Hey guys! It's Brijette and today on the Kellogg Garden YouTube channel I'm going to show you
a little bit about how we do fall seed starting here in Southern California. So, we are already starting
all of our fall seed crops which..bam! These are our cool-season crops that we start for zone
9 and 10. Now, if you're not in zone 9 and 10 these are still cool season crops but you might
want to start them a little bit earlier or at a different date depending on your zone.
For us here in zone 9 and 10 we're starting these now and it's the appropriate time to start your
broccoli, your cabbage, your cauliflower, all of your dark leafy greens, your beets, your radishes,
even your lettuce. I'm going to wait a few more weeks until it cools off a bit, but
you definitely can start them now. Now, I know it's really hot and it sounds crazy to start your cool
season stuff, but let's think about the time of year that we are in. We are in the fall, we are in a
transition period, so the days are getting shorter, the nights are getting cooler, and the overall
temperature is coming down. So, you want to start your crops now, to get them to a big enough size
so that when we're nice and cool they can go into the garden and really thrive. If you wait until
November or December to start your cool season seeds, it's really too late for Southern California
because our cool season is so short. So, let's take a look at everything that we have here. We have all
kinds of stuff. We have different lettuces,
we have tons of broccoli, we've got bok choy, we've got some flowers that we've planted, more cabbages,
and these have all sprouted just in the last couple of days.
And, we have them planted on the Northside of our house underneath the beautiful dappled shade of a
Jacaranda tree and we do that because even though we have a greenhouse, it is way too
hot in there to start these seeds right now. So, what I'll do is I'll have them on the Northside
of my house. I will baby them, and baby them, and baby them, but it will be well worth it.
They're going to grow to be gorgeous plants that I'm going to put into the garden and you can see
here these guys are pretty small, but this is actually, a really good time to start thinning.
I know it's terrible and it's really hard, but you really only want one. This is a bok choy and
I really only want one bok choy for this size of a pot. It really can't handle more than one.
So, at this stage, they're very little and this is just their cotyledon so they don't even have
their first set of true leaves. Once they do, I will fertilize them. We really like to use the Kellogg Garden's
Fish Emulsion and we actually dilute it by about 50% and we feed that to them every time
we water. They grow big, strong, healthy, they grow very quickly, so we can get them in the
garden during our cool season. You really see them thrive so that's what I recommend for these guys.
Now, we've got these started underneath the Jacaranda tree. Which gets nice dappled
light, but it can cause them to get a little bit leggy. As soon as you notice your
starts getting laggy and really reaching for the sun. That is a signal to you that they need
more sunlight. So, what I do is I watch these closely. As soon as they start getting leggy
I actually, just move this whole table a little bit further down out of the Jacaranda shade, so that
they get more sunlight. If you're starting them inside, you need to use a grow light. They're very
inexpensive and a big tip that you need to know, that people often get wrong, is they'll hang
the grow light way too far away from the plant. You want it literally hovering just inches above your
plant so it grows really big and robust. Remember sunlight is how these grow through photosynthesis,
so we want to make sure they get as much as they possibly can. So, if you haven't started
your fall crops make sure you do. I know it's hard to always have a fall or a winter garden because
you've spent all summer gardening, but I promise you it's worth it and you get so many delicious
leafy greens out of your fall and winter garden. So, make sure you start seeds now you won't regret it.