In this video I will be taking you through how I have been starting seeds and give you an update on progress so far as a novice gardener planting over 30 different types of seeds in the spring in zone 9b.
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00:00 Hello everybody, welcome back. Today we're going to do 3 things. That is cold stratification
00:22 of lavender seeds, which I'll do a demo on that. We'll also be planting some seeds in
00:28 the compost of some trays using compost. I'll be giving you an update on how things have
00:37 progressed over the past week or so. We're just past St Patrick's Day. We've had some
00:43 really good weather this week which has brought on plants, many of the plants and brought
00:47 seedlings up as well. I'll just bring them up closer to the camera and show you first
00:54 of all what I've been planting. So I have some night scented phlox which I just transplanted
00:59 this week. That's about a month ago. I started planting that. I have some Californian poppies.
01:06 I'm going to be sowing some yellow ones today. These are frilled rose. They have been planted
01:14 just in a pop out site along with some red poppies that people will be more familiar
01:19 with probably. Planted some nasturtium seeds, just a handful of those. Lavender, this is
01:26 the type of lavender, it's monsted. That's what we're going to be sowing and putting
01:30 in the fridge later on. Hollyhock, we'll be sowing them today as well. Pansy seeds I've
01:39 sown about 2 weeks ago. Left them up in an airing cupboard in the dark in the heat and
01:45 they've come up really well this past week. I've got some tomatoes here, some broccoli.
01:54 These are the poppies that I put you in a wee demo of sowing the seeds. I've already
02:03 done it so I've already filmed that part. I'll be lowering my camera so you can actually
02:06 see what I'm doing for those and the hollyhock. These are one of the packets of sweet pea.
02:13 I've had a few come up from other packets so far of sweet pea. I have about 6 or 7 sweet
02:20 pea plants at the moment seedlings and I'm hoping these ones will be more successful.
02:25 I kind of messed up the germination process for the first few packets but I still got
02:32 a few out of it and I'm hoping to trade them up for others of my own. So what I have in
02:37 front of me here first up is nasturtiums. They're about a month old and these are really
02:43 the star in terms of how well the seeds I've planted so far have been doing. I've planted
02:49 5 of these. They were old seeds. 2 came up and these are a trailing variety so you can
02:55 plant them in the ground for ground cover. Here's the other one as well doing equally
03:00 well. I've put little sticks from plants that came up last year beside them just to support
03:07 them until we can get them under the ground later in the spring. Here we have some of
03:13 the tomato plants, seedlings. I've just transplanted them this week. I've planted with the stems
03:21 pretty far down and all the little hairs on the stems under the soil will turn into roots
03:28 and help support the plant as it grows. You can already smell that beautiful tomato leaf
03:33 smell from the leaves even though they're still quite small. Here, this will be a nightmare
03:42 to try and transplant but this is lovelia on this side. This is white lovelia, it hasn't
03:47 come up. It shows you the difference. I didn't read the packet instructions. Well this packet
03:52 was actually in Ukrainian I think it was when I bought them online. I covered the white
03:58 ones with some soil before realising you need to plant the seeds on the soil and they need
04:07 to germinate. So all the blue ones you may be able to pick it up there. There is a chart
04:15 of them, there's hundreds there germinating and I only used half the packet. I'll just
04:19 keep the others for another time. But it's safe to say we'll have some blue lovelia if
04:26 things don't go badly wrong with them. Here I have some broccoli which has come up very
04:33 well and I'll need to transplant that soon because it's not going to survive in this
04:41 little tray so I'll need some deep pots I think for this. To get that going, these were
04:50 some free seeds that were sent with some seeds I ordered. They're plant sprite marigolds.
05:00 I have pot marigold as well which is this one here. Now they're two totally different
05:06 plants. These are ecthyte calendula but people refer to them as marigolds in many parts of
05:11 the world. Bright orange yellow flowers. These ones will have little bushy kind of flowers
05:17 and ferny foliage. I have some lupins that have come up. I've transplanted them straight
05:30 away because they have a big taproot and they don't like being in small containers. I'll
05:36 probably plant these on as soon as I get a couple of sets of lupin leaves. They're quite
05:41 distinctive family leaves. One thing that hasn't been so successful is the larkspur
05:52 type of delphinium. Once they were transplanted they were in the shock and a lot of them just
05:57 killed over and died. I still have about a dozen there so we'll see how they get on.
06:03 I've planted quite a few things this week. I'll update you on all those over the coming
06:11 weeks. Other things that didn't work was sunflowers. I can never seem to grow sunflowers. I have
06:19 some codicia coming up. Baby's breath I'll be transplanting over the next week. Some
06:25 of the best of all things. Herbs, very few have come up. They're very low seeds so I
06:33 wasn't expecting great things. We'll see how they do. I'll leave them on now a few weeks
06:38 and if they don't appear I'll just reuse the compost and pots outside. That's everything.
06:45 I'll lower the camera now and show you how I'm going to clear away a bit here, get some
06:50 compost out and we'll sow some seeds. The different seeds I'm planning to plant today
06:56 are sweet pea variety. They're going to be pre-soaked for 24 hours so I'll just show
07:03 you how I do that before I start sowing the seeds. Another sweet pea that will go through
07:09 the same treatment although I'll do one and then another. Those are the three I showed
07:14 last week. They need about 12-24 hours I'd say just to loosen the hard seed cutting and
07:25 then you can plant them straight into the soil. Hopefully the best I have some doing
07:28 that at the moment. Then I have picked these up this week, Californian poppies. I have
07:35 pink poppies to sow direct into the garden and red poppies. These are a mixture of orange
07:43 and yellow ones but it says that these can be sown indoors. I'll give them a go anyway.
07:49 I have plenty of other options as you'll see later. If these don't come up then these
07:55 are the hollyhock I talked about last week as well. I've planted these two straight into
07:59 the soil today. I'll do a few of each, not done it for you with doing every single one
08:04 of them but just to show how I do it. Everybody seems to have their own little techniques
08:11 for sowing seeds and I've had great tips online as well. Based on YouTube if you watch different
08:18 gardeners on there and other video social media channels. So first off I'm going to
08:30 take a little ceramic dish, add a little water to it. There you can see a little water there.
08:47 And then I'm going to take one of these packets of these seeds. This is the True Fragrance
08:51 from Sutton's. See there they have pretty good germination rate. We'll soon see. These
09:07 are quite big seeds, sweet pea, so they're quite easy to work with and quite easy to
09:15 see what you're doing. So there is around 25 seeds in this packet. There's one stuck
09:22 in the corner here. I see where he went, I've got one in a minute. So all I'm doing, this
09:30 is the seeds. You can see them, they are like little small balls. I'm just going to pop
09:47 these into the water now, or at least any more of them, and let them sit. Or one of
10:06 them, they all are well, there's two floating ones, which could mean that the seed is actually
10:13 dead and it's not going to germinate. Or it could be just that they shall dry and then
10:17 they take in a bit of water and then you might see it pop up then. But I'll plant them anyway
10:23 and I'll get the other one and throw him in as well. So that's that done. I'll leave that
10:27 aside and maybe plant those tomorrow morning. Today is Saturday. So next I'm going to do
10:37 a product, Californian poppies. This is SKZMX, I'm not sure if I'm saying that right. I know
10:51 these grow quite tall, let's see here. So up there with 35cm, so it should be on a par
10:58 with the other Californian poppies I have, the rose coloured ones. So first of all, I'll
11:06 do this actually. I'm just going to pre-soak the compost. You can put, this is just multi-purpose
11:13 compost, it's quite a fine mix, some are quite rough, you can take out any lumps that you
11:19 came across. Like that, that's fine. You can break them down normally. This is quite fine
11:27 and there seems to be a lot of sand through it which is good for the roots of the seeds.
11:33 So I'm just going to mix a little water in here now. The reason I'm pre-soaking it before
11:39 I add it to the tray is that sometimes if you water the seeds after you put them on,
11:50 it can scatter the seeds, it can wash them off even. You can end up with a clump of seedlings
11:59 or it can wash them on the surface of the soil. Some seeds like to be sown on the surface
12:05 of the soil because they need sun, but a lot of them need a coating of soil before they
12:10 germinate. So that's a decent enough consistency, that wasn't very much water, but I will spray
12:16 them afterwards with a spray gun here. That's good and moist and it's not too wet either.
12:30 As I found out this week, one of the trays of seeds I had wrapped in clingfilm to keep
12:38 the moisture in, but a little bit of mould formed on top of it. It doesn't seem to stop
12:44 the lobelia seeds coming up though. So I just removed that top layer of the mould and hopefully
12:49 that'll be fine now. So I'm just going to pack this in, not pack it too tightly. This
12:58 is a good deep dish as well actually. It should be a mature take-out for the roots to go down
13:09 and for the plants to get their second, third leaves, third set of leaves and then you can
13:17 transplant them in at that stage. So that should be, that's actually probably a bit
13:22 too much. So that's OK there. Firm but not too firm. So we'll now just take our aloponin
13:37 pappy seeds. There's always good information on the back of the packets. This one says
13:42 1.5cm deep, so just a light coating of soil over the top of it. Be careful not to overwater.
13:53 So store in a warm place. So they need temperature, 10 to 13 degrees Celsius in Germany. That
14:03 would be just in your Monde Solic at this time of year. It's March now. So you plant
14:11 on when the seedlings are strong enough and keep them in a light position. And then they
14:20 can be put out after the frost. I'm waiting to plant the other ones into the ground for
14:25 a month or so until the last frost date has passed. We had a frost this morning here so
14:36 I could have killed all the plants if I left them out. I'm going to look at these first.
14:45 Very dirty hands here. There's quite a few seeds in that. Maybe 100, not more. We'll
14:58 throw them on and see what comes up. These are big enough seeds. I planted some petunias
15:06 last week and those seeds are tiny and the lobelia seeds as well are tiny. It was hard
15:12 to see what was going where. These are big enough so I'm just going to... There's another
15:20 thing you can do, and I've seen people do it and I've done it a few other trays, is
15:23 you can just run a finger down the soil and create a wee ridge and then sow them in rows
15:34 like that and then pull the soil up a bit. I'll try a couple of those. There's quite
15:47 a lot of seeds here. Should I do two trays? I'll just throw them all in here. I'll separate
15:58 them out if there's a really good germination rate on them. They're a lovely colour and
16:06 I really need to stop buying seeds because they're far too many. But it'll be interesting
16:13 to see. And when the good weather comes there'll be no bothering then on that house full of
16:18 plants. Or the garden full of plants at last. So there we go. That's probably enough soil
16:25 for now. That's just a little sprinkling on the top of them. I wouldn't even say that
16:33 if I put on half a centimetre there. That'll do rightly. So that's those ones. Now I'm
16:43 going to plant a few hollyhocks. I don't know how many seeds are in these. These are hollyhock
16:53 giants. I'm not mixed. I was saying last week these could grow up to about 6 feet. These
16:58 are huge big flowers. Beautiful different colours. You can see some of the colours there.
17:04 There's pink and orange and almost black. It's like a dark, dark red. Yellow. I've never
17:11 seen a yellow one grow before. There's all sorts of colours in them. And they'll be nice
17:17 and amongst the large bur which are all shades of blue. I think these are inside a little
17:28 sachet. And they have a handy marker as well on them. These are Johnson seeds. I've had
17:38 quite a lot of success. I grew tomatoes from Johnson seeds last year. They came up great.
17:47 I grew a few tomatoes off them. Just grew them here in the kitchen by the glass doors.
17:51 Because the climate is too cold you would need a greenhouse or something like that for
17:55 tomato potting. This is a plant in trays as well. Keep it around 15 degrees. So again,
18:09 no need for any special treatment really with these. Just cover with glass or polythene
18:19 or something like that. Or a propagator lid. I find a bit of cream foam that you can reuse
18:27 or if you do have a bit of clear glass or something like that just place it over the
18:32 top of them. That should do. So I'm going to get some more compost for this. I might
18:37 actually just plant them on a tray if I can find another tray to do because maybe put
18:44 two in pots. But I know these have a tap root that doesn't like being disturbed. So there's
18:50 not much of a difference as you can see in the tray and the pot in terms of height. So
18:56 I might do as well. There's not very many of these so I may do that. Let's see now.
19:24 There we go. Another tray. A few holes in it. I might actually puncture a few more.
19:35 So here we are with this other tray now. There's a few holes punctured on it and I'm just going
19:39 to puncture a few more. And that's plenty enough. I just don't want the soil to become
20:02 waterlogged. That's not good for the safety either. So I need some more soil first.
20:30 That should be enough. So I just dump this right here and mix it up first. Again with
20:45 some water. Oops. Just break open a bit closer. You can come across here while you're doing
21:04 this. There we go. I was reading a thing the other day about a lot more young people taking
21:25 up gardening as well and it being used for therapeutic reasons. And there is definitely
21:26 something to be said for getting in touch with nature and just watching nature come
21:31 along with improving your mood and your mental health too probably. So that's that thing
21:42 broken down. And even for young children too, just teaching them about the world around
21:52 them and just to care for something and give them that little bit of knowledge about nature
22:03 is just a great thing. And I said it last week too, it's not an expensive thing either
22:09 I feel. It can be expensive if you want to buy big fancy greenhouses and things, you
22:14 know, or really rare plants and stuff like that. But it doesn't have to be. All you really
22:19 need is a bag of compost, a household container of some sort, a few seeds. And the good thing
22:28 about a lot of the plants is you can collect the seeds then come the end of the summer
22:35 or autumn time and just put them in an envelope, keep them for the next year. I've done that
22:42 before with Delphiniums, I grew them two years in a row but they were shot quite hard. I think
22:51 growing them the first year but the second year they all came up. So that's them done.
23:01 So we have here, if you remember these are the Hollyhogs over here. These are quite different
23:17 seeds, you can't really pick them up there, they're little kind of flat ones. They're
23:27 quite large as well so it's easy to see where you're putting them. Which is grand.
23:34 I'm just spacing these out, maybe a centimetre or two between them. It makes it easier then
23:47 when you're transplanting seedlings that the roots aren't all tangled and you're not damaging
23:52 them. You don't have to pick any of them up. I have some little pots here that I watered
23:59 earlier, I might actually use up a couple of them as well.
24:20 I have this pot here that's really old with the moistened clay.
24:25 It's like a piece of stone.
24:31 There's three in there.
24:38 And then just finish off here.
24:46 I probably needed a full size tray for this one because they are quite... there's a lot
25:00 more seeds than I think it's... I guess it is, which is a good thing of course.
25:07 Now...
25:09 Cover with a fine layer again, so similar to the last ones there. A fine layer of soil.
25:23 And I'm just going to keep both of these, like some of the seeds I've grown in the Arran
25:31 orchard, I put them up there to germinate and they've all come out great, the ones that
25:37 need heat. But these really don't. The temperatures that it's talking about there, can be up to
25:44 10 degrees Celsius. Can you say what that is?
25:48 No.
25:55 I'm not going to convert the different temperatures, but that's fine for where we are here. That's
26:06 here in the Arran orchard.
26:08 So, that's more or less it.
26:11 The good thing about faggots seeds is you can see whether you've covered them or not.
26:23 I've just gone in...
26:25 Now they all seem to be covered now, so that's grand.
26:29 And then the final thing I'm going to do, and these ones I'm just going to pop them down,
26:34 like so.
26:35 Into this one, so that I'm just covering them with my finger.
26:41 Right, so that's those two parches of seeds now on the ground. Just make sure there's
26:46 no more stuff in the bottom here.
26:50 And then, the last thing to do is stick a wee label on. So I must get a label for these
26:58 ones.
26:59 And then spray them, spritz them.
27:05 This just gives a fine mist and this won't move the seeds, especially larger seeds. It's
27:13 not going to move them around the place. And those that are covered are not going to move
27:18 too far.
27:19 But just moistens the seed itself as well. Makes it easier to crack through the coating.
27:29 So we'll keep an eye on that now. Right over the next weekend, see if anything comes up.
27:36 Some seeds can take up to a month to appear.
27:41 And I've just added some seeds, which I'll show you later, that I've taken the label
27:49 out of, out of one side. I've not shown you them now actually. These are the 19th of Flax
27:55 on this side, which all came up. But I had another packet of seeds here, which I can't
28:01 remember. I had a label on it, but the closing 100 came up and these were about a month old
28:05 now. I threw the label out thinking I'll transplant these and then reuse the compost and pots
28:14 for this side. But now two have come up overnight, last night, and I don't know what they are.
28:21 So I'll wait and see if any more come up. But nice to see. But that's over a month I
28:29 think. I was new to the start of February, those were the very first seeds I planted
28:34 this year. So it'll be interesting to see if any more come up. I know Virginia's take
28:40 a long time, Lobelia's as well. I have those up the stairs. Hansays can take a long time
28:47 as well. I was surprised, I planted some about day two to go now and they're starting to
28:55 come up just this last few days. So I've taken them out of the darkness and the heat and
29:01 put them somewhere where they can get a bit of sun. They're starting to get leggy, because
29:07 if they get leggy then they collapse on themselves and the stems break and they're not very strong
29:13 plants and strong seedlings. So that is everything here for the minute. We'll do a wee tour in
29:20 a while and then I'll show you the cold stratification of the lavender. I'll do a demo maybe if that's
29:25 ok.
29:50 So here we have what you will need to get started with cold stratification. So we have
29:56 a placket of lavender seeds, water spray, some paper towels. Now this paper towel is
30:07 quite thin and probably likely to break. It's a cheap one so I'll leave that aside. And
30:13 this is a thicker one that I have. It's too big for the zip lock bag which is the fourth
30:19 thing you're going to need. So I'm going to cut this. Now you could always fold it over
30:25 but it's a little bit tricky when you add the seeds onto it. So I'm just going to cut
30:34 this to size first. Just so it fits neatly inside the bag. Make sure that's fine. And
30:50 then I'm going to cut this around the side. So there we have two sheets of kitchen roll,
31:14 paper towels and put the ends aside and use them for a hanky or something. So now I'm
31:21 going to take my lavender seeds and open them. And I'll just take off a little, actually
31:31 I'll keep it on until they're ready to be planted out. So the lavender seeds are inside
31:38 here and then firstly, before I open those actually, we'll just get started on wetting
31:45 the first piece of kitchen roll. Maybe use the flatter side. So one, two, three, four,
31:58 five, six. I'm just going to leave that for a minute. It's probably not wet enough. But
32:08 you don't want to soak it, you want to let the water spread out towards the edges. And
32:14 you can see they just start to absorb the water as well on that. So here are the lavender
32:31 seeds. The date on this packet is soo by December 2027. So we've a good three years on these,
32:43 which is great. Most seeds you have to use, well they tell you to use within a year or
32:49 two. But I have seeds that are years old. You might not get as good a germination rate
32:57 but you might get one or two up. So, with old seeds. The lavender seeds are quite small
33:08 as you can see and they would fit there, so in this packet. So what I'm going to do is
33:15 put some of them back into the packet because there's probably too many for this one sheet.
33:24 And there we have about half the packet here now. And what I'm just going to do is check
33:30 that it's damp enough I think. And then just sprinkle the seeds over it. Just keep sprinkling.
33:54 Try and space them out. It's not an exact sense but they're too small to be totally
34:11 accurate with. So that's them now on the paper towel. We're almost finished. So the next
34:21 process is just placing this over the top of that one. Press it down. You want the seeds
34:35 to have good contact in between the two sheets. And I'm just going to spritz this as well.
34:48 Four spritzes on that one. So it's like a seed sandwich basically. Going into a sandwich
34:56 bag. So here we go. We have a Ziploc bag here. These are just bags you could take, you know,
35:04 for airport toiletries and things like that. So one like that. Or you could alternatively
35:11 use a plastic container. C3 ones are quite good because then you can see if there's any
35:19 seeds germinating inside it. Now we have this. See, carefully just lift it and try to lay
35:29 it flat inside the bag. And I'm going to do this just with the span of my hand. And then
35:36 just place it inside. And this mimics the effects then of the seed lying on the ground
35:50 in winter. Going through that cold period, that cold damp period in the dark. And then
36:04 hopefully waking it up and germinating. And once you see the little seeds come through,
36:12 then you can get little tails, like little roots. And then once you see that happening,
36:20 you can take them out, plant them in soil. This is still quite... I'm going to give it
36:25 another few spritzes in here. There we go. It's quite a throttling paper. But that's
36:38 it really now for the fridge. I just want to make sure there's some air out here. You
36:44 want it to be as flat as possible and you want the seeds to be in between those two
36:52 paper towels so they're making contact with the damp paper. So that's them. I'll take
37:01 you over now to the fridge and show you what I do then. So, I'll open the fridge here.
37:18 As you can see, I'm just laying them flat on the shelf in the fridge.
37:24 Make sure it's locked up.
37:27 Again, making sure there's no air.
37:35 Or as little air as possible inside it.
37:42 And that's it now. So we'll just leave it there for a few weeks. And just above that
37:48 one, you can see there's already one that I planted a few weeks ago and that's lavender
37:54 as well. Lavender is a great plant to plant out. It's a great companion plant for all
38:03 the vegetables and things like that, that the slugs and snails will eat. They won't
38:07 eat the lavender and they don't like strong smells. So I'm hoping to create a row of these
38:12 after germinating. These have been on for about two weeks and I haven't really checked
38:19 on them yet, like, but, this last few days. But I don't see any noticeable difference
38:24 yet. But they can take up to four weeks. I think it's usually around the three week mark
38:29 that you might start seeing the little tiny tails. They're such small seeds as well so
38:33 they probably need to give it a close inspection. But that's the process there. And see how
38:39 you get on. There's quite a lot of seeds you can do this with. But check just on the, on
38:45 different websites and things like that, you know, Gardening Experts. And they will tell
38:52 you which seeds this process is good for. It increases the germination rate too normally.
39:00 So, if you were to plant these seeds straight in the soil, you might not get very many,
39:05 you might not get any at all. Because they haven't gone through that kind of, wandering,
39:11 full wandering as this is. So, there we go. That's cold stratifying. Thanks for watching.
39:18 [Music]