Seed Selection
Now that we have our medium ready and our grow location set up, we’re ready to select the seeds we are going to grow. For this grow we want to focus on our goals and stay on task! One of the main goals for our grow is to fill the green house with life so we have a variety of herbs and vegetables to choose from. The herbs, tomatoes, and peppers we grow will be for sale. We will use the seeds our grow produces to plant more! This is just the start, we will soon have many different varieties of each to offer for sale. Then the fun comes, choosing the seeds of herbs and vegetables we will grow.
Seeds
It’s very important to have a legitimate source for seeds, whether they are from a personal collection, store, or online catalog. The seeds need to be collected properly from healthy well taken care of plants and they need to stored and sealed correctly. The seeds can be top notch and grade A quality but remember storage and sun exposure can ruin them. Damaged or sterile seeds are not useful!
Luckily, I have collected quite an impressive collection of seeds and will only need to purchase a few to broaden our collection. If you don’t have any seeds or friends who save seeds, we are working on offering them for sale but in the meantime, I would recommend www.seedsnow.com. They are a very reputable company and all seeds are sourced non-GMO as well as thoroughly tested. They also label their seeds with the purity and germination percentages which can be very helpful.
Before we begin, we need to be aware of the species we intend to grow as some have special procedures. For examples, some seeds need to be soaked before planting. These include a variety of peas, beans, corn, pumpkin, and many more. In our case we are working with common kitchen herbs, tomatoes, and peppers so we can skip this step and are now ready to begin.
Sowing
For this post and grow we will be using two different techniques. For both herbs and vegetables, we’ll be using seedling trays with a self-watering reservoir as well as domes for extra humidity.
Herbs
We’ll start by using the materials discussed in our last post. Our sun dried bleached soaped trays and pots are now ready to be used. Not to mention our custom seedling starter blend.
Custom Blend:
1 part peat moss
1 part vermiculite
.5 part worm castings
First, we fill up trays to the top with our medium moist soil leaving about have an inch of space. We want it moist but not water logged. You should be able to squeeze water out of the soil but you should not see the water. We then gently pat down each seedling cell to make sure that its nice and tight. This allows for better moisture and heat distribution.
You should then tap a .5 inch hole with pen or pen top into the medium moist soil. This will make a little bowl for our little seeds! The trays are now ready for our seeds. We did a few different varieties of Basil for our first tray. For Basil, I like to plant 5-8 seeds per cell. This gives us a nice little bush per cell. With this strategy we don’t even need to even cover the seeds with soil. We then simply place the plastic hood and put it in our green house. The only thing to worry about with our Miami sun is making sure that our greenhouse doesn’t get too hot. We must keep a close eye on those seedlings once they pop. That is also where the self-watering trays are helpful – this depends on where you live as well as sun/humidity exposure.
Tomatoes & Peppers
For our tomatoes and peppers, we will be using a variation of the bulk seed method to maximize plant yields with a minimal space requirement. For these peppers and tomatoes, we must take into consideration that each seedling will require transplant into a new much larger pot. So, with this technique we are planting about 50 tomato seeds in one seed cell and then right before the first true leaf is formed we will split the cell up and give each individual seedling a home. I say variation because we are not doing about 50 per seed, perhaps a little less.
We start off the same as we did with the herbs. We fill the seed trays with our moist medium and then proceed to spread our seeds, about 50 or so in each cell. Tomatoes and peppers are slightly different, once we’ve planted the seed we will use our hands to sprinkle medium soil and top it off – just for added moisture and heat on the seeds themselves.
Greenhouse Ready
Finally, we’ll place the tomato, pepper, and basil trays in the greenhouse. Let the growing begin!
