectly fine if you are a bit rough with them. And in fact, on some seedlings, like let's say lettuce, or actually onions is a really good example, I can pop it out. And even if I lose a little bit of soil, and even if I want to separate these seedlings out and plant, let's say, you know, this lettuce and this lettuce in a separate area, I totally can. Now I could plant that lettuce as a clump. That wouldn't be a problem whatsoever, but you can be a little bit less precious with your seedlings than you want. In fact, sometimes with something like a bean or a lettuce or broccoli, I'll just pop all my seeds out of my cell, kind of toss them roughly in the place in the garden that I want them to be. In particular, this helps when let's say you start seeds on your own, or you go to a nursery and grab some seedlings. You can oftentimes just split those seedlings up. And even if you damage some of the roots, I think a lot of us gardeners, we think, well, we can prune the tops of our plants. But if you touch the roots, then uh-oh, that plant's going to die. And the truth is a lot of the times you can even do some light root pruning, or you can lose a couple of those feeder roots on your seedlings when you're transplanting them into a soil situation. And it's actually totally fine. So your seedlings might be tough, but what about your soil? When it comes to growing your own seedlings at home, choosing the right soil mix can feel like a really stressful thing. And you might be led to believe that there's only one true type of soil to use. And that is something called seed starting mix. Over here on my left, I have an example of what that might look like. It's usually something like peat, very fine grained. It just has a little bit of tiny pieces of perlite for drainage. And the idea behind this is that it basically has nothing in there. All it's doing is keeping the soil moist so that the seeds can germinate and allow a little bit of water to come through. Now, right here, I have something that most of us have in our garden at all times ready to use. And that is potting mix. The problem with potting mix is that you end up having all this chunky material and that can actually hinder your seed starting. Think about a very tiny seed. If you were to put it on top of something like this big piece of bark, it's not going to really have a good chance of germinating because there's no water transfer from that to your seed. And that's really what it takes to germinate seeds. But here's the deal. What I like to do is get a nice high quality potting mix like this guy right here. And then I'll sift it using a quarter inch hardware cloth and just get it down to this really nice and fine texture. At this level, there's nothing really in here that's going to impede germination, nothing heavy that's going to sit on top of your seeds. And there's plenty of water access to that seed so that it could properly germinate. The only thing I'll say though, is that if you have soil that looks like this and there aren't many soils that are sold that look like this, where it's all just basically chunks of wood, that's just not going to do well for a seed. In a forest, of course, a natural environment, it does work, but those are not the seeds you're growing in your garden. You're growing tomatoes, lettuce, and things like that. And this just isn't going to give you a good time when it comes to seed starting. Just to be clear, there is nothing wrong with seed starting mix. If that is what you're used to growing with, you could of course keep doing that. But if you can't find a nearby or maybe you just don't want to buy that bag of seed starting mix, you could just get some potting mix, sift it down and make your own little blend. I actually like to add something like worm castings to it to give it a little bit of extra nutrients, which a lot of people think you actually can't do with seedlings. It's often thought that you shouldn't give your seedlings any fertilizer because first of all, the seed is the fertilizer. They sprout the seed leaves or cotylodons as they're called. And those are sort of consumed while these beautiful seedlings put out some roots and start to actually uptake nutrients from the soil. But the truth is a lot of seedling mixes don't even really have fertilizer in them. And people will say, Hey, well, if you put fertilizer on, you're going to burn your plants. And in the past, that really was true. Because way back in the day, and sometimes to some degree today, you used to use a lot of synthetic fertilizers that were really high in nitrogen, which is readily available by the plant and would actually burn the leaves. And so it wasn't a good idea. However, these days I'll show you what we like to do and we don't go crazy with it, but we do touch our seedlings with just a little taste of nature's magic. Just a simple fertilizer. You don't want to go too crazy on the NPK numbers or nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium. I put the fertilizer in first and then I'll just heavily dilute it. When you go to a nursery and you see all of those beautiful vegetable starts that look like they're growing in a five gallon pot, but they're actually in something not much bigger than this. The truth is those are fertilized plants. I mean, they're relatively heavily fertilized plants in most cases. That's why they look so good. And if you remember the early days of Epic Gardening, I actually started growing in hydroponics, which was growing solely in water and nutrients. So I like to give a light dilute fertilizer to my seedlings before I put them out. Now, not every seedling. You don't have to do this, first of all, at all. But if you want a little boost or you're growing stuff that you've started indoors that you're going to be growing for one month, two months, especially in small containers, container plants like that need to be fed before they go outside. Otherwise they are really depleting that soil of whatever nutrients were even in there in the first place. So I would fertilize starting at about the two week mark and it's tempting to then come up with a schedule, which can work in, let's say a commercial nursery, but in a home garden, it's not that simple. One of the most common questions I get when it comes to seedlings is why is my seedling dying? And nine out of 10 times, it always has to do with watering. A lot of people are tempted to create a schedule where I'm going to go outside and water my seedlings every single day, but that can actually lead to more problems than it does actually benefit your seedlings. So now I'm going to actually tell you guys exactly when to water, how to know when to water and how to do it best. There are a couple of different tricks that you want to actually think about. First of all, you do not need to water every day. For example, today it's overcast. There hasn't been sun single time throughout the day and these seedlings are not taking up much water. Now, if it was a warm sunny day, of course, they will be drinking up a lot more water and you'll probably get close to watering every single day. So here's what you want to do. One of my favorite things to do is simply pick up your tray. Is it heavy? If it feels really, really heavy, you're probably overwatered. If it feels like it has a nice heft to it, it's probably fine. But if it feels like nothing, like it just flies right up when you pick it up, there's a good chance it's actually way too dry. One of the best ways to actually know when to water is to just look at the surface of your soil. If it is nice and dry on the surface, that means that the water has now actually dried up at the surface, but beneath it, if you pick it up, there's actually still some heft and that is a great time to actually water your plants. If the top looks very dark and wet like this, then they do not need water. It's really as simple as that. Instead of sticking to a schedule, use observation, play around, look at your seedlings and that will tell you more than anything else. Now, if your seedlings look yellow, it's probably because you overwatered severely and that's really hard to recover from. Too much water in the soil can lead to rot of the roots and also suffocation of those roots and those seedlings aren't going to bounce back. That's usually where most diseases like damping off that pinch the base of your seedling and then they flop over, come from. All of it has to do with watering. So just follow those simple tricks of weight and observation and you'll do just fine. Now, there's another thing that I like to suggest is if you have a mixed tray of seedlings like this, if some came up like these guys here, move them to a separate tray. They're going to need more water than the ones like this one here that haven't even germinated yet. So this might go a couple of days without water. Whereas this full tray of seedlings that has multiple seedlings in it are going to be using quite a bit of water and they will need water more regularly, but you don't need to water every single tray. Just split them up when you can. Now, if you have a lot of seedlings in a tray like this guy here versus this one, this is obviously going to take up a lot more water than this one. And you might think, isn't it a mistake to have that many seeds in a single tray? And actually it's a strategy. We've all been in this situation before. You've got a tray, in this case, one of our 16 cell trays. So I should see 16 seeds. I do not. I see about eight seeds. And that could be because you are believing in the myth of one seed, one hole. Now, sometimes that's true. Maybe a bean or a pea. I'm pretty confident that's going to germinate. So I'll just pop one in. But in many cases, it's a really good idea to plant at least two, sometimes three seeds in a hole if you want to guarantee that you get germination. And to understand that, it's actually relatively simple math. So all seeds have a germination percentage. Let's just keep it simple and say we're planting a hundred seeds of lettuce and those seeds have a 90% germination rate. So on average we should see about 90 of those seeds in a hundred cell tray germinate. Now what happens if I actually put two seeds in each hole? In that case, I will see 99 out of a hundred germinate. And that's how you sort of guarantee your germination rate by just adding one more seed. And quite frankly, let's be honest with ourselves. We all have some seeds to spare. I don't know about you, but my catalog is looking pretty thick these days. So there's one reason to do it. The other reason to do it is some plants actually are just more space efficient when multi-sown. So if you think about onions, or you think about beets or shallots or things like that, that you can just plant two, three, four in a hole and actually never even separate them and just sort of harvest them out of the garden as they size up. It's a really, really good idea to be more economical when it comes to the actual results you get out of your garden. Now some plants have more than one seed in a seed and these are the ones you hear that you can't transplant. So why is it a problem to transplant said root crops? Well, it's actually due to the fact that many of these plants, including sunflowers, radishes, all other root crops have a taproot. That is a primary root that is sent down into the soil. That is the majority of where the nutrients are coming into that plant. Other things like tomatoes have tons of branching roots. So it doesn't really matter if you even damage that root whatsoever. And the deal is, is like say a sunflower, if you were to transplant this and damage the taproot, it'll still grow. It just won't truly turn into the mammoth. If you want to grow that 12 foot tall sunflower, put this directly in ground. But if you're fine with growing a eight foot sunflower, it's totally fine to transplant them. Same deal with the root crops like beets and even carrots. If you really want it to, I'll get more on that later. The idea behind it is that as soon as they start to germinate and have enough leaves, put it out in your garden. Don't sit around and wait because all those taproots, the longer they sit, the bigger the chances that you're going to damage it during transplanting. And that's really the only thing you have to worry about. There's even other things like poppies, for example, that say you cannot do it. I've been doing it for years. It's totally fine. Just have to be a little bit more careful. So let's pop out into the garden and I'll show you exactly how to transplant something like that. Before me, you see a sea of carrots that I have growing in my raised bed. And a couple of reasons why you would want to transplant them is a, you usually want to grow a lot of carrots. If I were to transplant all those carrots, I'd be pretty tired of carrots by the end of the day. And also they have a more sensitive taproot. You're literally eating the entire elongated taproot. So any damage to that and you're going to end up with a little stubby carrot. So how do you actually transplant the other things like the beets that I mentioned? It's actually very simple. The only thing you have to do is not much at all. You don't want to mess with the soil ball whatsoever because that's where the taproot is. So you want to do is just pull open a little pocket in your soil here, pop it in, and then he'll back up around it. That's it. By doing that, you're not really having any chance to disturb that taproot and it'll grow just fine like that. One of the myths that I believed for probably the first few years of gardening was that you have to be like a surgeon here in your seedling setup where you sterilize everything. Sterilize the tray, sterilize the bottom tray, sterilize the soil, put the soil in the microwave. I've seen people do that. And the logic makes sense to a degree, right? You want to avoid some of these fungal diseases, some of these pathogens that can kind of creep along the surface of the soil. Those little spidery tendrils that are the bane of everyone who starts their seeds or something called damping off where you'll get this little bean seed right here will get very, very weak right at that stem point where it goes into the soil and just kind of fall over. That's depressing. That's definitely sad. But to me it doesn't make a lot of sense to keep a perfectly sterile environment, which let's be honest, none of us are getting close to that in our home gardens. And then bring these seedlings out in two, three, four weeks and plop them into the ground or into a raised bed setup where we're trying to cultivate the exact opposite, which is a highly biodiverse, highly bioactive soil, you know, a diverse ecosystem above. You've got birds landing, you've got bugs all over the place. It doesn't make a ton of sense. So what we prefer to do is actually have a seedling mix or a DIY mix that is bioactive already. We've got some worm castings going on in there. We've got a little fertilizer. We're sort of cultivating some life in there already and saying, instead of keeping it sterile and then deleting the one or two pathogens that might show up, let's just have a lot of life in this system so that they have more things to compete with. Right? It kind of reminds me of that movie Bubble Boy, right? If you're in a bubble your whole life, then you walk outside, you just get dominated by like the first disease that comes by versus if you're running around, you're taking some scrapes, you're in the playground, you're eating a little bit of dirt. Your system is just simply more robust. And that is kind of what we're looking for with our seedlings. So don't freak out about sterilizing everything. You can do it if you want, but we don't here at Epic Gardening. If you have stunted seedlings, check this video out. We solve that problem for you as well. If you want to mess around with some of our seeds, go to botanicalinterest.com. Some of our trays and seed starting equipment, shop.epicgardening.com. Good luck in the garden. And keep on growing.