Hi, I'm Holly Capelle, a gardener in the pacific northwest garden zone 8b, and today I wanted to
share with you eight tips for successfully sowing your seeds indoors. But, before we get started,
be sure to hit that subscribe button and notification bell so you don't miss any of
Kellogg Garden's great videos. Starting your seeds indoors can be tremendously rewarding,
but there are a few key things to keep in mind in order to be successful. Here are my eight
tips for success. So, tip number one for success is soil. You don't want to cut corners here with
soil when it comes to seed starting, you want them to have the very best. So, you want to look for
an organic seed starter mix. If, for some reason, supplies are low in your area, you can always use
an organic potting mixture, but be sure to mix that with peat moss as well, so that you get
that aeration that's offered with the organic seed starter mix. It's really going to give
your seeds the best shot at life. So, number one important thing when starting seeds indoors,
soil! Tip number two on growing seeds successfully indoors is water. How do we water? Well,
when we first put our seeds into the little cell trays, we use a spray bottle to just keep the soil
damp. We want to always keep it damp for the seeds, that's the ideal condition,
but we definitely don't want it soaked. So, we found the use of a spray bottle,
works really well for that. Once the veg is established, and usually once I pot it up,
and now we've got some roots to deal with, we will start watering from the bottom up. So, we've got
all of our seed pots in a big tray. And so, what we do is we just pour one to two cups of water in
the big tray, and that allows all of the plants to drink from the bottom up. Of course, all of them
have holes in the bottom to do that. When the big trays are empty, then we'll go ahead and re-water.
You really want to avoid having standing water for too long, or having your soil just drenched,
that will introduce disease and gnats, all kinds of bad things, so again you want to stay within
that happy medium. If you're watering from the bottom up and you notice that the soil
on the top is looking dry, you're not going to hurt it to give it a little splash from the top
as well, but generally speaking, you want to try to water from the bottom up. Tip number three is
lighting. Lighting is a good one, I love to talk about lighting because a lot of people
think that you can only grow vegetables with those specific veg grow lights,
like these pink ones I've got down here on my bottom level. That's just not true, and actually
I hate those lights when I'm in the house, I don't like the way they look, they mess with my eyes,
and I don't really notice much difference between using those and a much cheaper LED shop light. You
want to, ideally, have a 5000 kelvin or higher, cool light to use. These are actually 4200,
and then we just have two of them on each of our shelves all the way down. Because it's not super
strong lighting, we have raised our pots up. We've used just wood blocks here to raise them,
or you can use, these are my craft bins, buckets, they do the job. So, whatever you can do to raise
up your trays, and then as the veg begins to grow and you can just remove your wood pieces, or get
rid of your bucket and they'll be good to go. But, I find that these are way more within budget
and they work perfectly fine. If you also, aren't really in the market to having a setup like this,
you can still grow quite a bit of veg in your sunshiny window. Things like lettuce, and spinach,
and celery all grow successfully in the window, so if you don't have lights or you don't have a space
to do an indoor grow, don't give up, that doesn't mean you can't start your own seeds indoors.
Tip number four is heat. Much like water you don't want too little or too much, because they
will adversely affect the growth of your plants. Some folks really love the use of the seed mat for
heating, we don't use a seed mat, we actually rely on the heat of our light source for the plants.
And also, some folks prefer the use of the greenhouse effect, where you put your plastic
lid over your your big pans here and you dome it up, we only use that if we are planting clones.
We've just found that what works best for us is this open-air grow space with good lighting. We
do have a heat register right here, above our grow area, we've had to close that because it wants to
barrel hot air down onto the plants drying them out really quickly. So, do keep in mind if your
grow is next to a wood stove, or a fireplace, or a heat register you might want to consider that
as well as it can affect what's happening. Otherwise, just having a nice open air flow
with, like I said, just these shop lights. Again, we've raised it up to get as much of the light and
the heat as we possibly can when they're babies, that will help us avoid leggy starts. Leggy starts
is a result of one or two things, either too hot or not close enough to your light source.
So, it's an important thing to make sure you you keep that raised. If you do run into leggy starts,
I have some, all you need to do is, once I get a little bit more leaves,
I will pot them up and I'll bury most of that leg inside the soil. And then, I'll figure out
what its problem was; did it not have enough light, or was it too hot? And remedy that problem,
pot them up, and then give them a second chance at life, fingers crossed. So,
don't give up on your leggy starts they just need your attention, they need more light or less heat.
I really hope you're finding some of this information to be useful in getting your
indoor grow started, please be sure to like and share this video so that we can spread the word
with new gardeners and old gardeners alike, so that we can all get sewing and growing together!
Tip number five for successfully growing seeds indoors is pots. What kind of containers
do you want to use? Well, these days we don't have a lot of options considering
supply and demand, but there are still a few ideal choices. One thing we stay away from
is the biodegradable pots for indoors. When we put them next to each other under the lights
inside the house they tend to mold, and so we just don't even use them anymore. I prefer the plastic
trays. Whatever you do make sure they have holes in the bottom. Last year when I was sowing seeds
like a mad woman in the beginning of the world falling apart, I couldn't find pots anywhere.
And I was desperate, so I bought myself tons of these. Sad I know, not the earth's friend,
but I plan on keeping these for many, many, many garden seasons and using them over,
and over, and over again so maybe that will earn me some forgiveness. But really, it was an amazing
alternative, it's a couple bucks for 50 of them and they go a long way. All you have to do is make
sure that you take a pair of scissors and clip all four corners, little holes in all four corners of
your cup. That is super important so that your plants can drink. But otherwise, they've kind of
turned into my favorite pots to use, I know, but they work amazing and once I pot it up one time
in the house, I rarely need to pot them up again before they go into the garden. So, I love them,
sorry! Number six is fertilizer. Once your seeds have turned into happy little starts it's time
to start feeding them. The best thing to feed them with is an organic liquid fertilizer. You want one
that you're going to dilute with water because it just the baby, so we have to take baby steps
into fertilizing our plants. But it's a really important step for this new life.
When I get my starts out into the garden, I actually transplant them by using a little bit of
shaking in some granular mycorrhizae and then I add my start to the garden.
That's kind of it, we don't fertilize after that, I am moved on, I'm doing other things now and I've
let that go. So, good luck to you buddy! Because I kind of neglect them at that point it's really
important that we give them the very best start we can, and using organic fertilizer is definitely
going to be a good way to go. Tip number seven but it probably should have been number one,
is timing. It's really important that you pay good attention to the time frame on when to start your
seeds that's listed on the back of your seed packets. It's always going to be different than
the date given when you just direct sow into your garden. And then some vegetables like tomatoes,
peppers, and eggplants those are long, long growing plants they take forever, so although
they're summer veg, those get started a little bit earlier. So, before you get started be sure
to check those seed packets and make yourself a calendar or a list of what needs to be started
first, using the estimated date of your last frost as a guide and you can get that by looking
it up like the farmer's almanac should be able to give you that information. And also, any
other resources and information that I might have missed or might have included in here you can find
details in the description, so be sure to check that as well. My last tip for you is when it comes
time to transplant, it's really important that you harden off your starts before you just plant them
into the garden. What that means is about two to three weeks before you intend on planting them,
you're going to want to start slowly introducing them to that outdoor environment start with a
half an hour the first day and then just sort of work your way up until they live there. The ideal
spot for them will be out of direct sunlight, you want to be warm but they don't want to be
scorched they're just too young for that. So, let them acclimate, kind of in the shade, a little bit
at a time before you just let them go. And that's, it you did it! With all of these things soil,
water, lighting, heat, pots, fertilizer, timing, and transplant, you can grow successful garden
from seed all by yourself. I believe in you! Thanks so much for tuning in, I hope you're able
to gather some good information to help you feel confident in getting your indoor grow going for
your garden this year. I'll be sharing videos both indoors and out all year long with Kellogg Garden,
so please be sure to like and share my video as well as hit that notification
bell and subscribe button so you don't miss any other new videos coming up. Happy gardening!