- So this is where I pick up your fascinating comments.
Please keep them coming.
I like the interaction and on my screen,
I was looking at some a while back
and saw this one from Barry and he says,
"I purchased some CD60 trays last year
and had some success.
I need advice on how to get the most benefit
and what crops do well in them.
It still seems wrong to be growing in so little compost."
And that last sentence of his
is what really piqued my interest and thought,
yeah, this would be a great subject matter to show
'cause I feel that very often people are using more compost
than is needed and that can lead to its own problems
of like water logging when seedlings are very small.
So I'm going to show you now in the greenhouse
how I recommend using particularly my trays,
which I've designed to have that small amount of compost,
big saving in compost and how to push the compost in,
and then how to sow and prick out into them very briefly.
And which vegetables do best for starting in them.
(tranquil music)
So I'm coming to propagation HQ
at Homeacres and it's my greenhouse, which is not heated
but it's actually late January when we're filming this.
We're filming this before sowing Propagating time
in order to be able to get this video
to you before you begin.
(Charles chuckling)
So just bear that in mind.
What you're seeing here is January, not February.
Once we start propagating here,
we'll get a hotbed in there
and provide some warmth for the seedlings
and that kind of thing.
What I'm showing you here is the bare bones
of using module trays successfully
and the one I designed in particular,
the style which is the quite small cells and solid.
So this is what I had been using before and these trays,
I'm sure some of you have used trays like this.
They break very, well, not too soon hopefully.
You get some uses out of them,
whereas these ones are very robust.
In fact, Sean who sells them in the US, he's a distributor,
he did a great video recently
and he was driving a car on them even
and still didn't break.
So these are good investment.
You've got 'em for a long time.
For growing, it's more about,
or it's all about the size of cell for me.
And also having that tapering angle
at the bottom as opposed to solid there.
These are both made
by the same excellent propagating company, Containerwise.
I just felt though with these ones that I had been using
but there's more compost in there
than is needed compared to that.
And the result is when you got seedling, there's more risk
of water logging, it doesn't need it all
at that early stage.
So to put a figure on that,
I filled one of these with compost
and it came to four litres and that's for 40 plants.
And one of these I filled.
I can show you actually 'cause I've got it here.
So that's how I fill it to,
the level I fill it to,
which is you can't see the partitions.
I was doing this last year
for a propagating class
and one of the people said,
"Ah God, I would've failed my propagating exam
if I'd done it like that
'cause they say you're meant to be able
to see these partitions like that."
But in my experience with compost,
once you've filled it quite full, it's always going to go down
and by the time the plant's sort of two, three weeks in,
you can see those actually.
And then if you'd filled it to that level,
they're going to be a little bit empty.
I want to get as much compost as possible in there.
So how much is it?
If we tip this out,
you can see also that I'm filling them quite full.
I am going to show you that in a minute.
This is the homemade compost I'm going to show you.
And if I now put this into a measuring tray,
last time I did this it came to about...
Oh damn, I spilled a bit.
Sort of like that, but it's about two litres.
It's just to show you for a demo.
And I mean, there's thee bit I spilled.
Tip that in.
So there you are.
That's how much compost you can use to fill one
of these 60.
Two litres for 60, four litres for 40.
So that would be therefore six litres for 60.
Six litres for 60 of these and two for 60 of those.
So it's three times saving in compost.
How much compost do you need?
That's an advantage.
Another advantage is it takes up less space
so you can fit more.
You've got 40 there, you've got 60 there,
so you need less propagating space per area.
And then bearing that in mind
that we're not using a lot of compost,
the compost does need to be good quality.
And do check out the video we made prior to this one,
which is already on my channel
about how to make your own potting compost
or if you can't do that, this is some of it.
It's sieved, oh there's some frozen lumps.
Sieved to four millimetre.
Homemade compost and worm compost
and a bit of wood chip, a tiny bit of soil, not too much,
a tiny bit of vermiculite, not much.
And that's my version of a homemade compost.
There are many other possible ways you could do this
and you could also, you might be lucky
and find a good one that you can buy.
But how to actually fill them is important
because we haven't got much compost in there.
Sorry, we can't get much compost in there
because the cells are small
so you do want to fill them quite full.
Okay, so I've done a first filling
and I'm actually now going to do a second filling
but if I was going to sow quite large seeds,
it could be good to do at this point.
So without making any extra holes,
you could use the holes
that you just created with that first fill.
And I brought out a few large seeds and I'm not saying
for one minute it's time to sow these.
This is more about showing you
what's possible to use with these trays.
Like okay, so runner or pole beans, big, is that possible?
It's actually possible, I think though it's not desirable
and I do use these bigger hole, bigger cell trays
for large seed like that.
Having said that, we have succeeded with this size seed,
which is broad bean, fava bean.
They just fit snugly in there
and like last early November, we sowed two of these trays.
One seed of broad bean in each
and planted them out in about two weeks.
So the point being, you're using the trays as a kind
of way to germinate the seeds, and get little seedling.
You're not trying to make a big plant.
Get them in the ground small
and they actually grow better for that.
It means that you go past that tricky stage
of germinating the seed when the seed
is more likely to be eaten say by mice,
particularly with broad beans in November.
That is what we do.
Those broad beans now in January,
they're looking all right actually.
So they went in very small
and they just carry on growing.
For slightly smaller seeds,
so we've got sweet corn there,
it would be the same idea
but they could stay in there for a bit longer.
So sow the sweet corn,
which you'll do sometime towards the end
of April maybe and then give them about three weeks.
I normally do that, it could be four weeks.
So you're looking to get a reasonable size plant.
If you're used to using some something bigger cell,
these plants won't be quite as big
as what you're used to, but that's fine.
All I can say is I find that small seedlings,
it works really well to grow them
and transplant them small when they're quite young
and also, it's quicker.
They've got less propagating space in all of that.
Peas, we do two seeds in each cell like that.
You could do three.
If you wanted pea shoots, you could even do four.
Peas grow quite nicely in a clump
but for actual pea pods, I find that two works well
and that's very feasible.
Again, to transplant quite young.
Maybe two, three weeks depending how warm it is as well.
Courgette, so there's courgette seed.
What we do with them is start them in there.
You know how big a courgette plant gets.
So within two weeks, that will be pretty nicely grown.
It might even be within 10 days.
And then I take a seven-centimeter pot,
loosely fill it with compost,
make a little hole and then you can just transplant.
I could use one of these radish actually as a demo here.
I've got some radish seedlings and if you were potting on,
I don't actually do this with radish
but you just pop it in the hole you've made and push it in.
You could even put it deeper than that.
Bury the stem.
But that's one way that you can use these as a starter.
We do it for tomatoes as well.
So around 10th of March, I'll be sowing tomatoes
and just dropping a seed in each cell
and then potting them on after about three weeks usually.
Germinate them in warmth and with one of these
or with the smaller trays.
So for example, you've got options here of different numbers
in a tray and for many people, probably a 15
or maybe a 30 would be good for tomatoes,
depending how many you want to grow obviously.
But I would reckon if I sowed a tomato seed
in each of these, the 15, I'd probably get 12 tomatoes
if they're decent quality seed.
So you've always got to allow for some not coming up.
That's a 30.
So we got 15, 30 and 60
and 15s could be good for something like melon.
Actually no, that's cucumber.
Tiny little seeds, well, not tiny, tiny, but I just sow them
like that, not too deep.
The secret with a lot of sowing is to put them not too deep
and they should come up fast.
Cucumbers, if you keep them warm,
they germinate very quickly
and then you can pop them on again within two weeks.
So it's a combination of using these trays
like to grow the radish that I did here just for an example.
I wouldn't have sowed them this early otherwise
but that's multi-zone radish that at this stage already,
they were sown around 16 days ago
but they've been in the house pretty much the whole time
in the conservatory with a little bit
of extra light to help, which normally you don't need to do.
If you start sowing mid-February, you can manage
without extra lighting because there's enough.
And even today, the 24th of January,
you can see how much light there is.
It's starting to come back, not fully.
I'm doing a second fill here
because I want to get these trays really full
of compost, as full as they can be.
You can't compact compost, it's not like soil.
If this was pure soil, this wouldn't work.
Compost is much more structured and crummy.
Then
(Charles pounding)
you could do any combination
of finishing off at this stage
but something I like to do.
If I'm sowing seeds as I've shown you,
I would do that before watering.
This is a really high-quality compost.
And compost should be like this,
it should be well structured and aerated,
which means that you can sow seeds
and then water it and the compost won't all run off
'cause the water drains in.
Water should drain in pretty quickly.
But what you don't want to do is water it too fast
all in one go.
That would be not so clever
and the seeds might wash away then.
I'm going to show you just a quick sowing of onions.
Put this away now.
It's precious compost. I don't a waste that.
We can get by with using a surprisingly small amount
for a lot of plants and small amount of space as well.
So just for example here, if I'm going to multi sow onions,
I would do that, just make a little dent.
This is before watering.
If you did that after watering,
that would smear it a bit possibly.
And then I'm just going to count out a few seeds.
These are some home-sown seed.
So partly, I'm doing this just to show you the depth.
I'm not going to do the whole tree but I'll just do enough
that I can show you filling in the compost.
So that's about a good five seeds.
I'm aiming for five to six seeds
and then I'm just going level that off on top.
(Charles mumbling)
Then I would water.
And when you water, just do it
in stages a bit until that's fully moist.
And then what I would do there is actually put it
in the house where the nights are much warmer than in here.
In here it's freezing every night at the moment.
Even February, early March, it could be quite cold nights,
well, it will be.
And then well, there you go.
That's one way to use these trays.
Economical with space, economical with compost.
Plants love them.
You can see the quality
of these radish here, growing in not much compost.
And I'm just going to pop in one or two plants
'cause I want to show you the final stage,
getting them in the ground.
I actually designed a dibber as well as the tray.
So this is my long handle dibber
and it's got spacing markers on, so that's 15 centimetres,
six inch, that's nine inches, 22 centimetres roughly.
That's the spacing.
This is what we use for radish, for multi-sown radish
that's for all salad plants.
So it's kind of simple.
12 inches, 30 centimetre would be maybe celery, sweet corn,
that kind of thing.
I've got spacings in a useful information tab
on my website and once you've got spacings in your head,
it just speeds things up, or on the stick.
And the idea of this is
how it matches these cells is if I can get one
of these out, it's pretty similar profile but fatter.
You actually want it slightly fatter and bigger.
So that drops in neatly and always when I'm making the hole,
I'll make it a bit deeper so that that can go down there
and the soil levels up to the top of the seedling.
So I'm just going to do a bit of dipping now to finish off.
You can see how how that goes and the plants dropping in.
(tranquil music)
(water spraying)