Hi, my name is John Lenz and we're here at Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company.
We're in greenhouse number four; we call it the seed starting greenhouse. Today I
want to show you some stuff about how we start some of the 27,000 different
plants that we grow every year here. The essential elements for starting seeds
indoors early for your garden are pretty simple. You need a good soil mix, you need
the correct heat, a little bit of light and proper moisture. Any seed will
germinate if you give it the necessary stuff, and it depends on the seed is what
is the important question. We start with the soil. We use a Pro-mix.
It's peat and perlite, has good drainage, good aeration; nice, light, and fluffy, easy
root growth in it, easy penetration for the cotyledons. Heat is something that's
important. Your pepper seeds like to germinate at 80 degrees, your lettuce
and cool crops like to germinate at 70. We keep our heat mats in here about 75
degrees all the time. If you don't have heat mats, sunny windowsill, on top of the
refrigerator - believe it or not is a very warm spot in your house this should help
with speeding up germination. Light is important - sunny window sill again. It's
not necessary for germination, but once you get emergence of your seedlings
you're going to want to shoot a little light at them so that they could develop.
Moisture is important. For this you need to keep it damp but not soggy. A good-
draining media will help ensure this. When we're preparing our soil for
seeding we'll take our Pro-mix and we'll add some gypsum to it because the Pro-
mix is pretty much nutrient deficient, and we'll also put a big healthy squirt
of Dawn dishwashing liquid in. This acts as a surfactant and helps manage the
moisture. It'll wet up a dry spot and it'll dry
out a wet spot, makes the soil nice and even. Heat
mats. The heat mats we have here are commercial grade. There's like 16 of them on
this bench behind me. We keep them set at 75 degrees unless
we're doing a pepper crop and then we'll jack it up to about 80. We have overhead
lights in here that are 2000 watt LEDs. These aren't necessary for germination
and emergence, but once your plants come out of the ground you're gonna want to
make sure they get adequate light or else they'll get leggy and stringy and
not be transplant quality. We grow 27,000 plants to transplant, so we need ours 4
inches tall with a good root zone development. Moisture is important. You
want to keep the seed damp, not standing in water, not soggy, not soaking wet - just
good and damp. So we come by and water about every other day depending on how
the surface looks. We're gonna see about seeding some now and we'll show you how
we go about this. I have some lettuce here; I think we'll probably use it. The
key to seeding, proper seeding, with different seeds is you want to use the
size of the seed as an indicator for how deep to plant it. Squash seeds big as
your fingernail need to go half an inch deep. Lettuce seed and poppy seed that
looks like dust, we surface so and then when you water it
it'll force it down. If you get it planted too deep this seed won't have
the energy necessary to emerge. If you plant it too shallow then the
bigger seeds are just gonna be growing on the surface. OK, I filled up my tray, my
six packs. I got 36 cells here. I've got a package of Trumpheter lettuce I want to
show this to you. We'll get her opened up here.
This lettuce seed is quite small, as you can see, so we're just going to surface
sow this. So we're gonna try to put one or two or three seeds per cell just to
ensure that when we're done we end up with 36 plants. We can thin them later.
You've got to keep in mind, in my opinion seeds are cheap, so I'd rather have too many
plants in a cell than empties. So we're dropping a couple of three seeds in each
cell, kind of scattered them out, once we get
them done we'll take them over to the bench and give them a drink, and the
water as we water and will force the seed down into the soil. You've got to
have good seed-soil contact. The seed imbibes the water that's in the soil
around it and this causes the embryo to emerge. The first thing out will be a
little tiny root called the radical. Next thing out will be the cotyledons, the
seed leaves. We brought our tray over here to our watering station and we're
just going to water it down gently. This initial water and you should get
water coming out of the bottom of the tray then you know you've got the whole
thing nice and wet. Shouldn't have to water - this lettuce germinates pretty
fast - shouldn't have to water it more than twice more. Don't drown them. I want
to show you some of the results we've achieved here at Baker Creek. This
cauliflower is six days old. You can see it's just come off the heat mat, got
multiple emergence, multiple plants in each cell, so we'll thin this down in
about a week. We have a Tom Thumb lettuce here. This is
now, let's see, been seeded on the 4th, 13 days old. It's been thinned, and we're getting a
pretty decent growth out of it. It'll have a root system that we can count on here in
another week. Anyway, seed starting at home is not that
difficult. Follow the basic rules: takes moisture, heat, good soil mix. Grow them
like you love them. This is John Lenz. I'm here at Baker Creek and this is how we
do it.
Hey everyone this is Shannie from Baker Creek. Thanks so much for watching this
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