Seedy Tips

Today was a lovely warm sunny spring day, so I took the opportunity to get some more of this year’s garden seeds started. I planted cucumber, zucchini, and winter squash seeds. I thought I might share a few tips on starting seedlings that I’ve picked up or worked out over the years:

1. Recycled plastic food containers make great seed-starting pots. I find large yoghurt containers perfect for tomatoes (punch holes in the bottoms for drainage), and these mushroom trays work well too, especially the ones that aren’t recyclable.

Cut the corners off the container with scissors for drainage.

2. Always, always, always mark your pots. “I’ll remember” has never been true for me. If I’m only planting one variety, then I just mark the type of plant – the details of the variety I write down in my gardening log book.

The tomatoes are all in yoghurt pots, so I’ve just marked the first letter of the variety, in this case “F” for “Federle”. You can see where I crossed out whatever was previously written on this particular yoghurt container. Re-use, and then recycle!

3. I like to plant 2 or 3 seeds per pot to make sure I get at least 1 viable transplant in each pot. Last year I did an experiment: I used to plant three seeds per pot, and then at transplant time I would separate the seedlings for planting.

Last year I did this for half the tomato seedlings, and the other half I planted the whole pot of three seedlings together, cutting off the smallest, weakest plant at transplant time, and then going back and cutting off the next smallest a week or so later. My theory was that the decaying roots of the newly decapitated seedling would give the other seedings a nutritional boost to help mitigate the “transplant shock” – which in my experience means that the plants stop growing for a week or two while they adapt to their new environment. The tomatoes I treated this way grew significantly larger and faster than the ones I separated for planting. So I’ll be doing all the tomatoes, as well as the bell peppers and squashes that way this year. It may seem like a “waste” of seeds, but since it takes me two or three years to use all the seeds in a packet, and I save seeds from many of my plants, I think it’s a worthwhile trade off.

4. Beyond the seed rack, on the kitchen counter is a fan. For a couple of hours every afternoon I take the plastic cover off the greenhouse and turn on the fan.

It serves two purposes, first to get air circulating around all the seedlings to help prevent a fungal disease called “damping off”, and secondly the “fake wind” encourages the seedlings to grow sturdy and strong rather than spindly and leggy.  They lean toward the window every day, and I turn the flats 180° at the same time that I switch the fan on so that they grow more evenly.