How to Start Seeds, the Gardenfork Way

Gardenfork

Seed Starting

www.gardenfork.tv

Eric: Today, we are going to talk about starting your seeds in trays. So it is a seed starting episode. Anyway, back to starting seeds

Female: Back to starting seeds, Miji. All right, pay attention.

Eric: You need a couple of things. You need a grow light, which we talked about how to build a grow light. You could put this in the window but I just do not see that windows work very well because the plants get really leggy because they are trying to get to the sunlight. I start everything in what I call seed starting trays. So this is your typical seed starting tray. What I like about this, this is a self watering tray. It has this water thing. The water goes in here. This wicking material here wicks the water up from the tray then this goes on top. The soil goes in here and then right down here, all the moisture wicks up from inside these holes.

So, it is self watering. It is really nice. Also what I like is, you can put a little clear plastic top on it that keeps the humidity level nice and moist for seeds to start.

You can get a regular---Mark bit them--- this would be how Ken Drews do it. Ken Drews has those really nice books about wild flower gardens and really nice photography in there. So, hello Ken if you are watching. You cannot use regular potting soil to start seeds. Just do not even try it because regular potting soil gets all crusty on the top. So if you put seeds underneath, they cannot poke through to grow. You want something called seed starting mix, anything that says seed starting. You can buy this stuff premade, or you can make your own.

I like to make my own. This is basically peat moss with some growth helper stuff in it. This is called shredded coconut fiber. And I think they call it quire or coir.

Female: They make rugs out that.

Eric: Yes, it is a fiber from the coconut shell and you can buy it in a compressed little brick and of course, I could not find any of them. I think we used them all.

Female: You bring chaos.

Eric: You take the coir fiber. It is just like peat moss. The thing that I do not like about peat moss is I do not know everything about peat moss and I do not want the peat moss council to come after me. But it is not really a renewable resource. They are digging up these peat bogs so you can have little plants growing. And if you could use a renewable resource, coconut hulls, there is so much stuff you can do with those. You can eat the coconut inside, the fruit part or the meat, the coconut meat.

Anyway, you take these coir bricks and you stick it in the warm water, and they become this great seed starting material here.

Female: It is very dark.

Eric: Yes, it is nice. And what I do is I mix this with some vermiculite, and some perlite. Vermiculite is some kind of mineral that has been heated up. It is a volcanic rock I think that has been heated up. It does not say in here what it is.

Female: Could you bring up the Google?

Eric: I did not do all my research. But this is a stuff that they use. See this, what this does, is it absorbs a little bit of moisture and it also provides air for the roots to go. You do not want compact soil. So we take this, and we put it in there. What you also want is this stuff called perlite, and I forgot to buy some. But perlite, looks like this. It looks like little pieces of Styrofoam. It gives a lightness to the soil. It allows air and water to percolate through and it keeps your seed starting mix from crusting.

Female: Crusting.

Eric: From crusting, on the web, I will post the kind of mixture you can use. But there is a bunch of places that give their idea of a seed starting mix but I would avoid a lot of fertilizer. I would avoid almost any fertilizer at all in a seed starting mix.

So what you do is you take your coir after it has been uncompressed, and you mix up all the stuff. Use your fingers, the coir sometimes; you have to break it up a little bit. So then I take our seed starting mix.

Female: For shot.

Eric: If you do this in your house, you might want to put some newspapers down. Do not pack it down too tight but you want to tap it down a little bit.

Female: Set me free! So you fill it right to the top.

Eric: Yes, you just go like this. So, we have some parsley here. This is a flat leaf parsley.

Female: You love parsley?

Eric: I love parsley.

Female: Is it good for you?

Eric: Yes! It is good for your breath so I need it.

Female: Your what!

Eric: Breath! I like to use these little tweezers. This is really handy. I got these at.

Female: Much like a fork--

Eric: I bought this at like a flea market. These guys that sell army surplus stuff or something. Let us just make a little hole, and you could just tap a couple in there. You just drop them in. and just cover it up. You do not want to pack it in like a bus but you can just put a couple of inch. You could put one on one corner, one on the other corner.

Female: It is how we do it.

Eric: It depends on how much of a control person you are. You are going to be planting a lot of stuff, and you are going to forget because I forget all the time so I use some of this blue tape.

Female: Oh, look I see some blue tape from last year, right there.

Eric: I tape this.

Female: Is that pink tape?

Eric: It is a tape we use for when you are painting, your trim off stuff. So to peel off later, it is a sharpy okay? No, do not eat the sharpy.

Female: Yes, if you eat the sharpies, I am a modern man.

Eric: So you could just mark and here, we have parsley. They are whining in there.

Female: That is nice.

Eric: So there you go. You fill the bottom tray.

Female: Excuse me; you are supposed to put the date on there too.

Eric: The date, oh, yes!

Female: It is not 3/20, it is 3/11.

Eric: Oh, sorry. There. Put the little top on. Put it under your grow lights.

Female: Where are the grow lights?

Eric: They are going to be where the laundry counter is right now. I did not tell you about that. And there you go. I mean I really like this self watering thing. You can do the watering thing if you want.

Female: What is that?

Eric: These are some of the beer cans that we found in the backyard when we had to dig a new waterline from the spring. And so, we dug through an old trash pile. So it was kind of neat so we pulled out Schafer, Heidelberg, Ballantine, Black Label or the guy who built this house, Mike really like Black Label so. I like Schafer. Schafer is a good beer.

Female: Okay.

Eric: You are going to alienate it.

Female: All the viewers.

Eric: All the guys that drink wine. All right so, but this is really nice. It is self contained. It is self watering. In that way, I can forget to water and it is fine. These will start to grow when they start to get too high, you take the cover off, and let them go. These are cow pots and I do not know if you saw on Discovery Channel, they have a show called dirty jobs. And they have featured our neighbors the Freund Farm. And these pots are made out of basically dehydrated cow manure and it was a really neat episode.

Female: And they call poo pots?

Eric: They like to call them cow pots. We call them poo pots.

Female: It is not cow pots.

Eric: Yes because I am full type. But you know how you have, you can buy peat pots. There is this compressed peat. Again, that is a non-renewable resource. And this is a really used cow manure.

Female: This is a very renewable resource.

Eric: This is a very renewable and recurring resource. You can start with these and they work really well because there are a lot of plants like cucumbers have a problem with root shock. When you are transplanting them, they do not like their roots disturbed. So you can grow in a cow pot like this and then when you plant it in the ground, this stuff starts to break down.

Female: So you do not really transplant it at all.

Eric: You kind of just throw this in the ground. So it is a transplant but you put the whole pot on the ground. What you want to do is any part of a peat pot or a cow pot that is above the ground, you want to break it off. So that none of this is jutting above the ground. Because what it does, is it acts as a wick. And it wicks away moisture