High Cost of Seed Starting

[sherwindu]

Unfortunately, I have no floor head register, but wall mounted forced air ducts. I am going to be stingy about using my heating pads next year. As soon as I see sprouts, I'm either going to turn down or turn off the heating pads. It never gets that cold in my crawl space.

I use two shop lites each with a regular florescent and a grow light, to give the most broad spectrum of light.

Now there I have no problem. You should carefully pry up the plants trying to retain as much original growing media, as possible. Plant your spindly seedlings deep, as they will generate new roots. Not sure exactly what is your problem with transplanting?

Sherwin

[Kay Lancaster]

Handle seedlings by the cotyledons (seed leaves), not by the stem. It's too easy to accidentally crush the stem of a seedling. That's one of the most common causes of seedling death. If your seedlings came up in a clump, lift the clump, and try to pull seedlings off by sort of lightly shaking and pulling two seedlings apart. Or lay the clump down after lightly shaking off all the soil you can, and tease the clump apart with a couple of pot labels.

If you are vastly overpotting your seedlings, you have to be *very* careful with watering, especially at first. Soggy soil that doesn't have roots in it tends to turn acidic from bacterial and fungal metabolism, and then when the roots try to grow into the acidic soil, they often die back. 2" pot is probably the maximum size for most of us growing tomatoes from seed and transplanting at the 2-true-leaf stage. If they get crowded in the 2" pot, you can shift them to a 4" pot later.

Also, always transplant into slightly moist soil. Water ASAP after transplanting.

Kay

[Bill Rose]

Kay, what would you think of lying the seedlings on a surface and using a light spray (and I mean light, maybe a squirt bottle) of water to wash away any soil that may be binding the roots together? Then, carefully, replant with fresh potting soil.

- Bill Coloribus gustibus non disputatum (mostly)

[Persephone]

Now here's an example of someone in good faith trying too hard to be grammatically correct. Why the lie/lay problem is so intractable, I fail to understand. I notice even good writers, especially younger ones who never learned grammar, get confused.

There are two separate verbs, so don't make them work so hard. EacH one has a different job to do.

"Lie" is intransitive- meaning it does NOT take a direct object.

I LIE down to sleep.

but

I LAY ME down to sleep. This transitive verb does take a direct object: "ME".

and

I LAY the WREATH at the gravesite. Object is "Wreath"

and, in this post,

You LAY the seedlings on a surface...

=============

Here's where the fun begins -- in the past tense.

Intransitive verb TO LIE does not take an object

Present: I LIE down to sleep.

Past: I LAY down to sleep.

(incorrect: I LAID down to sleep.)

==========

Transitive verb TO LAY does take an object

Present: I LAY the wreath at the gravesite.

Past: I LAID the wreath at the grave.

Easy to see how the confusion arises. But once learned, the rule becomes second nature both in writing and speaking.

(Whew! Wipes brow in utter exhaustion...)

Persephone

the seedlings on a surface and using

[Bill Rose]

I'm inclined to agree with you;-) You sound as if you could use a really good lay down:-O I hope someone learned from my mistake. I shouldn't get in such a hurry. Well, I hope that's been laid to rest. But, I suspect that I'm prone to do it again.

- Bill Coloribus gustibus non disputatum (bad jokes, free of charge)

[Kay Lancaster]

I tried that once... all it got was severely tangled roots. Ditto my attempts to wash the germination medium off the soil in a bowl of water. I find the "grab a cotyledon on each of two plants and shake them gently apart" method works the best for me, and it's what I've seen "pro" greenhouse folks do when planting (at my best, I could never keep up with the pros in seedling transplanting.)

I have gotten much better over the years at sowing seeds in seedpans in nice straight lines with some space between the seedlings. We shall not mention the year I sneezed and blew about 1000 petunia seeds into about 4 square inches of soil. That was Not Fun to disentangle.

I'll "reprint" my old summary of how I start stuff from seed in a separate post.

Kay

[JoeSpareBedroom]

It's a really bad idea. Why would you want to do that?

[Sue Burnham]

Sherwin, please forgive me for butting in, with a non- gardening idea....... but if you have an electric hot water heater, check to see whether you've lost one of the heating elements ( most hot water heaters have 2 elements for quick recovery capacity). You wouldn't necessarily notice this right off in your hot water supply, but you sure would notice it in your electric bill if one element was doing all the work of 2.

When I did condo/rental unit bill reconciliation, a huge spike in a bill like that was usually a tip-off that it wasn't "use by resident", or "weather related", it was an element failure in the hot water heater.

If I'm baked on the suggestion, call it just a suggestion, and never mind.

Sue in Maine

[Kay Lancaster]

The term that's used for "getting right onto the job of growing" is "vigor". Seedling vigor is one of those terms that everyone thinks they what it means, but no one's ever been able to put a test number on to quantify. If that sort of thing interests you, you might want to poke around in Agricola for "vigor testing".

Then there are the species and cultivars that you expect to have a certain percentage of stunted seedlings that go nowhere...

Kay

[Bill Rose]

Sherwin, I'll let you know. Right now I have 6 cells of astragalus - basil mixes. I'd like to save as many of each as is possible.

- Bill Coloribus gustibus non disputatum (mostly)