How To Grow Seedlings

Hello I'm Mike. Welcome to Camden Garden Center. I'm going to give you some help with some gardening advice.

I'm going to show you how to grow seedlings, or as we term it, pricking out seedlings. What you need for that are the seedlings, and here we have some cape gooseberries. You need a container to grow the seedlings in, and this is a standard seed tray.

As you can see it's got drainage holes through the bottom to let the excess water escape from it. It's important that the container is clean. You don't have to use a standard seed tray, just a small pot will do.

It depends how many seedlings you want to raise. And then finally you'll need a potting compost. The seeds were germinated in a seed compost.

But at this stage you will need to move them out of the seed compost into a compost that contains more nutrients, and John Innes Potting Compost No. 2 is ideal for this. John Innes is a recipe.

People can actually make their own John Innes. If you didn't want to use John Innes Compost, then multi-purpose compost will do just as well. So I'm going to put the compost in the seed tray now, and it's important that you use a proprietary compost.

You shouldn't use soil from your own garden, it wouldn't have the right texture and there's a danger that soil from the garden would contain pests and diseases and weed seedlings so you'd get weeds growing up in your seed container. These proprietary composts are pasteurized to kill off any weed seeds and pests and diseases in the soil. If you find that the potting compost, when it comes out of the bag, is a little bit dry, then at this stage, you will want to immerse the tray in some water so I'm just going to put this in here.

You leave it there for a few minutes until the water is absorbed into the compost. This compost is quite moist so I don't really need to do that. And now I'm going to pick out the seedlings.

You need a little stick or a pencil, I'm going to use a ballpoint pen here to take the seedlings out of the seed tray. It is important at this stage that you handle the seedlings only by the leaves and not by the stems. The seedling has only got one stem and there's a danger you might crush or bruise that stem and injure the plant.

So I'm going to hold the plant by its leaf, put the dipper directly underneath there, tease the seedling gently out of the compost, trying to minimize root damage as much as possible. And I'm going to space these nine across and five down. So I just dig a little hole there, drop the root in, and firm the soil around the base.

It's important when you're doing this to space the seedlings apart in the new tray as evenly as possible. If you've got an uneven distribution of your little seedlings then they're going to grow unevenly as well. If you find that the root is very long as it is in this case, then it's ok to just pinch off the bottom of the root there.

And to get this even, I'm going to start at the other end now. In the center. I was thinking if you let me do, because that's nine, five, and then you've got the grid to work with, so if you'd let me put these in.

And now I've got a guide to work to there and I just carry on working across keeping my rows as even as possible. And then when you've completed this process, you need to leave these seedlings just for twenty four hours in a shady part of the greenhouse so they can overcome the transplant shock they've suffered in being moved out of the seed tray into this larger container. And that's how you prick out seedlings in containers.