Seed Germination

What I want to talk about is the first step in growing plants and that seed germination or getting the seeds to start growing. What you want to have to speed up or make germination successful is a warm and wet environment for your seeds. Now when I say wet I don't mean soaking wet maybe damp would be a better word.

Now a great thing to have to help you is a seed starter heat meant this is going to keep the seeds warm at a constant temperature which is going to speed up and make germination more successful. Another great thing to have is a thermometer. This will tell you the actual temperature. This one I love because it takes readings at two places. You can see it's 67 degrees here at the base out here in the probe when I push this button you can see it's a nice almost eighty one degrees. That's gonna speed up germination making it much more successful.

Now an easy and cheap way to germinate medium to large seeds is with a paper towel and a plastic bag. What you're gonna do is put the paper towel on the bag, you're gonna get it wet now , two mistakes that growers make number one they get this too wet. Remember you want it really damp so if you can squeeze water out of here – water coming out that's too wet my friends. What you want to do is squeeze all the water out until the paper towels just dam. Now you're ready to go so what you can do then is put your seeds directly on a paper towel. I have some small little pepper seeds here I don't know if you can see them or not I also have some pumpkin seeds and so you're gonna put the seeds directly on the paper towel. Now the second mistake a lot of people make is they seal this up they want to keep it wet in there, no you're gonna need to get air flow in there as well so I recommend every day in fact several times a day open up the bag and make sure you get some air flow in there.

Now in a few days you should have some seed germination and I have here some seeds I've started a couple days ago. Here are some pepper plants you can see they're starting to grow and of course you can see these pumpkins are starting to grow. They're ready to go into soil or whatever grow medium you're going to use.

Now here is a plastic bag that I started a few days ago and you see these little black spots right here, that's mold and you don't want that. Now it's not the end of the world but once you see mold growing in your paper towel you are gonna want to get the seeds out of that because the mold is gonna continue to spread. Now once your seeds germinate I like to grow in dirt and so you can put them directly in the soil however, a lot of growers like to skip this germination step. Any seed or any plant that grows in soil you can put it directly into the soil and germinate it. To do this you're gonna get the soil damp, not soaking wet. You're gonna put the seeds in there I like to put two or three in each pot to make sure I'm gonna get some plants growing. If you don't have directions about how much dirt to cover over them good rule of thumb is to maybe cover the seed about the diameter of the seed. Now you're gonna want to have a tray here to catch any water when you water them. So you're gonna put the tray there and you can fill this with as many pots as you want. Now my favorite way to germinate plants are with these little starter plugs they can get from HTG supply. These are great because they have a nice little hole here so you can go ahead and put your seed directly in here. I'm gonna go another pumpkin here you just push it down in there. The pepper seeds you can put them in there as well and there are lots of different size trays here's a smaller one and so I'm gonna put this right on the heat mat.

Put the seeds in there that's gonna allow that seed to germinate there are
other sizes for example here's a 55 size starter kit if you're gonna grow more plants you might wanna get this. You can see again the heat mat is the perfect size for this tray. So I hope that helps you get started with growing to germinate your seeds. You want to keep them warm and wet maybe damps a better word for that and you can put them directly in the soil, put them into my favorite the starter plugs, or if you want to watch and see which seeds germinate you can put them in a plastic bag keeping it damp not too wet. good growing.