SOWING SEED TRAYS

What you need:

• Vegetable and Salad Seeds.

• Name Tags.

• Compost.

• Seed Trays.

• Garden Gloves.

• Hand Spade.

The first step is to choose your seeds. Garden centers also have already germinated plants if you want to skip this step. But I find growing plants from seed makes them a bit hardier. I’ve made use of these plants when I missed the early Spring sowing season. They are a great gap filler, but I enjoy seeing my little seeds germinate and starting to grow. It’s such a rewarding feeling. Then I know summer is coming.

Once you’ve got your seeds, compost and seed trays you are good to go. Place seed trays on a level surface, the ground is fine. Make sure you have your name tags ready. Take it from someone who has missed this step. Once you have those little seeds in the ground inside the trays, it’s almost impossible to tell which seeds which are until they germinate. And when you’re sowing plants like marrow, courgette, squash and pumpkins, their little plants are so similar I find it impossible to tell them apart until they start bearing fruit. I learned this the hard way. One year we had a very interesting spread of vegetables.

I tend to do one tray at a time, marking it clearly before moving onto the next type of seed. Fill the seed tray with your compost and level it off using the back of your spade.

Now it’s time to get your seeds out. Careful when opening those seeds packets. Some seeds are tiny. I usually shake the packet down to get the seeds to the bottom. Carefully place a seed in each block in your seed tray. You can gently push the seed into the loose soil. I like to sprinkle a bit of extra compost on each seed to make sure that it’s covered.

The only thing left to do is give them a drop of water, making sure each seed block gets watered and put them in a sunny spot indoors preferably. This time of the year our windowsills are filled with seed trays and germinating plants. Greenhouses are great for this too, but not necessary. You can germinate seedlings successfully indoors and if the weather is mild enough, even outside in a warm protected spot.

You will enjoy seeing you seeds grow! In a few short weeks you will have your plants ready for planting out. We will have a look at the next step of planting your seedlings out into prepared soil once we have our seedlings well cultivated and strong enough to face the changing weather elements of outside.