Starting Seedlings

Hey there! The growing season is just around the corner. If you want to get a nice garden come spring, it is important to start to make preparations now. In this post, I will share my experience for starting seedlings indoors. The outdoor planting season in our climate (Ankara, Turkey) starts around the beginning of may. So we are about 2.5 - 3 months from that time. An important vegetable to start indoors at this time of year is peppers. Because it takes just about this much of time for pepper seeds germinate and become well-established seedlings to go into the earth. So let's get started.

I start with a pre-made seed starting mix. Actually my plan was to use soil blocks, therefore I added some coconut coir into the mix. However, I decided to not use the soil block approach and use regular seed-starting tray approach for this planting. I hope to share my soil block experience in another post. 

So I just added some starting mix and coconut coir into a container. I then added some water and mixed it thoroughly. Initially it looked as in this following picture:

Pre-wetting your mixture is important. Otherwise your mixture will be crumbly and it will be difficult to give it enough moisture after the seeds are planted. Also your seeds may go too deep into a crumbly mixture. Anyways, nothing interesting so far. So let's get our seedling tray and start filling it in:

It almost looks like the gloves did the job themselves, isn't it? Perhaps some day we will have some such smart gloves. But for now I had to do the hardwork. Now, after you fill your trays, compress them a little bit with your fingers and add some more mixture. After that just brush off the excess dirt to have a nice little tray:

Looks cool, if you ask me. You can see in the picture above that I also placed a flat tray underneath the seedling tray. I will use this for watering and of course preventing the soil and water leak from the above tray. 

One of the important tasks during seed planting is to label your seeds. It is a step that is often overlooked as we get ahead of ourselves and want to be done with the process. But this year, I don't want to skip over this important step. In the past, I've tried many methods to label my seeds. But I think the only sure safe method is to label each and every individual seed. Why? Because if you label groups of seeds, during different stages of growing and transplanting it is so easy to lose track of which seed was which. It happened to many so many times that I am not taking chances this year.

So what can we use to label our seeds? Again I've tried many methods in the past. I think the best approach is to upcycle an empty yoghurt container for this purpose. These containers are designed to handle liquid items so they will not give in when watered. The pictures below document this process:

I can write a lot of words but I think the pictures are self-explanatory. Just cut up a yoghurt container into pieces on which you can mark your seedlings. Do I need to say that you need scissors for this purpose? Probably no.

Now we are almost ready for actually planting our seeds. Whenever you plant seeds such as peppers that take long time to germinate (2-3 weeks almost), you don't want to risk your chances of planting a bad seed. This is especially important if you are not sure about the source of the seeds and when you purchased them. I believe I purchased some heirloom seeds from this supplier last year. So I wanted to plant multiple seeds per pot to maximize my chances of germination.

Being a geeky gardener, let's get into a bit of math here. Assume that you have seeds that you estimate to have a 50% germination rate. A good seed should have a higher rate, but a stale one can have a rate like this or lower. So how many seeds should you plant to expect a germination rate of at least 90% per pot? Without getting too fancy let's work out the math. We assumed that the probability of germination is 50% which is equal to 1/2. This means that the probability of not germinating is also 1/2. Now the big question: if you plant 3 seeds per container, what is the probability of not germinating all of them? Assuming that each seed's germination is independent from each other, this probability is equal to the product of the individual probabilities: (1/2)x(1/2)x(1/2) = 1/8 = 12.5%. So with 12.5% probability, we will have no germination if we plant three seeds with 50% chance each. Then the probability of at least one seed germinating is 87.5%, which is pretty close to the 90% bar that we set initially. By the way, if you plant 4 seeds of the same type, your germination probability will be about 95%. 

Having cleared this math problem, we can now get back to planting. While I have no idea of the germination rate of each seed, I decided to plant three per pot to increase my chances. And this being pepper plants, I can actually keep two of them if they all germinate (I will cull the third one to avoid overcrowding). This is because actually two peppers can grow as a bunch without much problem. But if we were planting tomato seeds, for example, we would have to think to one plant per pot. This is how it looked like:

You can see that I put three seeds on the container instead of burying them into the same hole. But of course we will need to bury them. In general, seed packets tell you to bury the seeds to a depth of about 3 times the size of the seed kernel. It is very difficult to measure this precisely (and of course I never do). Instead I simply press on the seeds with the tip of a pen or what not to bury them into a reasonable amount of depth. And because I do this separately for each, one of them ought to go into the ideal depth (hey seeds help me out here!). Here is a short clip of how I do this process:

So, all that needs to be done is to repeat this process for each container and then you are done. My seed tray had 28 pots and therefore I planted 7 varieties of peppers, 4 from each variety. I made sure to mark and label each variety. What information did I include? I wrote the cultivar name, whether it is hot or sweet, and the time of planting. Hey, let's look at the final result:

Finally, let's water the seeds. For this type of planting it is more suitable to water from the bottom. How can we understand this if we do not watch another video?

The final step is to cover your seed tray with a some sort of plastic. This is to ensure that your soil mixture stays moist for several days and thus you do not need to water everyday. I would normally use a stretch film for this purpose but the labeling markers get in the way. So I got creative and used another upside down seed try to cover the top:

I didn't bother to cover the holes at the top, but you can do it if you want. So with a bit of work, we converted a few dormant seeds and a bag of soil into something that, if we take good care of it, can supply a family with plenty of peppers over the entire summer season. I hope you enjoyed reading my post and feel motivated to get on with your own plantings. I would love to hear about your comments below. Thanks.