now I'm in the greenhouse and I'm
showing you propagation and the whys and
wherefores of doing that the advantage
being that if you can raise seedlings
sturdy healthy plants for planting out
you can gain so much time early in the
season and here I have a module tray
which I'm going to fill with compost and
then sow some seeds and pricks and
seedlings into it it's a 60 cell tray
it's made a quite firm plastic so you
can reuse it many times without any
washing out or sterilizing and I'm going
to fill it now with compost so this is
some compost which I've mixed up from
it's one half bought multi-purpose
organic compost and it's one half very
well rotted calleman yeah it's two years
old so it's compost really and I've said
that very lightly and then mixed it with
some of the finer pork compost and I'm
now putting this compost into the tray
to fill it up and I'm putting in a lot
as you can see because when it's pressed
down it needs to be well-well pressed
into sections here with two fingers at a
time and what I do is actually then
smooth it out and push down again partly
because there are some lumps and I want
to make sure that each cell has a decent
amount of compost in it so now I'm
watering the tray to get the compost
fully moist because it's much easier to
prick seedlings into moist compost it's
a very free draining compost so it
doesn't hang on to the excess moisture
if along that drains through and you can
start working almost immediately with
some seedlings for example this is some
parsley which I sowed about a month ago
in February and I have some flower seeds
which are a mix of helichrysum and
scabies and Snapdragon and also finally
I have some tomato seedlings which are
all suitable for pricking in two modules
like this in the way I do it is lift
doing them up with the pencil underneath
and lift them out always holding them by
the leaf not by the stem and then I make
a little hole here and pop it in now
notice the the root there is longer than
the depth of the tray and it's
absolutely fine just to push it in and
coil it round it doesn't have to go all
straight down and it's also a very good
idea to bury the stem because that way
you can turn a leggy seedling into a
sturdy one all vegetables are very happy
to have their stems buried in this way
you end up with lovely stocky sturdy
plants rather than flapping around in
the wind and it's very similar procedure
here with the tomatoes so I'm just
lifting out the small tomato seedlings
nice little bit of root on there and
again popping it in burying the stem to
make it a sturdy plant and then also
sometimes you've got a bit more root
maybe you need to make a slightly bigger
hole to bury it all and finally that one
I'll just show you a very small seedling
which is actually a Snapdragon here it's
so small you can hardly see it but you
can prick tiny seedlings the advantage
being that they just get their little
roots in there the moist compost and
then they settle down and grow away here
is a different kind of module tray it's
actually made of polystyrene it's broken
a little bit at the edge and again just
reused and reused never washed out no
sterilizing anything like that and what
I'm doing here is I'm sowing seeds into
the compost I sowed some a couple of
weeks ago I'm just doing a second
setting now into the same tray so his'n
season he are saved in fact a couple
years ago
and it works very well to put two or
three seeds in each hole and then they
grow quite happily in there and develop
their little roots in that amount of
compost until they'll be ready for
planting in about three weeks time I'm
now going to show you a couple of trays
I sowed only and they are another
experiment into the same question of
compost which compost to use and one has
well rotted cow ammonia pure manure and
this is this one and one has West Riding
multi-purpose compost now the seedlings
have grown well in both trades you know
if we just had that one on its own you'd
think well that's fine they're all
coming up but look at the difference
with well rotted cow mania I mean this
one surprises me as much as anyone the
the the lovely quality and vigor of
growth and basically you can see sowing
into well rotted manure is fine for
healthy seedling growth for further
information do visit my website which is
www.hyken.com
you