University Place

Seed Starting 101

– Hi, everybody. Thank you very much for attending today. My name is Dan Goodspeed. I’m a horticultural consultant. It’s kind of a lofty title, but I service different companies and provide horticultural information, education to people like you. Every day, all day, that’s what I do. I provide really personal attention and have conversations, essentially, with my customers from different companies that I represent. So some of the companies, I’m here today on behalf of the Jung Seed Company. Does everybody know Jung? Familiar with it? But many other companies fall under my jurisdiction, as they say. So we’re gonna talk mostly today about, I’m gonna speak mostly about seed germination process, the process and potential issues or troubleshooting that everybody has with growing things from seed. It’s primarily. . . I’m gonna primarily cover vegetable seeds, but you can take a broader view. You know, I can speak to some individual things like annual flowers, some perennials potentially, but because the seed germination process is really similar for all of those different things, okay?

As I mentioned, I’m a horticultural consultant, so my customers come from all different walks of life, but for the most part, they’re just average gardeners. People trying to do it for a hobby, sometimes they’re doing it for a business, have their own farm stand, things like that. But I help everybody equally, or I try to. So no matter what walk of life you’re from, and if you’re very experienced, or consider yourself very experienced, or if you’re a complete novice, I help everybody equally. Okay, hopefully through this conversation today and the presentation, there will be nuggets of information that everybody should be able to grasp. You should be able to get something from it, no matter what your skill level is at starting things from seed, okay? So to go forward to the troubleshooting and figuring out what’s happening with your plant, we need to go backwards.

We need to start at the beginning about what a seed really is, okay? It’s something that everybody generally takes for granted. That a seed is a little thing in a packet that you buy, and you put it in dirt, and water it a little bit, and it grows, and it produces something, it grows into something, right? It’s pretty easy to think about it that way. But if you recognize that all seeds are sleeping plant, it’s a sleeping embryo, right? That’s what it really is. It’s the means for that plant to reproduce itself. That’s important because you need to recognize what the seed is to understand what its capacity is. What can it do? What can a seed do? A seed has the capacity to do one thing. It germinates. That’s what it does. That’s all the seed can do. We’ll talk about the vocabulary a little bit in just a minute, but the understanding what the seed can do and understanding what it can’t do is really important in the whole process.

So, can you think of things that a seed can’t do, just off the top of your head? Can a seed make an ear of corn tasty, flavorful? No. Can it make a squash really flavorful? No, it doesn’t have anything to do with that. All of the qualities. . . The seed has the capacity to germinate. All the qualities from the fruit that you get from the plant that grew from that seed, all of that depends on the environment. The environment, the growing conditions, does that make sense? Everybody’s with me? ‘Cause I hear that a lot. And that’s why I go backwards a little bit for everybody to get to where we need to start, how to grow, and what the seeds need to grow and grow well, or germinate and grow well. So I hear it a lot from people that call and say, you know, “My sweet corn tastes terrible,” i.e. , the seed was bad, and that doesn’t happen. That can’t happen. You might have grown a variety that doesn’t prefer to grow where you grew it, that’s absolutely can happen. You can have varieties. . . That’s why there are so many varieties of everything, because everybody has different environments to grow their seeds in. So some things that do well for people in other parts of the state or other parts of the country, you know what I’m saying? That those varieties matter, what you choose, the types of things you choose, that matters a lot. But the seed itself has no bearing on the flavor of the fruit that you harvest, the quality, the yield, none of that. It’s only environmental and growing conditions that affect that, okay?

Again, a little bit of background, how do you know if the seed is fresh? This is the other comment that I get from customers all the time, that when they don’t germinate, the perception is that that seed, it was old or it was bad. People put in, you know, that label on everything. Seed companies like Jung Seed, Gurney’s, Johnny’s, doesn’t matter who you’re buying your seeds from. If it’s a reputable company, all of those seeds are tested rigorously and frequently. So those seeds, if you’re buying from a reputable seed company, that seed is the freshest that you can get for the season, for sure, no matter what. The seeds that don’t test at a high level, out they go. The seed companies have a vested interest in making sure that that seed germinates and germinates as well as possible. So there’s a bell curve of percentage of germination capability. So zero being the worst and 100% being the highest. The federal government is the one who sets those standards for everything, all seed varieties. Does everybody know that? Does everybody know that the federal government, they watch over all of us, right? So seed companies included. So all our seeds are tested; if it doesn’t pass, with Jung Seed company, again, when I say our, I’m talking about Jung Seed Company and the affiliates that they own or work with. But the federal government sets those standards, the Jung Seed company sets a standard even higher than that, 5-10% higher than whatever the federal standard is. So if it’s not testing at that high level, they don’t sell it. It doesn’t go into a packet to go to your house. So I just want everyone to understand that or know that.

All the seeds are stored in a climate-controlled seed vault. So humidity, temperature, that’s all kept as, again, for freshness. Just like if you went to a, you know, vegetable packing plant, they have standards that they have to stick to to make sure that what they’re putting in a frozen bag of peas is gonna be good, healthy, and fresh. Seeds are exactly the same. They’re handled by the USDA in exactly the same way. Fresh, viable seeds. We use ’em, they grow plants from those seeds. Again, we’re not gonna mess around or waste our time, energy, money on trying to grow plants from seeds that we know don’t germinate well. So everything is tested. That’s the USDA Federal Seed Act, you can look it up. You can look up the federal seed standards for everything online. I didn’t put a link, but it’s easy to find just through Google. Okay, so basic vocabulary. We’ll move forward a little bit.

Seeds, like I said, can do one thing, germinate. They send down a radical, right? Send up a hypocotyl or the stem and seed leaves, that’s it. And what happens when you have all of those three? What is it now? It’s a plant, that’s right. So you have a seedling. So everything that plants grow through, suffer through, that’s what dictates how well those seedlings will do, right? They have poor growing conditions, or if there’s something missing, those seedlings aren’t gonna do well. The seed did what it’s supposed to do, right? It germinated, it grew, but the plant may not do well. So I get this question a lot, or statement, that “All my seedlings died, therefore, the seed was bad.” Is that true?

– Audience: No.

– No, it’s never true. If the seed germinated and grew, you’re doing great.

Now it’s just a matter of taking care of that seedling, right? So what’s the recipe? That’s what everybody wants to know. What’s the recipe for growing seeds? It’s easier than most people think, especially for annual vegetables, annual flowers, it’s really pretty simple. There’s four things, there’s really only four things that 90% of all vegetable seeds you’re gonna grow or you’re gonna germinate need to germinate and grow well. Okay, that’s the recipe. Who makes pies? Any bakers bake pies? Any blue ribbon? County fair blue ribbon pie makers? One, maybe. So to get a really good pie, is it an accident that the crust comes out really good? No, it’s never an accident. Somebody put love into that pie. But what they did was they followed the recipe to a T. That’s how you get consistency and that’s how you get really good quality of that pie or that baked good. You can say cookies, cakes. So it’s the same thing with seeds. If you follow the recipe, you’ll get optimal results, okay? Super easy.

So those four things, I’m gonna go through these really quick. Moisture, right? It’s a given. Temperature, soil temperature, media temperature. Whether you’re starting indoors or outdoors, the soil temperature matters a lot. Seed depth, proper seed depth. This is one I don’t harp on a lot, ’cause it’s the most simple out of all the four main ingredients in the recipe, but it’s important. And oxygen, all living things need oxygen. We all need it, plants need it, seeds need it, okay? So proper moisture, temperature, depth, and oxygen. That’s it. Everybody can memorize that, right? I’ll talk a little bit about each one and why it’s so important and potentially what happens or what to look for or watch for if one of these things is missing. So if one of these four ingredients to the recipe is not right, or is, like I said, missing completely, you may have a really bad scenario. You may not get good germination. You might, because seeds are super forgiving. They’re really forgiving. Think about weed seeds. You ever get weeds in your garden? [audience laughs] How easy are they to sprout? You’re not caring for those. You’re not making sure they have this recipe, and yet they still come up. So it is pretty easy.

So ingredient one, moisture, imbibition. Imbibition, imbibing, right? We have to consume beverages by drinking them, pouring ’em down our mouth. If you laid in a bathtub and you could take in water that way, which you do a little bit, but that’s what seeds do. They imbibe, they absorb that moisture through the seed coat. That’s really important, because what does that do? That initiates germination. That’s what starts the process. If moisture, enough moisture doesn’t get through that seed coat, [blows raspberry] it’s not gonna grow, even if you have the other ingredients. Even if those are perfect, if the temperature’s right, there’s plenty of oxygen. If the moisture isn’t there, it’s not even gonna start, okay? How do we start that process? The easiest, simplest, fastest thing to do is soak your seeds. Who soaks their seeds before you plant? Few people. Eight hours, start with warm water, you know, right out of the tap, doesn’t matter. People say, “Well, I’m gonna only use distilled water.” Doesn’t matter, the seeds don’t care. Most tap water’s healthy enough for us to drink, so you can use it to start your seeds. Some people use chamomile tea. Who uses chamomile tea? Anybody? Chamomile tea has sulfuridic properties. So if you have varieties that are susceptible to soil-borne fungi, sometimes those seeds soaking in that chamomile tea, now they’ve absorbed some of that sulfur that better resists fungal pathogens, which is kind of cool.

But incidentally, I put a note on here to remind myself that the pre-soaking, that’s your home freshness test as well. So if you soak those seeds, start ’em. I start ’em at night when I’m going to sleep. After Wheel of Fortune, seeds go in the cup. [audience laughs] The next morning, I wake up. If those seeds haven’t sunk to the bottom of that cup, you’ll get floaters. Anybody who soaks seeds, you get floaters? Some of ’em float. That usually means the embryo’s dead. So in a packet of seed, if you have a hundred seeds, what’s a normal germination percentage? You know, what’s the capacity of that? If it’s 80%, you may get some floaters in that packet, from that packet, does that make sense? So there could be some floaters in every package. But some seeds, when you soak ’em, when you put ’em in the cup, it helps to stir ’em up a little bit. Just use your finger and stir ’em up or a spoon and stir ’em up. Because sometimes they’ll get a little air bubble that encapsulates the seed, ’cause there may be some little bit of botanical oil, you know, around that seed, depending on what it is. So they’ll build up an air bubble. And so you may have floaters in the morning, not because they’re bad or the embryo was dead, but because they had an air bubble around ’em all night. So it’s good when you wake up in the morning, I just tap ’em, just tap ’em really quick, and they’ll usually sink, even if they’ve been in that little air bubble or they’re at the surface, if they sink, you’re good, you’re good to go. I usually plant the floaters anyway, especially if there’s just a few of ’em, doesn’t matter. It’s not gonna affect your whole crop anyway. So I plant ’em because there’s always variables. So if there’s a little bit of embryo alive in that seed and it just didn’t soak up enough water, it still may have the capacity to germ. So I do it anyway.

So there are some things that you never soak. Some seed varieties or types, papery seeds, dill seed, marigold seeds, they don’t need to be soaked. You’ll do more harm than good.

Larger, fuller seeds, really hard seed coats, things like that is what you want, you know, primarily to be soaking. Again, because getting moisture through the seed coat is what’s most important to initiate the germination in the first place. Those seeds don’t have a problem soaking up moisture when they’re in the soil. Treated seeds. If you’re buying treated corn seed to plant out in the field, that has a fungicide product on it already, that’s to help benefit the seed to germinate in cold soils, just like I was talking about the chamomile tea absorbs the sulfuridic property. The fungicide is essentially sulfur, and that helps the seed to sit in cold, wet soil until it germinates. So if they’re treated, don’t soak ’em. Pelleted seeds, don’t soak pelleted seeds. Those have a clay coating around ’em to protect the seed and to make it easier to handle because those are usually teeny tiny seeds. So don’t soak those, just plant ’em.

Cucumber, regular cucumber, sweet corn seeds, things that are cucurbits in general are, they’re susceptible to soil-borne fungi. So you don’t wanna soak those seeds, soften the seed coat, and then plant ’em directly outside. If you’re planting ’em indoors, that’s okay. Your soil media, what you’re planting in the Jiffy, the soil mix, that’s sterile, right? There should be no soil-borne pathogens. Should be no. So if you’re gonna direct sow them, just hold off, don’t soak ’em. So after you soak ’em, rinse the seeds, you wake up in the morning, rinse the seed. I just do it in the same cup. I’ll put in a couple of, you know, new cups of water, pour ’em out, hold my finger. You can use a strainer. With really tiny seeds, you can use a piece of paper towel or a coffee filter. Those work really well, just rinse ’em off a little bit. Then moisten the seed starting mix. Always moisten the seed starting mix before you even start. You can do that while the seeds are soaking, really. You know, if you’re doing it in the same day. If I do it overnight, I’ll go and pre-soak the mix before I take the seeds out of the cup, you know, to sow ’em. After you get ’em sown, cover ’em, kitchen plastic wrap, a dome, everybody is familiar with that, right? You’re just holding in the moisture. You need the soil mix to be moist. You went through eight hours, you slept through your seeds starting to germinate in the cup while you were sleeping. So you need to carry that moisture concept all the way through the planting process.

Ingredient two, temperature. Why is temperature so important? Because all plant varieties, including vegetables, have evolved to specific conditions that they prefer, right? Don’t guess; use a thermometer. Use a probe thermometer so you know exactly what the temperature is. You’ll get different readings. You’re looking for an average, right? You’re gonna use a heat mat, you’re gonna use a radiator, you’re gonna use Grandpa’s back heating pad, those work great, if it has an adjustable thermometer on it. If it has a medium, high, low, those are great. Just don’t tell Granddad that you’re gonna take it, or put plastic over it so it doesn’t get ruined. But you have to have a way to test it. A lot of people will call me and I’ll say, “Well, what’s the soil temperature?” They say, “Well, I don’t know. It’s 72 in my house. ” And the air temperature– Which is nice, that sounds comfortable, but that doesn’t translate. The ambient air temperature will not translate to what the media temperature is, for a lot of different reasons. Whether it’s, you know, how much moisture is in that media, you don’t really know, we don’t have a moisture meter, we’re assuming it’s good.

If it is good and it’s been sitting there for a while, do you have a vent on, do you have a fan on? Oxygen is number four. It’s one of the most important things, so do you have a fan going? Is there air movement in the room? When that moisture in that media starts to evaporate, what happens? That automatically cools the temperature of the soil. Okay, does that make sense? So all of those things matter. So optimal temperature ranges for vegetables. They all have ’em, you can go look ’em up. UW-Madison probably has a nice page of what the optimal temperature is for any particular variety. Sometimes seed packets will say, they’ll give a range of what the soil temperature should be. That’s always a median. It’s always an average. Not what’s a maximum or what would be most optimal. That’s gonna be an average temperature. So if you don’t know, if you’re not familiar, look it up. Look those things up so you know what those temperatures are supposed to be. These are some examples that just, generally speaking, warm season, tropical crops, tropical plants, solanaceae, like tomatoes, eggplants, peppers, cucumbers, they all like hot weather, squash, they all like warm weather temperatures, right, to grow in. Generally speaking, the temperatures to germinate those seeds should be higher than things like cold crops, brassicas. Those things, you can generally guess that that’s gonna be a lower temperature. Onions, I use onions a lot as an example. Onions will germinate in 33 degree soil. They really will. It takes 140 days to do that, though. Who wants to wait that long? [audience laughs] And granted, if you plant it, if you sow it at 33 in March, you say, “Well, by April, the soil temperature will go up, right?” So as the soil temperature goes up, it decreases the number of days that that seed’s gonna sit in the soil. But in the meantime, what’s happening to that seed in the cold, wet soil?

– Audience Member: Rots.

– We don’t know. Yeah, it could rot, it could be attacked by all kinds of bad pathogens that destroy that seed. So if some of it survives, great, but you don’t wanna get sporadic germination. We want optimal germination.

So know what the soil temperature’s supposed to be for that given variety. Peppers, I use that example too. The hotter the pepper, the hotter the soil temperature should be, okay? Peppers have capsaicin, that’s a natural inhibitor for germination that helps suppress germination in peppers. So the more capsaicin they have, the hotter the pepper, the longer, you know, or the higher the temperature needs to be, and the longer it’s gonna take, even if you do everything perfect, again, if our recipe, if we’re following our recipe, if you start a Carolina Reaper, who grows Carolina Reapers? It can take 30 days at about 95-degree soil temperature and all those other recipe items equal, it can still take 30 days for that seed to germinate. That’s a really long time. When I plant seeds, I dunno about you, but I wanna see some progress. So 30 days, I’m off to doing something else in 30 days. So that all matters. Ingredient three, the depth, talked about a little bit. This is the least critical of the four, okay? But it’s still worth paying attention to.

If you’re gonna err, err shallow. That’s the answer, okay? If you’re not sure, plant it shallower. Generally, the bigger the seed, the deeper it can go, right? Because the bigger the seed, that means the larger the endosperm, you know, that it has more energy. The bigger seed has more energy, smaller seeds have less energy. So the deeper a smaller seed goes, if you’re planting carrots or onion seeds, if they’re just a hair too deep, what happens? They stop, they run outta energy. Remember, one third of the process is the radical has to go down. It just spent 30% of its energy right there. Next thing that happens is the hypocotyl, stem needs to go up to push the seed leaves, the cotyledons to the sun, where they can start to photosynthesize and make energy for that new seedling plant. But if they’re too deep, they peter out. They won’t push through the soil.

So you’re sitting there waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and you find out after the fact, maybe, if you’re careful enough to dig down and see what really happened, you’ll find a little seedling that has a radical, and it may have a little stem, and that’s it. So if you’re gonna err on something, err shallow, because they’ll still come up. They can have other problems after that, right? But you can usually overcome those issues of too shallow, and we’ll talk about that a little bit. Pelleted seeds, who plants pelleted seeds? Petunias are one of the main ones, carrots, some smaller seeded things. Pelleted seeds, you don’t bury at all because they’re in that clay coating. Those have to be. . . You press out your soil mix, press out your tray so that that mix is firm, and then you just lay the seeds on top and use the palm of your hand. I use a kitchen roller, speaking of pies. I’ll roll all over the top of ’em sometimes and just squish ’em into the top of the soil. That’s how you do pelletized seeds. Pelletized seeds, the coating, that clay coating needs to break down first before the seed makes soil contact and gets enough moisture to then germinate. So there’s two steps, essentially, with pelletized seed. Lots of people fail the first, second, sometimes even the third time when they plant pelletized seeds. So if that happened to you, don’t feel bad; happens to everybody. But that’s the trick to it, is just lightly press ’em into the soil and then keep ’em a little bit more moist than you do other things, you know, which is difficult, but it takes a really careful eye to keep them moist enough, but not too moist.

But oxygen, last ingredient, that’s all from the mix. The oxygen is in the mix. The oxygen helps in the air, obviously, it does a lot of good things for us. But the most important part of your seedling that needs the oxygen is the radical or the roots. The roots need the moisture. Don’t use potting soil; use seed starting mix. They only sell seed starting mix in small quantities generally. If you’re a commercial, you know, entity, you can buy a three-cubic-foot bag of it. But that’s not what most of us are doing. Even we’re doing a lot of seeds, we’re buying smaller packages. They’re almost always peat-based, they have a lot of perlite, they may have vermiculite and perlite, they’re very airy. They’re good at holding moisture, but they’re best at giving oxygen to the roots, okay? If you don’t have that, they lose tertiary pressure, it’s a whole big biochemistry thing that they can’t function and they essentially just suffocate if they don’t have enough oxygen. So that’s why it’s important.

Air movement, I mentioned. If the air is stagnant where you’re starting your seeds, just turn a little oscillating fan on. You know, depending on the space you have, there might be good enough airflow in there. You don’t want a heating vent or a cooling vent blowing on there, because again, that’s gonna alter the temperature of your mix and defeats the purpose potentially. No germination. Number one, is not enough moisture. If you’re getting little to no germination, number one culprit is not enough moisture, okay? That’s what I would check first. Improper temperature, either the set temperature’s too low; it’s possible it’s too high, rarely. You can get soil temperatures too high; if you have an adjustable thermostat on your heat mat, they can go up too high. 95, 100 degrees, that’s about the max for most things, even that love heat. 105, you’re getting in the danger zone. Lack of time, like we talked about with onion seeds, at the proper temperature, if you’re not seeing germination, go back, and you know, figure out, okay, what is the temperature? You know, put your thermometer in there and see what the temperature is, and compare it to how many days that should take to germinate and what it is, so on and so forth. Because at the temperature reading that you get, it may not be warm enough yet, right? So even if you’re giving ’em enough moisture, it could be that they’re just not warm enough.

One of the biggest mistakes that people make is to water with cold water. Who waters with cold water or just regular tap water? Everybody does. Everyone raise their hand. [audience laughs] I water with hot water, especially if it’s a tomato, or a pepper, or a squash, or a cucumber. The minute you pour cool or just regular tap water onto wet soil, again, what happens? That temperature goes down. And you’ll get different– On heat mat, in a tray of 72 or 100 cells, you’ll get a different temperature from one end of the tray to the middle to the other end. You’ll have a range of temperatures in there, even if it’s sitting on the heat mat, because heat mats are just coils, right? So depending on the consistency or how much soil is in each cell, how wet each cell is, you’ll get different temperatures. So you’re looking for the average, you’re trying to figure out what’s the average. If it’s too low, somewhere in that tray, I just flip it around, just move it around. Sometimes if you’re starting things in peat pots, like cucumbers, cucurbits, they don’t like to be transplanted. You should never start those in plastic pots or something you have to pull ’em out of. Should always be plantable, Jiffy’s, you know, something like that. But if you can take those peat pots out of the tray that they’re in, that you’re holding ’em in, set those on there separately, turn ’em vertically, turn ’em horizontally to try and increase that temperature in that to help, you know, increase the germination rate that you’re getting, because you’ll get some of the seedlings to come up, right, in a tray. They won’t all come up at the same time because that variability in temperature across the whole thing. So move ’em around, mess around with it. But take the temperature so you know what’s really happening. If you use warm water, it’ll decrease, or it can decrease or increase the temperature that those seeds have. So you may get a different result.

Improper soil depth, we talked about that. Generally, you’ll get poor or no germination if they’re too deep for whatever they are. But if they’re shallow, they’ll usually still germinate. So troubleshooting. These are the irritations, okay? This is why everyone’s here, right? Irritation, droopy, curled leaves, stems, anybody? Does this look familiar? It’s not a great picture, but you get the idea. Have you seen this?

– Audience: Yeah.

– I’ve seen it. That’s not my picture, but. . . [audience laughs] I’ve seen this. Those aren’t mine, but yeah. So if you’re seeing curled leaves, droopy stems from the top. Okay, that’s really important. If it’s at the top of the plant, anyone want to yell anything out, what do you think? It looks like they were too dry, right? It’s too wet. And that’s the number four ingredient. Oxygen, they don’t get enough oxygen. I mentioned briefly the tertiary pressure. In order for the roots to provide moisture to the top of the plant, they have to breathe like we do. Oxygen goes in, keeps your heart pumping, pumps blood to the rest of your body. The oxygen to the roots does basically the same thing. That’s a really simplistic explanation, but that’s how it works. So if the soil’s too wet or it’s lacking oxygen, you’ll get drooping, you’ll get that kind of a look.

Stretching, who sees stretching seedlings? Everybody, yeah. Happens a lot because we grow indoors, right, we’re growing inside. Does everyone know what stretching is caused by? There’s two things, right? [audience murmurs] It can be, lack of light is the main one, that’s usually the main culprit. But it could be too warm. If the seedling, after they germinate, because they’re on a heat mat, if you don’t take ’em off, if you don’t take those plants off that heat mat as soon as they germinate, or when I get about 65% germination on a tray, off the heat mat. It comes off the heat mat. Because if most of ’em have started to germinate, that means the rest of ’em are probably right behind. And the worst thing that would happen is if you take it off the heat mat and the rest of ’em don’t follow, you can always put it back on the heat mat, right? If maybe those seeds are more shallow, so they were planted too shallow compared to the other ones. So it’s gonna take longer for them to warm up, or use hot water just on those cells and see if you can get a different result. So it can be a combination of both. But the temperature generally after you get germination, after you see germination, off comes the plastic, off comes the dome, and they have to go into bright light right away, and in 8 to 10 degree cooler temperature generally than what they were getting on the heat mat. And that slows ’em way down. Which you think, “Well, I don’t wanna slow ’em down, I want ’em to grow fast.” But if you grow ’em too quickly, then you’ll get a lack of light, you’ll get stretching, and they won’t produce well, they won’t finish like they’re supposed to.

Okay, so what’s happening here? Looks like wilting. Yeah, does it look like wilting out there? Does on here. That’s my picture. [audience laughs] I put those on our kitchen windowsill. I was really disappointed that that happened. And it’s usually not correctable. That’s too wet. They were too wet. Those are tomato seedlings, that’s a lack of oxygen. Again, it looks like wilting, right? So when you see that, what’s the first thing gardeners do? They water ’em. [audience laughs] Right, guess what I did? I saw that and I panicked, and I watered ’em and I killed ’em, killed all. Yep, so yeah, it happens. It happens a lot and it happens fast. And again, you can try and save ’em by drying ’em out. You can separate ’em, and you know, transplant ’em into different soil. But I just started over. I mean, well, we had plenty is the real truth. So I didn’t fret about it too long. But yeah, it happens fast and it happens to everybody. So what if they’re tipping over from the base? This is damping off; that’s what it looks like. You might not see. . . They have a very characteristic constriction of the stem, the hypocotyl, right at the soil level. Usually they’re discolored. They’re usually brown, or burgundy, but not always. It depends what your seedlings look like, what they are, ’cause sometimes they’re very green, sometimes tomatoes, solanaceae can have kind of a purplish color on the stem anyway, right at the soil level. So you may not see it. What happens is that tipping. If you see ’em falling over right from the soil level, then you know you have damping off. This can happen individually or it’ll happen en masse. You’ll come out the next morning, they’ll all be laying there, or half of the tray will be laying there. That’s not a good feeling because there is nothing you can do about that. Then you know there’s a problem.

So we can talk about this a little bit. So prevention is the most important thing to prevent damping off. Damping off happens from overwatering. It’s like we talked about with droopy stems, but it encourages the growth of a pathogen, that’s what happens. The pathogen is what we call damping off, but it’s actually a water mold that attacks the little seedling. It’s not. . . Sanitation is one of the most important things to make sure that the area where you’re growing the seed is as sanitary as possible. And people always ask, “Well, what does that mean?” If you can eat where. . . You know, if you can prepare food where you’re germinating your seeds, that’s good. If you don’t want to eat out there, it should be cleaner. It should be clean. It should be clean. If you’re reusing pots, sterilize ’em. Sterilize the tools, sterilize your pruners. Make sure that everything, if you’re using a trowel in your garden, don’t ever take it into the house to dig soil or starting mix out of the fresh bag that you just bought, ’cause you just tainted it. It’s no longer. . . Even the seed starting mix you saved from last year and you roll up the top and you put it in the corner of the garage, that’s not sterile anymore, right? ‘Cause your hands have been in it, your tools have been in it. I use a plastic pot to dip into that bag and fill other pots with it. I always bleach that pot after I get done with it, so I know that that’s clean before I use it again. So sanitation is really important, but trying not to overwater is also super critical. Again, these are just a couple slides that you’ll see examples of what damping off looks like.

How about curled leaves, curled, dried leaves? This is a lack of water; that’s wilting. You know, that’s what’ll happen. When the leaves start to curl up, sometimes they curl under, sometimes they curl in from the edges. That means there’s either poor ventilation, or they’re just not getting enough moisture, or it’s too hot, or it could be a combination of all those things. So lower the temperature, water ’em a little bit, know what the soil moisture is, you know, feel around in the little pots, and you can usually prevent that. How about stuck seed coats? You ever see that, stuck seed coat? Two things, pretty easy. If they’re too shallow, that causes it. Like I mentioned, if you’re gonna err on shallow or too deep, shallow, because you can always get the seed coat off. You have to just use a spritzer, you know, a little mister and spray it, spray it, spray it, spray it, and use a little tweezer, go into the medicine cabinet and get a tweezer, and you can gently coax that seed coat off of there. Sometimes if the mix is too dry. If it’s too dry.

If it’s too dry and too shallow, you always get this. [chuckles] That happens a lot. What about pale, yellow leaves and no growth, stalled growth? It’s been six weeks, they’re sitting there, they look the same. I water ’em, but they don’t grow, they don’t proceed. That’s called stalled growth. This is probably the number one thing I get called about, you know, during seed starting season. I get called about this all the time. This is a simple lack of nutrition. They’re starving, those seedlings are starving. The seed starting mix, Jiffy’s, coco coir, whatever, they provide, like I talked about oxygen, a good amount of oxygen that they need. And they also provide decent moisture holding capacity, which is great; that’s what all the seedlings need. But they don’t have nutritional value. They don’t have nutritional value. They’re not meant to do that. That’s what the soil in your garden provides and that’s what the soil in potting soil has. Incorporating, seed starting mixes will usually say on the bag that they’re fertilizer free, they’re free of fertilizer, and that’s to protect the radical. ‘Cause the radical, the little root that comes out of the seed coat is really sensitive to nitrogen, particularly. They can burn really easily. If it has too much nitrogen or too much fertilizer, they can burn. So that’s left out. So you can increase that, you can feed them as soon as they get hypocotyls. As soon as they break the surface and they have their seed leaves, you can start to feed ’em.

It’s kind of a myth. I think people are scared about fertilizing too soon because, well, the seed mix doesn’t have fertilizer, but you can wait until they get their first set of true leaves. As soon as you start to see ’em divide and get their true leaves, you can start then, if you’re getting good growth. If they sit in that cotyledon, you know, position for a long time, and those cotyledons, the cotyledons provide energy back to the seed, right, or back to the root. So if they start to get yellow, you could have a problem. They can’t proceed any farther than that, right? Plants keep a balance. The leaves produce roots and the roots produce more leaves. So they have to stay in balance that way to continue to grow and get bigger and healthier.

So just feed ’em. And I put some suggestions on the handout of what to feed ’em. Usually it’s a water-soluble food, low in nitrogen, higher in phosphorus, because phosphorus, that’s the middle number, right, on the formula, fertilizer formula. Phosphorus feeds the roots. What about purple/red leaves? Happens a lot on tomatoes, peppers, solanaceae. This is a phosphorus deficiency. It can happen for several different reasons though. One being if the soil temperature is too cold. Spring, it’s cold outside, plants don’t like to grow. If you’ve hardened ’em off and put ’em out in the garden, if the nighttime temperatures get too low, you can start to see purpling on the leaves, especially on tomatoes. It usually goes away; this is nothing to panic about. You can feed. . . Sometimes if the pH is not quite right, it’s complicated, but the phosphorus gets tied up. It’s there, but the plants can’t absorb it. So if they’re outside already, there’s not much you can do about changing the temperature. It is what it is. You can try and feed ’em with a water-soluble food, you can try and lower the pH. Usually by the time you do all that, it’s gonna warm up anyway, and this’ll go away. But it’s good to know. Sometimes you can have purple leaves from the variety you’re growing. These are peppers that just happen to have purple leaves. It’s not a deficiency at all. That variety just has purple leaves.

So what about white blotches on leaves? You see this? There are a lot of different scenarios, but usually, sunscald, sunburn is most common. It can be a phototoxicity issue. If you’re using neem oil or something like that and you spray at the wrong time of the day, if it’s too hot, it can cause this kind of look; you’ll get white blotching. It happens to cucumbers a lot. Tomatoes are pretty sensitive plants, other solanaceae. Again, it’s temporary. Those leaves that get scalded, they’re not gonna change, they’re not gonna go back, but eventually the plant can grow through it, and you’ll just pick those off eventually.

But how about this, this is weird. This doesn’t happen to seedlings, generally. This happens to young plants in the garden. And I hear about this and I see this. I get probably a hundred photos a season now, where in the last four years, I’d probably get three customers that would write in and say, “My tomatoes,” these are tomato plants. Have you ever seen this or something like it? This is from herbicide. This is an accidental herbicide drift issue. About a thousand normal household garden products have something called 2,4-D in them that causes this to happen. Tomatoes are really sensitive to 2,4-D, to dicamba, Roundup to some degree, or glyphosate. So if they’re too close or you’re using, I get a lot of people that say this happened to their tomato plants. And when I ask questions, they say, “Well, yeah, my lawn is right there and I use a weed and feed on my lawn.” That drifts. When it starts to, you know, it goes. . . Those chemicals are very volatile. So when it warms up, they get watered, and it goes into the air and it can accidentally damage the plant like this. The plant could grow out of it. Those are all growth regulating chemicals, so the plant could grow out of it, but usually it’s best just to start over, pull those out. So it’s kind of sad when that, you know, if you do it by accident or your neighbor, you know, who knows, or the farmer down the street potentially, I don’t know, because it can drift a long way. But anyway, that one was kind of interesting. So that’s pretty much the end, right? Not the end. We’ll call it a beginning. When I give talks like this, I like to say, “Well, it’s just the beginning, right, of doing your seeding and starting plants from seed.” I hope that was helpful. Thank you very much.

[audience applauds]