Seed Starting | Everything you need to know | Full Video Peppers, Tomatoes, Heirloom Reviews

Hey buddy, we're going to do a video here on setting up your seed trays for seed starting. We're going to talk a little bit about the soil mixtures, how to mix the soil, how to prep the soil, how to, you know, the types of trays that you have access to, which, you know, kind of trays you want to use. And basically going from this stage to, you know, basically, you know, if you see over here, where is it, right down there, you can see that most of those are already started. And of course, you know, I have all the other ones already started to get potted up here. So what we're trying to do here is really try to clear the air on how to properly start your seed trays. Now this isn't a comprehensive video, but it's going to get you in the right direction. Now I've made a lot of mistakes in the past and I still do it even till today. I mean, there's times I just don't prepare the seed trays the correct way and I'm just in a hurry. And as a result of that, I mean, I make mistakes and I end up getting all the dampening off. I'll have to plant my seeds sometimes three or four times just because I didn't want to go through the trouble of preparing the soil and sterilizing the soil correctly for me to get ready for starting seeds. So let's start with the type of trays, for example. These are the type of trays I like to use. You can use, you know, they're basically just the normal. I think these are, I don't know what these are, maybe 12 by 24 trays. They're just standard trays, right? So you get your little things here. I like to use the big ones. And the reason why is, is I'll plant four seeds in here of the same variety in each cube and each cube will contain four seeds. Sometimes I do a whole cube, you know, a whole cell for one variety, but most of the time it's one variety per cube. And the reason why I do that is I get at least four plants coming up to make sure that I'm getting the right variety. They sprout and everything else. So that's how I do it with the tray. So I like these bigger ones and the plants can get quite large inside these, these larger cells. They can get quite large before you have to transplant them. Being I'm so active most of the time, I really don't need to go this large. I can go with the smaller trays, you know, like this, for example, and just plant one seed per tray. But I like to do four seeds per cube. And the main reason for that is, is I have to make up tags for every single one of those. And that's a lot of tags. That's literally thousands of tags by the end of the sprouting season part, part of the season. So I have to do thousands of these tags to eliminate over excessive making those tags. I put one tag per cube per variety. It's easy for me. I don't need millions of those tags. And even yet with all of that, I end up consuming probably six to 700 tags that I have to make by the time I'm done with the seed sprouting part of the season. So these are the ones I like to use. I like to put four seeds in there and we are done. Okay, so that covers the basic trays. Yes, you can use these kind or you can use these. Some people go with other types. There's all kinds of systems out there. This is just the way I like to do it. Now, as you can see here, these are already started with seeds. Now, in general, when it comes to the soil, which we're going to talk about now, when it comes to the soil in general, I would tell you to sift the soil and take out all the larger pieces of detritus, like stuff like this. You want to get all these big branches and stuff out of there. And so this is basically a combination of my soil. Where would you be? Maybe right there somewhere. I'm not sure. There's a big pile in the back. That soil is a combination of like all ponding soil, a little bit of leftover soil from last year. It's a mixture of all kinds of debris that I've been breaking down throughout the winter, through the last year roughly. Normally, I would say let it sit for another year, let it break down more, but it's fine. I re-energize that soil by adding rock dust to it and everything else. So I use that as my compost mix. Then I do what's known as a Mel's mix. Even for seed starting seeds, it's a great mix. It works fantastic. Basically, a Mel's mix is one third peat moss, one third compost, or like you've seen the stuff over there, one third of that, and one third perlite. This is the perlite that I use. I'll leave links to the stuff in the description where you can pick it up. I buy these four cubic foot bags because I make so much soil that it's literally ridiculous. One little bag of perlite is not enough for me. I like to use Mel mixes in my self-wicking containers and so on and so on. That's basically the mix that I use for planting as well as for seed starting. The only difference really is with seed starting and my planting soils is you can, if you want to do this with all of your potted plants and all your wicking container plants, you can literally sterilize all your soil. It's just a lot of work. You could see that pile right there. Zoom in on that one. Right there. You see the size of that pile? Guys, there's no way I'm going to sterilize that much soil to fill every one of my containers. It's just absolutely ridiculous. Basically, what I do is I'll make my Mel's mix first. One part peat moss, one part perlite, and one part compost. I'll make that up first. With seed starting specifically, I will sift it out or oftentimes I won't sift it, but I'll go through it with my fingers as I'm filling these trays. I'll pull all the bigger parts of detritus out of there. Basically, what I do is once I get it all mixed, I put that into a container like this. I'll give you the size of these pans in the description. Again, I don't know. Remember what size pans these are, but you have to use these size pans to fit in your oven. If you use anything bigger, it's not going to work out correctly. Basically, one pan, you see right here, one full pan of this will do four cells worth of soil. You need two pans per tray. That goes for whether you're using the smaller cells or the bigger cells. It doesn't matter. In general, it's going to use one pan roughly per half a tray. You need two pans per tray. What I basically do is I bake my soil in the oven because you're going to need to bake that. You want to take your pan like you got here. You want to take that pan and then you basically want to cover it with foil. You want to bake that soil in the oven. I bake my soil. Now, I've read a lot of things online about sterilizing your soil in the oven. I've tried the boiled water method. I've tried the microwave method. Guys, nothing really works 100% for me except for the way I'm about to tell you that I do it. I bake my soil right here. I bake that at about 400 degrees, give and take a little bit, for anywhere between 40 minutes to two hours. I've left this soil in the oven one time for three or four hours. It doesn't burn it, but it will cook it. Your house is going to smell like soil. It doesn't smell bad, but you are definitely going to sterilize the life out of that soil. Nothing's going to be in there. You're not going to have any fungus gnats. You're not going to have any fungus. You're not going to have anything alive out of that soil at all. It's going to be completely and utterly sterile. You will not experience dampening off. Now, with that said, that's how I do it. Now, what's recommended online is that they say no more than 200 degrees for 40 minutes or else the soil starts releasing toxins. I tried to look that up and down everywhere, all over the internet. I can't find out where this source of information come from. Basically, what they're saying is if you cook it at higher temperatures for longer periods of time, the soil can become poisonous or toxic. The fertilizers in the soil, those will start to leach out and become very poisonous or toxic. I don't know where they're getting this information from, number one. Number two, most of us are not cooking our soils with fertilizers in it. If you're buying Miracle-Gro fertilizer, pre-fertilized with those little fertilizer balls and stuff in there, most of that soil that you get from the big box stores, that's already been depleted. That's already old soil, just so you know. That soil, after a year or so, it gets recalled from the big box store, then sent back to the, I don't know, the Miracle-Gro yard where they store everything. They open up the bags and they pile it all up and then they revitalize it and then they repackage it and sell it to you as a lower grade soil and so on and so on and so on. I don't find any information online about baking soil and becoming toxic and poisonous. I don't know what to tell you. If you have information on that, feel free to share it with me or put it in a link in the description and show me where the source is from that because I can't find anything on it. So from my experience in general is, if you're baking soil and it's producing poisons, maybe you shouldn't be using that soil to grow your plants in, period. When I bake my soil, only thing I'm baking is compost and perlite and, what do you call it, peat moss. That's it. That's all I'm baking. I'm not baking cakes or anything else here. So I'm just a little confused as to why people say that. Now, I have done the 200 degrees for 40 minutes or 35 minutes. I have done that and I still had fungus gnats actually survive that. I've also had other, you know, seeds that get into that mix actually survive that bake. It's just not hot enough, guys. I bake my soil, like I told you, at 400 degrees for anywhere between 45 minutes to 2 to 3 hours long per bake. I can fit four trays in my oven and let them bake for a long time. I go about doing it. It's not going to catch on fire or anything, but yeah, you do got to keep your mind on it. Also, if you have a timer, you might be able to set up a timer for an hour. I would say not less than an hour, but not too much more than two hours, right? But I have baked my soil for three, four hours. It's fine. You can see all my plants are sprouting. I don't know what they're talking about, toxins or poisons or whatever. So that's what I've been doing. I've been doing it that way for years. I've done it with lower temperatures and stuff still seems to sprout and sometimes insects and other things still manage to get past that 200 degrees for 30 minutes thing. It doesn't always stir. I need that soil. I spend hundreds upon hundreds of dollars a year in seed. I need that soil to absolutely be 100% sterile. I don't want no myosilin in there. I don't want no myomycetes that are surviving in there. I don't want anything biological, bacteria, viruses, nothing. I want that soil 100% sterile. As a result of me doing that, I eliminate at least 70% of potential problems with my tomato varieties because it sterilizes the soil and the trays and everything else. So I'm kind of rambling on that a little bit, but I really want to emphasize the fact that this is the most important part of your entire garden season because it's your foundation. If this isn't right, the rest of your garden season is not going to be right. A lot of the diseases that are acquired into your tomato varieties and your pepper varieties, they start right out the gate with bad starting soil and they get sick early and they carry that sickness on throughout the life of the plant. If you at least start with a good start here, your plants will get a good jumpstart before they eventually start picking up something from the garden or the other soil that you're planting in, but it'll have a good jumpstart and the plant will be able to outpace whatever blight or diseases are in the garden. So this is absolutely imperative that you sterilize your seed starting mix. Okay, so now that we have the soil part figured out, we told you about sterilizing, now we're going to talk about sterilizing. Before you fill these up with soil and you sterilize, as your soil is baking, you need to take your soil here, I mean your seed trays, you need to take all these trays and everything and you need to soak them in bleach water. Now, I make a pretty strong level of bleach, so when you pull your hand out, it's feeling slimy and slicky. I don't care. I want a really strong concentration of bleach and I'm going to soak all my seed starting trays in there. I put in a five-gallon bucket, I'll put in two, four, six, I'll put eight of these cubes in there and I'll soak them in there for about two or three minutes, let them sit and soak in there. You don't have to wash them off clean or nothing. Just soak them in there, let them get really bleached up and then pour a little bleach water in here, rub it around your shirt. Yes, you literally have to do this if you want a really good success with your plants without them getting sick right out the gate. So, you need to sterilize these as well and once you do that and everything is totally sterilized, your trays are sterilized, your soil is sterilized, all your tags are sterilized, all my little, you know, my number everything's got to get sterilized 100%. Either it's going to go into bleach water or it's going to go into soil. Now, when I bleach water my trays, I don't dry them off. I just bleach them up, I put them back in here while they still got bleach on them and I don't care. Oh my god, the bleach is going to, it's toxic, it's going to heal. It's not that toxic. Bleach is actually a tertiary element that should be in soil for plants that actually benefit from a little bit of bleach. It's actually a nutrient. So, it's not as toxic as you think, number one. Number two, it doesn't have a residual effect. It basically evaporates and it doesn't turn into a concentration. So, you're not putting that much bleach on this thing where you're going to have to worry about bleaching yourself to disease or whatever. So, but you have to do that in order to sterilize absolutely everything. Once we get to that point and everything's sterilized, then basically from that point, you want to take this soil and you want to hydrate it with the hose. This is not pre-hydrated yet. I'm just showing, I'm just showing you now, you know, what the, what the trays look like. So, before I rate it, but you, you want to kind of give it a, you know, a once over with the hose, let it all settle down. Once you're done with that, then you're ready to start, you know, poking your holes in here. Like I told you, I make four holes, you know, inside of each cell and I put four seeds in there. Sometimes I'll put five seeds, sometimes I actually do six seeds if I have enough of them and I just, I'm just doing germ tests. Most of the times I do my germ tests this way. I prefer to do my germ tests like this rather than putting them inside of a container or a plate with a, with a towel on it and wet it up and see if they, yeah, that, that does give you a quick to see if you're going to get a foot comes out of the seed. But sometimes I want to see the seed develop and, and so on and so on. So this is the way I like to do it because this is as close to a natural way of spotting the seeds going to be. And that's basically it guys. The most important thing to keep in mind here is for a good potting mix, you want to use the Mel's mix, which is a one third, one third and one third. And you want to make sure that you bake and sterilize your soil and you want to make sure that you're, you're definitely sterilizing these trays. Once you're done with that, let me just pull you off of here. Once you, once you just did everything I said, you're going to be to this point here and you can see that these are all ready to go. Some of them are popping. You can see a lot of stuff popped already. These are all planted at different times. Some of them were still waiting, but this is everything here has been sterilized. And I want to point something out here. That's very important too. Even though I sterilized all these plants, all these trays and everything, you still might see a little bit of burning on the edges of the leaves. On some, some, some of the plants, you might see some spots. That's not right there. You see that? That's not blight guys. What you're seeing right there. That's not blight. This is, the soil has been sterilized. That's actually a result of me actually over watering. Okay. I try to keep these trays moist to the point where they're not, if you, if you don't water these enough and the sun comes out, it'll literally burn all your plants, right? You'll come out here, all your plants will be wilted and burned off. I've done it many times. You're better off slightly over-watering than it is under-watering. If you at least go over under water, you're not doing a lot of watering. You're just doing a light spray to keep the surface wet and make sure that the surface below, you're not soaking it every time you water it, just a light spray and you're done. Even with doing that, you're still going to see, if you look here, you see like there's little burnings on the edges of the leaves. Some of that is just simply due that the sun is burning the edges of the leaves a little bit from from the water because I watered this throughout the day. A lot of that is also due from just over-watering, to be honest with you, because the soil down below is a lot wetter than the surface. I just don't want my plants to burn off. So yeah, you will get that from from spraying. However, the plants will quickly recover from that. You won't see that anymore. That is not blight. That is not disease. That's not what you're seeing right here. So if you see that, don't worry about it. You sterilize your soil correctly. It's not that it's getting blight. What it's getting is too much water and that will do that effect. It won't kill the plants, but it'll just cause some problems. You're better off having a little extra water than under-watering and then coming out here and then seeing everything you have here laying flat and dry up because it got cooked from the sun. The other thing I want to point out too, before I end this video, is that I like to start my plants, like you see here, in direct sunlight. I start them directly in sunlight. That way, I don't have to worry about dampening anything off. It's literally started in sunlight and it's going to thrive a lot better than like this, for example. These were all started indoors and these probably won't start coming in and dampening off. I mean, they won't start coming into, you know, growing larger and coming strong enough for me to start bringing them out into sunlight for several months. That will sit there like that for several months. These are ready. These are done. These are ready for outdoor planting and everything else. So I like to start my plants in direct sunlight, but again, if you're not experienced doing that, be careful doing it. I recommend doing all your seed trays under a greenhouse that has like a film, a sunshade cloth over it so it protects it and slowly build its exposure to sunlight as the plants get larger. If you're not experienced with doing that, maybe it's not the best thing to start it in direct sunlight. However, that is the way I do it and I never have to worry about hardening anything off. Boom! Once you see it where it is, it goes right in the ground and we're rock and roll. We get stuff done real quick around here and the reason why that is, is because of the way I do it by starting everything in direct sunlight. Sometimes, yeah, sometimes the sun could be a little stronger than you want and it can literally burn your plants. Even the way I do it, still fry your plants. However, if your plants survive being started directly in sunlight, they're usually the most hardiest and strongest you're going to get. They'll fight diseases much better. They're much more resistant towards all kinds of other stuff and the plants become extraordinarily vigorous and that applies to tomatoes and peppers. And just so you know, in general, when I tell you to start this mix, you can use it for any kind of seed, but generally speaking, the main stuff I use all of this sterilized soil and it's mainly for tomatoes and peppers. Those are the only things. I don't waste my time sterilizing soil for stuff like this. You see stuff like this? These are melons and cucumbers. That's wheat over there, I think. This is blue wheat, by the way. Some kind of blue wheat. I got that from Baker Creek. I figured I'd try that this year and see what it looks like. So I got some interest, but I didn't sterilize this tray and the main reason why is you don't need to do that with this. The only thing you want to sterilize your soil for is for your tomatoes and peppers. Don't waste your time with this stuff. These plants are extraordinarily hardy. This soil is... I don't even know if I mixed that with... This is just straight. I just took handfuls of that stuff, stuffed it in here. Yeah, I see perlite in here, but there's also perlite in that pile. I just basically took that and stuffed it in there and planted that and that's good. But all this other stuff, this is all tomatoes and peppers. Those you absolutely utterly have to sterilize. And then your final stage before you go into either bigger pots or in the ground is you're going to want to put them into these cups. Now I recommend these cups. You know, you take your stack of cups like this and you just take a long drill bit and you drill down the center of it all the way down and you drill that hole out and you fill those with soil and you're good. Now the cups, yeah, you want to make sure that they're sterilized if you use them year in and year out. So you want to make sure they're sterilized and everything still applies. The only time you generally stop sterilizing and cleaning things is when you actually go into the ground. All the way up to this stage, you still want to keep things sterile, believe it or not, as much as you can. The cups especially. You don't want to take chances with that. Now as far as the cups go, how many years do they last? These cups I've had for about four years, four seasons, this particular batch of cups. And they'll last you roughly about that long, four years. And eventually what happens is they just start cracking and breaking and falling apart. They don't last forever, guys. They last for about four years. You might be able to get five years out of them if you're careful. But eventually they just start falling apart and crushing and breaking up and everything else. So yeah, just keep that in mind with using these cups. They don't last forever. That's the same thing with these trays. These trays, most of the stuff you're going to get on Amazon, they're very thin, very crappy type material. It's very junky. But yet there are some companies out there that make these where they're a lot thicker and you can get as long as 10 years out of that easy. It's the same thing with these trays. So I do have, some of my trays are really old and they're getting ready for the garbage, but I still use them because I need that many trays. But when I go to replace them, I'm going to the thicker, more coarse, heavier, dirty, duty plastic versions of it, as well as the same thing with these. These are a lot cheaper. You'll get them for probably a quarter at a less price on Amazon, but you pay for it in the end because these are, if you get the real thin ones, they're only going to last you like one or two or three seasons. And then after that, they're all, you know, they're ripping apart basically. You can see how these things fall apart and they rip. They're too thin. Some of these I have are really thick. This is like, this one right here is very thick. And you could see this one here is very thick and sturdy. It's very strong. Spend the extra money and buy the right stuff. Make sure you read the comments for people who are complaining about them real, real thin and ripping and coming apart. That's what you really want to look out for. And as far as the tags go, last but not least, I got a beam, I think. But last but not least, these tags, basically what I do is I take, I go to the store, I'll buy a blind for $5. You know, like a window blind. I'll buy a window blind, those plastic ones you see in Home Depot or Lowe's or whatever for $5 and I'll buy it and I'll cut the ropes on them and I'll pull the slats out of them or I'll, or oftentimes what I'll do is I can replace the blinds in my house anyway. So I just buy the blind new, replace the blind with the new one and I take the old one, cut that one up and then just cut it into strips like this. And I use this for my tags and I use a permanent marker for the ink and that's good enough. And then of course, you know, I tag everything because that I don't want to make mistakes with. So everything gets tagged. This is basically thick aluminum. This is just wire and I tag my plants and that way I know for sure everything I'm getting. So basically that's it guys. If you have any questions as to, you know, anything else on what I just explained here, if you didn't really understand something, just comment below, I'll do the best I can answer that question. But if you have any input as well for yourself, like you, what's the system that you guys use? I mean, what do you use to sterilize your soil? Am I overdoing it, underdoing it? I mean, you tell me, this is what I've been doing for quite a while. And for me, this is really the only thing that really works. Everything else for me hasn't really worked. I've had nothing but problems no matter what. If I do it the way I just explained to you, I have a, I have a 90% great start and most of my plants not only survive the whole blight, early blight season, but they thrive. So that's still for me, it's imperative. But yeah, feel free to share your experience and how you do things. And, um, I'm really curious as to, uh, you know, what you do and, uh, and everything else. So, uh, yeah, that's it guys. So that's it for this video. I'll have another video soon. I have been really, really busy. I haven't had time to make videos lately, but I'll have some more videos coming out soon about some other stuff. We'll do some more tomato reviews this year. And, uh, hopefully from there, um, I'll be able to, you know, make some more videos about gardening and, you know, what's going on around the, uh, the farm here. So anyway, guys, thanks for watching. Don't forget to like, share and subscribe, and I will see you on the next one. Take care.