Good morning and welcome to my pea sprouting experiment! So a little thing
about me, I'm really good at long term planning. I've got my garden planned and
plotted out months ahead of time. Not so good at short-term planning. So a good
example of this is-- I know that lots of people have great success with soaking
and pre sprouting their seeds before planting. I have never done it, not in 20
plus years of gardening have I ever soaked or sprouted a single seed that
was intended for planting out in the garden. So this year I decided I was
going to try it and I wanted to start with pea seed because I felt like peas
had the most potential for this being an advantage because usually when I want to
plant peas it's still very cold and they take a long time to germinate. So I took
three batches of pea seed- the first batch I planted directly into the garden,
no soaking, no sprouting, no nothing, seed straight from the packet into the soil.
The second batch I soaked the seed overnight and then pre sprouted it. The
third batch I did not soak overnight and I pre sprouted the seed. All of those got
planted out between March 8th and March 10th and I've been tracking their
progress along the way to kind of see if I'm getting any kind of advantage from
the process.
The first batch of seeds I soaked and pre spouted. So I put the seeds in a
little jar of water overnight, let them soak, drained off the water and then
placed them on a damp paper towel. I then put another couple of layers of damp
paper towel over the top and put the whole thing in a ziplock baggie. And this
is how they looked about three days later. The second set of seed I pre
sprouted only. So these I did not soak overnight.
I put the dry seed directly onto a damp paper towel, folded more damp paper towel
over the top, and then put the whole bowl in a ziplock baggie. This is how they
looked about two and a half days later, and this is how they looked five days
later. And the third batch of seed I did not soak or sprout. I planted it out into
the garden directly from the packet.
On March 8th I started planting the seed. The batch of seed that had been soaked
overnight and sprouted was ready to plant. I also planted the seed that had
not been soaked or sprouted. On March 10th I planted the seed that had not
been soaked overnight, but had been pre sprouted. Because this batch had not been
soaked overnight it took a couple more days for the seeds to sprout and be
ready to plant.
So this is the batch of seed that was soaked overnight sprouted and then
planted out in the garden. And you can see, this plant's about three inches
tall, some of these are about two. Looks like most of these are about two inches
tall, but they've got some pretty good height on them already. This is the batch
that was not soaked but pre sprouted and it looks like most of these plants are
not quite, ah that one's two and a half, most of them are just under two or right
at two. And this batch were the seeds that were planted directly out into the
garden and most of these look to be right at about one to one and a half
inches tall. So significantly less growth so far than either set of pre sprouted
seeds. So obviously the soaking and the sprouting gave these plants a definitive
jumpstart on growth. So let me know-- is soaking or pre sprouting seeds something
that you regularly do and do you feel like it really contributes to your
gardening success? I love to hear what other gardeners are doing in their own
gardens. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next time!