- Spring is here.
It is time to start thinking about starting seeds.
We've already been doing some here at the homestead.
In this video, I'm going to go over three different ways
that you can create a seed-starting mix,
from easy to epic mode. (chiptune music)
So stay tuned and let's start off with the easiest way
to get your seed-starting mix off the ground.
Getting your seeds started means having a specific mix.
So what really is seed-starting mix?
In effect, it is just a lighter mix,
meaning that there aren't all
these large, woody particles in it,
and that's kind of what makes it a seed-starting mix,
in my opinion.
What you'll see, though, is you can
just buy a seed-starting mix, much like this one.
This one's from EB Stone Organics.
I'll read you off the list of ingredients
and you can start to see what it's made of.
So first of all, you have sphagnum peat moss.
We actually just did a video on peat moss,
something we're trying to cut down on a little bit here.
For the sake of example, this has peat moss in it,
pearlite, and dolomite lime.
The reason you need the lime is
because the peat moss can tend
to be a little bit acidic,
and you need to buffer it up with some lime.
So what you don't hear in this is
any kind of nutrients at all.
There's no worm castings, there's no compost,
there's no fertilizers of any kind,
and that's because most seed-starting mixes
that you buy are fully sterilized, inert mixes.
So that's really the big question, is,
why should they be?
And in my opinion,
I actually really don't think seed-starting mixes
should be sterile, and probably,
they should have some sort of nutrition.
And so what I prefer to do is,
if you're gonna buy a seed-starting mix,
rip this bag open, just like this.
We'll dump it through, and I'm gonna add two amendments.
There's a couple different ways you could approach this,
but these are mine.
Then I wanna take worm castings.
So we actually offer worm castings
from Urban Worm Company on our store.
I'm gonna cut in about,
I would say five-ish percent by volume.
So this was eight quarts.
I'm gonna put in about half a quart or so
and not stress too much about the amount.
So I'm gonna let that fly in there.
Helps with some moisture.
Also very light on the NPK,
but does add some nutrients,
and it does add some microbial activity.
So in this particular mix,
most of the time, with worm castings,
you're gonna see it be like a zero, zero, zero,
or a one, zero, zero.
This one is 0.67% nitrogen, 0.1% phosphate,
and 0.05% potassium.
So really not super high.
We're not gonna burn these seedlings.
Most of the time they're getting most
of their nutrients from the seed itself
in the beginning of their life.
I'm also going to at a little bit of azomite,
and you don't need to overdo it with this.
Azomite is effectively a rock dust product,
and it's been very powerful for us here in the garden.
So I'm just gonna sprinkle a tiny little handful
of this in, and what you're seeing me do here is just amend,
slightly, this mixture with some level of fertility.
Now it's gonna look pretty much the exact same.
That's your lightest-weight way to make a seed-starting mix,
is, take a rack, off-the-shelf seed mix,
and then just amend it slightly,
because I personally feel having a little life
in that soil, having a little nutrient
in that soil, is gonna set it up for success.
It's kinda weird to have a sterilized mix
for a living organism that you're then gonna put
into a completely unsterilized garden.
Might as well start it off in an active mix.
Your next option, instead of bolstering
up a seed-starting mix,
is actually to thin down an existing potting mix,
because most potting mixes have roughly equal parts
of what a seed-starting mix needs.
So you've got aeration components,
something like a perlite.
You've got some kind of retention component,
like a coir, and then you have some sort of forest product
or fertilizer-ish-like product.
So this is recipe 420.
We've had some success growing with this in the past.
Obviously it's probably geared for a particular kinda crop,
if you know what I'm saying, but we're growing it for seeds.
So lemme break down what's in this first,
and I'll show you what I do to turn this
into a seed-starting mix.
So first of all, what we have, aged forest products.
We talk about that all the time, now, on the channel.
Really, aged forest products can become compost.
It just depends on which point they've been broken down to.
Really hyper-aged forest products
effectively have become compost
or humus or whatever you wanna call that, there.
Then you've got coir and peat moss.
We talked about that a bunch.
Now, here's where a potting mix adds
a little more than a seed-starting mix.
You've got oyster shell lime.
That's gonna buffer the pH for that peat moss additive.
But then you have things like bat guano,
alfalfa meal, kelp meal, things like that
that actually do add a little nutrient.
So what you wanna do here is pop this open.
All you're doing is you're just cutting this down.
You're saying, hey, these larger particles,
I don't want those in the seed-starting mix.
Effectively everything else I do.
So I've got this screen here.
This is quarter-inch screen.
So all I'm gonna do is exactly that,
filter this through, and you'll see
what's left both on top and down below.
(reggae music)
So I have most of the material through,
and this is actually why I particularly like
this potting mix, because if you take a look,
I'll show you, there's not a lot
of crazy wood particles in here.
They're all pretty small, pretty broken-down,
unlike some mixes, where all this would be like
almost big pieces of bark.
Now let's see what we're left with down below.
You have this beautifully thin
and fine mixture that the roots aren't going to hit
and get all tangled up and messed up in.
Still got enough nutrients in there,
just like we bolstered up that seedling mix.
We've now cut down the large particles
from the potting mix, and sometimes
that can be pretty cost-effective.
I would say, though,
try to buy the highest-quality potting mix you can
if you're gonna use this strategy.
And now we get to the epic strategy,
which is just making your own seedling mix.
So now we're in the big boy and girl club
of making our own seedling mix,
which we do from time to time,
when we have the ingredients at hand.
So here's what we're gonna use for this one,
and just keep in mind, you might not be able to find
some of this stuff near you,
whether it's pumice versus perlite
or coir versus peat, and et cetera.
So try to find the stuff that's the most local to you
that solves the problem I'm gonna talk about
in a seedling mix.
Oftentimes the most local thing is the
most sustainable to you.
So I'm just gonna put that out there.
But here's what I'm gonna do.
So I've got some pumice here.
Pumice effectively takes the place of the perlite
in a solution like this,
and this is gonna provide the aeration
and the drainage that young seedlings are going to need.
So I'm gonna go in with basically
just this bag of pumice at one-third of the total volume.
So this is eight quarts.
So I'm gonna put in eight quarts of this.
That's my one-third of my whole mix, right there.
Next up, I've got this brick of coir.
Now one of the advantages of coir,
if you're going to use it, is that
it can be compressed, unlike many other materials.
So that's great, because from a shipping perspective,
it's a lot more economical and cost-effective
and resource-less-intensive to ship it,
but you do have to expand it.
So Jacques's here in the background,
I'm gonna have him expand this
while I chat about some of these mixes.
So we're gonna do that.
And then the final thing is going to be
your fertility component.
So I have some compost here.
Of course, if you can make your own, you probably should.
For the purposes of this,
I just had this Malibu Compost here,
just to show you really simply.
So this'll be the final one-third.
That coir is gonna provide that water retention,
that water capacity, holding onto moisture,
and then this compost is going to provide the fertility
and some of that long-term growth.
So this is gonna go in at about a third or so,
but I'm actually gonna split this in half.
I lied.
I'm gonna do about half of that third,
now we're getting complicated,
is going to be the compost.
I'm gonna do a little sprinkle of that azomite
that I mentioned earlier, just for
those trace minerals, trace nutrients.
And then I'm actually gonna use the
other half of that third, so a sixth of this mixture,
is going to be worm castings.
So there's really a lot of different ways
that you can approach a seedling mix,
as long as you don't violate the principles
of how to create a mix in general.
About one-third of retention ingredients,
coir, moss, et cetera,
about a third of drainage ingredients,
pumice, vermiculite, perlite, that kinda thing.
Vermiculite probably more in that retention side
than the drainage side,
so I would skew away from that sometimes.
And then about a third of filler,
compost, fertility materials, like compost and castings.
That's what I personally do.
In go the castings.
And I'm just gonna add a tiny little bit
more compost in here before I start mixing.
We still have to wait on that coir.
We have our coir.
Like I said, you gotta rehydrate it,
you gotta squeeze the water out
and make sure that it's nice and ready to go.
But I have roughly eight quarts.
So in goes one.
In goes another.
Really easy to do.
And all we have to do now is hydrate
and mix it, preferably at the same time,
because you really want to hydrate a seedling mix
before you get seedlings into the mix.
So I wanna show you the components again, really quickly.
It's not mixed.
So you got your coir, got your castings,
some compost down in here, some azomite dust,
and then, of course, the pumice.
You can get fancy or you can get simple.
You can mix it with your hands.
I'm getting a little weird and fancy.
I'm using this power planter auger here,
which is actually on our store.
We used it to plant hundreds of potatoes
in this side yard over here. I'm just gonna use this to mix,
'cause my other hand, I'm going to hydrate at the same time.
So I'm just gonna dump some water in,
and then come in and just mix this all up really simply.
(downtempo music)
It's starting to look like a proper seed-starting mix there.
Let's get our hands dirty now
and just get all the stuff in from the edges.
It's kinda like you're making a bread dough.
This is really all you need to do,
get a little water in that mix,
mixture going, make sure that it's
all well-incorporated, and then,
at this point, you really are good to go.
You have a nice, fertile, powerful,
well-mixed seed-starting mix that, yeah,
it took a little more effort,
but if you can get those bulk components
in bulk, you save a little money
and make big batches at once.
This is probably for a gardener who's
more on our scale, but certainly
it works really, really well.
So three different ways to make seed-starting mix.
I'm gonna keep getting this going.
We've got some seeds to start this afternoon.
Until next time, good luck in the garden
and keep on growing.
(downtempo music)