How To Germinate Seeds

Today, I'm going to show you how to germinate seeds. The first thing I'm going to do is prepare a seed tray with some seed compost in. It's important to use seed compost and not multi-purpose compost because seed compost is well-drained and it gets rid of any excess water.

So, I've put some seed compost in my seed tray. I now want the seed compost to soak up some water. So, I put my seed tray into another tray and then fill that tray with water like this.

And this seed tray will soak up that water. I'm now going to sow the seeds onto the seed tray. As you can see, I'm sprinkling them onto the surface of the tray.

They're nicely evenly distributed. I now want to cover those seeds with some more seed compost and I do that by putting the seed compost in a sift like this, and covering the seeds like that, just sprinkling the seed compost over the seeds. Now, some seeds are so tiny that you actually don't have to cover them with any compost at all.

They will germinate just sitting on the compost surface. It's important that whatever seeds you're sowing, that you check on the seed packet before you proceed. So, I'm just finishing covering these seeds now with seed compost.

Once I've put the seed compost into the tray, I need to firm it down nicely and that's best done with a nice block of wood like this. That creates a nice level compost surface for the seeds to grow on. Once the seeds have germinated here, some young tomato plants that I planted about a week ago, as you can see, they've already germinated.

And once they've grown quite big like this, the next job is to just what's called pricking them out. So, do it very carefully, dig them out of the compost like that, and we pot them on onto individual pots like this. So, we place the seedling in the pot, firm it down very gently.

And there we have a brand new tomato plant. And that's how you germinate seeds. .