Hey again, it's Jason from Fraser Valley Rose Farm.
Behind me is my seeding setup for the spring of 2019.
I've just borrowed a corner of a room in the house with some windows in it, so I have a
little bit of light.
I've supplemented that with some LED lighting.
The topic at hand today, the one I want to show you is how to grow lavender from seed.
You can take cuttings from lavender.
That's another way to go.
But it does take them some time to root, and it can be quite economical to do lavender
from seed.
You can get a packet of seeds with 100 or 200 in it, put them into trays like these
and get pots and pots of finished lavender later on in the spring and summer.
The tray I'm working with here comes to me just as this plastic frame empty.
What I do is fill it up with seedling soil.
The soil I use is just a peat-based mix with a little bit of perlite in it for good drainage.
It doesn't have any fertilizer in it, so it's starting out nutrient-free.
I loose fill it like this here.
A few thing I'd like you to know about lavender seeding: lavender seeds are quite small compared
to some of the other annual seeds you would start in the year, the second thing is that
they require no pre-treatment in terms of cold stratification.
The third thing I'll say is that they require light to germinate.
All that information is something you should Google for any seed that you start.
Aside from the annual flowers or annual vegetables, which all have roughly the same requirements.
For perennials, trees and shrubs I recommend you do a Google search and check out their
stratification requirements - which just means whether you give them a cold pre-treatment
and check for their light requirements as they try to germinate.
Let me show these seeds and how small they are, and then I'll give you some tips on how
to handle them.
Alright, just to give you some idea of the scale, I've put a pencil in behind the dish
there and you can see the size of the lavender seeds.
Probably at the very most, they're about a millimeter around so it makes them a bit tricky
for handling.
With seeds this size it can be difficult to get just a single seed per cell in the plug
tray, so what I'll do to give myself a little bit of guidance on that is to dibble.
Here I'm just using the eraser end of a pencil to just push in by probably 3 or 4 millimeters.
It's not very deep.
All that does for me is just gives me a little target in the center of the cell to aim the
seeds at when I'm dropping them.
Some people will use other gadgets to help them drop one seed per cell if they're having
difficulty with small seeds like this.
With some practice, I've found that the easiest way for me is to just grab some between my
thumb and forefinger and roll them around until I feel one drop into each cell.
If I do manage to drop two or more, it works like some insurance: if one doesn't germinate,
then another one will.
So I don't get worked up about it at all.
If I do end up with a lot excess in a cell, I'll go back and prick some out and and move
them to another cell or into a larger pot later on.
Let me show you a plug tray I started probably about two weeks ago or maybe a little less
than two weeks ago, and it already has some seedlings coming up.
In this tray you can see that the seedlings are coming up now.
I've probably dropped more than 3 or 4 seeds in some of these.
As I said, I'm not going to get too worked up about it.
They're well on their way.
Those are just the seed-leaves, but they'll soon have true leaves on them and I'm going
to let them root out in the plug tray just like this until they're well rooted, and then
I'll divide some of those and get thin into 9cm (4inch) pots for sale.
I anticipate them to be ready for this summer or maybe I'll hold them over one winter and
sell them next spring -in the spring of 2020.
Alright, that's how far I've gotten on my lavender so far this season.
I may do a little update or at least post some pictures later on when I get to the stage
when I'm going to transplant those into 9cm pots or when I have the finished crops of
lavender.
In any case, thank you so much for watching today, and if you have any questions about
this seeding or any other seeding or propagation in general please leave those below the video
and I'll see what I can do to help.