 Welcome everyone to the 2020 spring webinar series. We are doing these 10 weeks in a row. Next slide. On February 12th, the speaker is Don Kinsler, growing flowers for fun or profit and the 19th, Tom Kelb growing tomatoes in North Dakota. We are archiving all of these presentations. Please complete the survey after you watch this video or participate in any of the videos and also sign up for the opportunity to win a prize. And after submitting the survey, a form to fill out with your name and address will appear. So please just type your information in. And I do wanna acknowledge the U.S. Department of Agriculture Ag Marketing Service for the grant that we receive for this project. So I'm happy to introduce Mr. Randy Nelson. He is an extension educator in Clay County. His primary job responsibilities include education and outreach in the area of home horticulture and agriculture production systems. And he has been with the University of Minnesota Extension, Clay County since 2007. So welcome, Randy, and thank you for doing this. Thank you, Dr. Garden Robinson and welcome everyone. Today we're gonna go through and we'll talk about seed starting at home with an emphasis on starting vegetables. And some of the areas that I want to cover include containers, potting soil, light, watering and fertilizing, seed starting dates, and then we'll wrap everything up with hardening off your seedlings. When it comes to containers, there are really limitless possibilities. Basically, you're only limited by your imagination. Two things to keep in mind when it comes with two containers, they need drainage, meaning that even if the container doesn't have any holes in it, you can always make some holes in there to allow all that excess water to drain out. And you wanna make sure that the container that you're gonna use is gonna be large enough to support your plant, meaning that you want adequate space for a root system. And also that potting soil that you're gonna have in there needs to be supportive enough to keep that plant upright. And again, that's gonna play into the size of the container, a small container and a large plant, they get pretty tipsy. So keep that in mind. And also your containers don't have to be overly large because you are gonna be transplanting these plants outside. So they're only gonna be inside for a certain number of days. With that in mind, I'd like to talk about repurposed containers first or recycled containers, however you'd like to look at it. The photo on the left of your screen, you're actually looking at some onion seedlings being grown in gallon milk containers. And the milk containers were, the top portion was cut off. So this bottom portion is maybe three, four inches in height. And the soil was put in there and then the seeds were put in there and the onions are being grown right in there. Obviously with a milk carton, they don't come with holes in the bottom. And with these, all I did was just cut in some holes with a knife in the bottom. And then I'm using aluminum foil just on the bottom. And after I water these, I water them in a sink, allow all the excess water to go through. And then I just put the aluminum foil over the bottom. That way, if you happen to have a little bit of water remaining, it's not going to make a mess on the floor. Another example of a repurposed or recycled container is the one right here, which is a cardboard egg carton. And egg cartons work fine. Obviously there are Styrofoam egg cartons as well. When you think about cardboard egg cartons, obviously when these get wet, they're going to be pretty flexible and not very sturdy. And it's a possibility that maybe a Styrofoam egg carton might be a better bet. If you'd like to go with cardboard, I would always have these on some type of a hard surface, like maybe a baking sheet or something like that that you can pick up and move easily after you're done watering. Some other examples are repurposed or recycled containers. On the left, we just have containers made out of newspaper. And you will just take several sheets of newspaper and then you can just fold it into your pot configuration. On the right hand side, it's just your standard Styrofoam cups. And these Styrofoam cups, it's very easy to put in drain holes in the bottom using a pen or a pencil, just pull holes in the bottom. And again, all the excess water will be allowed to drain out. Moving into what I would consider more of our standard containers, yet these two are biodegradable, like most of the other ones that you looked at with the exception of the Styrofoam cups and the milk cartons. But these standard pots would be known as a jiffy pot or a peat pot. The ones that you're looking at are compressed sphagnum peat and that's why they're known as a peat pot. And on the left, I've grown geraniums in these types of containers for a few years. And these are about three and a half inches in diameter, so a rather large container. And it's nice, you can seed directly into these. And then when you go outdoors with these, when it's time to plant your baskets or if you're going directly into the garden, for the most part, you can just plant the whole container in the ground. Usually it's a good idea to take portions of that off and I'll talk a bit about that later. But again, for the most part, these are gonna be biodegradable. And just wanna point out too that they come in a number of shapes and sizes. You can see on top here, we have just strips of square pots and you can also get them as round ones too. Some other examples of some biodegradable pots. On the left is a coconut koi pot and when coconuts are sold in the supermarket, you just more or less just have to crack into it. But that outer coating of that coconut's been removed and that's what they use in coconut koi. And these have just been compressed together. So very similar to your peat pot. And then on the right hand side, what these are, they have potting soil that is compressed and then there's just a little net type structure over the top of that. You add water to them and then as that water soaks in, these pots then expand in size and you would just put your seed right in the hole. And these two can be planted directly outdoors. For the most part, and I'll talk a little bit about modifying these pots when we get towards the end of the presentation. Usually the containers that I just showed you, the Jiffy pots, the peat pots and the coconut koi pots, you're gonna have them in something. And usually it's gonna be what's called a flat and this would just be your standard greenhouse flat. The top one actually has drain holes in it. The bottom one does not have any drain holes. And when you're indoors, I like using the one on the bottom with no drain holes. I put all my containers in there. I can water, I dump out my excess water and I don't have to worry about any water dripping on the floor. When you bring these outside to harden them off, it is nice to have flats with holes in the bottom and that way when you have them outside, you can water them and then all that excess water can then run out. With the standard flat that I showed you, if you, like I said, if you wanted to use those to put in your peat pots to your coconut koi pots, that's what I do, that works fine. These also have an insert that will go into them and you're looking at a few different sizes of inserts in these two photos. The photo on the left, they're growing tomatoes and there are about, I think, 82 or 96 cells in here. And then the ones on the right, I believe there are 48 cells. And again, these are just filled with potting soil and they're seeded right into those. Some other containers, be very similar in size to some of the peat containers. These are just your standard plastic containers. One nice thing about the plastic containers is that you could reuse these every year if you wanted to, although I would caution that if you do reuse your containers, it's always a good idea to go through and sanitize them. And usually if you mix up in warm water, a 10% bleach solution or some other type of disinfectant and then scrub off your containers really good so you don't have any soil or anything left on there, you should be safe to reuse those. What can happen is that you can get a disease that is either brought in on your soil or it came in somehow, but it can be present year after year if your plastic containers are not sanitized appropriately. If you want to avoid having to go through and sanitize, it may be best just to start over with brand new pots every year. We'll transition right into potting soil. And I mentioned a little bit about the function of our potting soil that it needs to anchor the plant. It's also gonna serve as a reservoir for plant nutrients. It's gonna hold water and also provide gas exchange. When it comes to potting soil, you could use an actual, what's known as a field soil, which would have sand, silt and clay. And particularly for that type of a mix, you'd be looking at two parts of a loam soil and a loam soil would have predominantly sand, about 30 to 50% sand and the majority of the rest would be silt and maybe a little bit of clay mixed in here. So that would be your typical loam soil, would be two parts loam soil, one part sand and then one part organic matter. The one drawback of any soil based type of potting soil is that you never know if you have any disease that is present in that particular soil. And I guess another drawback would be you could have weed seed that are in that soil too. And I guess the other drawback would be not everybody has access to a loam soil. It depends on where you're located in the state. If you don't wanna mess around with trying to mix up your own, there are a number of what are known as soilless mixes on the market that you can use. And a soilless mix basically doesn't have what we would think of in a typical field soil, which again would be your sand, silt and clay. Usually these are predominantly peat moss and peat moss is nice. It holds up to 60% of its volume in water. It is slow to decompose and typically brown in color and it'll be on the more acid side of the pH scale. So somewhere right around a three or four. Sometimes you'll have vermiculite in these mixes and vermiculite is a good water, it's a good water holding material. It also provides some aeration. And I'm gonna show you a picture of vermiculite. It does provide aeration, but if it's compressed when it is wet, the aeration for the most part goes away. And then pearlite, which is a expanded volcanic rock. This one will provide aeration. These are, it almost looks like little bits of white styrofoam and they're rather hard too. So they don't compress as much as what vermiculite would. The photo on the top left is a very fine peat moss and you can get peat moss in various grades and it's sometimes they're graded on how coarse or how fine they are. And again, this one would be a very fine one, which would provide a really good seed to soil contact. The photo on the right, on the left-hand side of this photo, we have vermiculite, which is, when you look at it, it's kind of like a worm-like structure or an accordion-like structure and like I said, when it's wet, you can compress the stuff really easy. And then on the right-hand side, we have our standard vermiculite, which again kind of looks like pellets of chopped up styrofoam. And I also want to show you some coconut koi. This is some ground-up coconut koi and more and more often you're seeing coconut koi in mixes and it's being used to replace sphagnum peat moss to some extent in some of the mixes. And it seems to do a pretty decent job in a soil mix. So again, these are the general components that you're going to find in a soilless mix. As far as the process of filling your containers, it's pretty straightforward. You are going to take your containers, you're going to take your dry mix and distribute it over your cells if you're going with an insert or you'd be filling up your other containers, your recycled containers or maybe some of your biodegradable containers. And then once you get them full, it's always a good idea to tap them. And I usually just, I do most of my seating in the kitchen and I just tap it on the kitchen counter and what that'll do, it'll help get out some of the large air pockets that might be in there and it'll settle the soil a little bit and then you can always add more if need be. In this photo right here, my youngest daughter Flora is going through and she's actually making a hole to plant some seeding and believe her planting broccoli or we'll be planting broccoli in these flats right here. But what she had done already was she filled it up, tapped the soil and then added any additional if she needed to. Then she went ahead and she watered her potting soil and the reason you'd want to water before seeding is that if you don't water before you seed, sometimes your seed can end up going a lot deeper than what it should or sometimes your seed's gonna float to the top. So it's always good to go through and give it a really good soaking, make sure it's really saturated and drain out all your excess water, then go ahead and seed. And like I said, Flora is making seeding holes. She's using the end of a paintbrush. Some people will use a pen or a pencil and make those holes at the proper depth. And it's important to put your seeds at the proper depth. We'll be talking about light coming up in a little bit, but some of these seeds are pretty small. For example, these pots in the back are three and a half inch peat pots and there are petunias that are in there. Petunia seed is very tiny and you don't want to go very deep because those plants, those small seeds can only push so far. There's only so much energy in that seed to be able to push up and allow those cotyledons to be exposed to light and then start to be able to photosynthesize. So planting depth is extremely important. And for the most part, on the seed package, it should tell you roughly how deep to plant the seed and follow that as close as you can. And if there is no planting depth listed on the seed package, one general rule of thumb is that you can plant that seed four times as deep as the seed is wide. And another way to look at that is that you'd have that seed planted deep enough so you could stack another three seeds on top of it and then you'd be level with the soil. Flora's sister, this is Celia right here, she joined Flora in the seed planting process. And like I said, you're going through with and putting in broccoli at this point, but once your seed is planted, then just go ahead and cover that up with soil. And then when you're done doing that, I always go through and carefully water it a second time. And watering the second time is important because you likely have some error gaps and you want to make sure that you have really good seed to soil contact. That'll help with germination. And therefore watering after you seed is always a good idea. And once that is complete, I always cover my seedling flats with plastic. And here's an example right here. I just use a plastic covering and I lay it loosely over the top. And this will do a couple of things. The main thing that I use it for is that it keeps moisture in. It's not a tight seal over it by any means, but it does keep quite a bit of moisture in and that way that surface is not drying out as much and it's going to remain moist until those seeds begin the germination process. The second thing it'll do, you'll likely be putting these under some type of a light, which we'll be talking about in just a minute here. But it does tend to warm your containers because if you have a light source, that light energy is moving through and it will heat up that soil to some extent and that plastic cover on there will keep in some of that heat. So you'll notice a little increase in temperature, which for the most part is gonna help with the germination process. I had referenced light earlier when we were talking about seeding depth and just a little background here. Probably all familiar with this already, the equation for photosynthesis and basically carbon dioxide and water and then with light energy will result in essentially sugar and the byproduct of course is going to be oxygen. And that sugar that is produced during photosynthesis, that plant is going to use for maintenance and growth. And I want to just show you a graph here and really what I want you to pay attention to is this green area right here is probably the most important part. As you look at this figure, this blue dashed line is basically showing you the amount of photosynthesized or the sugar that's produced or in photosynthesis that's used in respiration. And again, plants need to maintain themselves just like we do and therefore they need to use so much of that photosynthesized is gonna be used just for respiration or maintenance. But if you look at the green area that is on here, this would be the excess photosynthate that is produced above what is needed for just general maintenance of the plant. And this really is our growth potential. So if the plant is producing enough photosynthate to go beyond just what it needs to maintain itself, we're gonna have additional growth. Another way to look at this is that plants growing in low light conditions, they can maintain themselves possibly in that situation but they're likely not gonna be putting on much growth at all. And since our seedlings are gonna be destined for outdoors at some point in time, we wanna make sure that they have plenty of time for, or that they have plenty of light to be able to produce enough photosynthate so they can go ahead and grow properly so they look good for outdoors. With that said, most cases we're gonna need some type of supplemental light unless a person has an area where they might have a really good southern exposure, nice tall windows. It's possible you might have enough light but in most of our homes or if you're in an apartment, we don't have access to that much natural light and therefore we're gonna have to supplement somehow. One of the easiest ways to do this is to get a four foot shop light and you can get those with cool white fluorescent lights but what's nice now is that we have more access to the LED lights which use a lot less energy even with fluorescent lights and we also get a lot of light output from LEDs. Regardless of which one you use, you're generally looking at having those lights on anywhere from 12 to 16 hours today and you want it roughly about four inches from the canopy. If you do notice some bleaching of the foliage or maybe even some burning of the foliage, you can always increase that height but generally speaking you should be fine with it four inches or less from the canopy. I will mention though some of the LED specialty lights that you might be able to find online that are specific for plants, some of those have a tremendous output of light and they may have directions that come with them that say you wanna keep them, maybe it's gonna be several inches or even a foot or so away from the canopy. If you're going with those specialty lights, make sure you're following those directions. If you're going with again the standard four foot shop light whether it be a fluorescent or an LED, you're gonna be fine being within four inches or less of that canopy and I wanna show you a couple examples of some lighting systems that a person could use at home. This first one was a purchased system. These trays are four feet in length and then they're about a couple of feet wide and I'll show you another photo here. Now we're just looking at the end. These use two, I believe these are T5 fluorescent lights and they have a nice shield on the top that's reflecting all that light going down onto the plants and these systems are, you're gonna be spending a few hundred dollars on these because they're a nice steel and again, it comes with everything already wired so all you'd have to do is just assemble this and it's done but you can do something for a lot cheaper. One option would be what this particular grower is doing and this particular person has a couple of high tunnels and they're starting all their vegetables inside and they're gonna be planting out in a high tunnel and they used pallet racking that you can purchase at some of the hardware stores and then they purchased some very large, I believe these are eight foot fluorescent lights, what you'd see in some of the shopping centers and each of these, I believe holds four to six fluorescent lights and actually on this next photo here, we can see in there, so their shop light unit is tipped to the side and there are four lights in there and again, these are eight feet long and these work quite well for growing seedlings underneath and this is actually taken in my basement and what you're looking at, two shelves of and lights placed above and this is your standard four foot shop light. This particular light that is turned on is actually an LED light and again, quite a bit of output, the rest of them that are down here are fluorescent lights and again, I have these lights side by side, you really can't see it. Maybe you can see a little bit in this one but there's actually, there's a light here, there's one back here and there's one in the far back that happens to be a little bit lower that's not turned on yet but I have three of them in the shelf and the shelf is about 18 inches in width, 60 to 18 inches in width and then it is four feet wide and obviously I don't have any vegetables that are growing underneath here, I have some rose cuttings and some hibiscus plants that are growing, actually they're doing quite well, they've been down here since about, oh I suppose last October is when I placed them underneath here and I can easily fit two flats running lengthwise with these shelves. When I put seedlings underneath here, what I will do is I'll flip these so these flats are actually perpendicular to the shelf and I can fit five flats along here and I have a little bit that are sticking over the edges and I just put wedges of wood underneath just to help support them but in a system like this with two shelves I can fit 10 flats in there which is, you can get quite a few seedlings and I should mention too that with my lights and also in this example here of this grower who's producing vegetables for his high tunnel, their light system, they have everything plugged into a timer and you just set your timer for again, 14 or 16 hours on, plug it in and you don't have to worry about it, that way those lights come on and go off automatically. You could do it where you go downstairs or wherever it might happen to be where you plug it in and then you unplug it but doing that day in and day out gets kind of old and it's really easy to forget. Just wanted to illustrate in this photo here with their tomato plants. Again, they have the tomatoes right underneath those fluorescent lights. He's probably within about two inches or so and again, his tomatoes are doing wonderful. The next thing I want to talk about is watering and fertilizing which is critical when it comes to seed starting. When everything is germinating, all you need to do is make sure that soil is moist and if you put some type of a plastic cover over the top of it, that's gonna help that potting soil remain moist and I forgot to mention earlier but with the seedling flats that I was showing you, they do have plastic covers that they sell that you can use. I like using just a plastic wrap because once those seedlings come out of the ground, I can take that plastic wrap and discard it. With a plastic dome, you can certainly go that rope but it would be a good idea if you plan on reusing it to make sure you go through and sanitize it at the end of the growing season just to make sure that you're not introducing some type of disease into your next year's plants. Like I had said before, just make sure you drain all the excess water from the containers. Usually I just let mine sit for a few minutes and then I tip them up on the side and let all that water drain out and then I'll just put them back under the lights and you don't have to fertilize anything until you actually start to see the true leaves and in this photo on the right, you can see they have some variation in the emergence. We can see we have just the cotyledons of the plant right here and you look over on the right, you can see the larger cotyledons over here and then in the middle right here, we actually have our true leaves that are on there and at this point, you can start fertilizing. The biggest thing with fertilizer, you don't wanna overdo it and I just wanna draw your attention to the picture that you're looking at of some geraniums. We got some relatively healthy geraniums on the right-hand side and some not so healthy geraniums on the left-hand side. The ones on the left, you can see we have some browning and yellowing of the foliage and some of these are pretty sparse. What happened is they were over fertilized. I actually, I think I might have forgotten when I had fertilized them last, thought it was probably a week or so in length and it wasn't. I think it was probably within a couple of days and then I fertilized again and I over fertilized them which resulted in them dropping some leaves. Thankfully for me, geraniums are pretty tough and they eventually pulled out of it but it did take them some time. And again, the key with fertilizer is don't overdo it because you can always add more fertilizer to your plants. You just can't take fertilizer away once you've already added it. One of the probably the most common types of fertilizer you're gonna find would be a triple 10 or it might even be a triple 20 and basically what that is is that the nitrogen which is your first number, your phosphorus is your middle, potassium is your last number on there. All of them are gonna be in equal percentages. Again, for that 10, 10, 10, it's just saying there's 10% of each one or with a 20, 20, 20 there's 20% of each one. And just make sure it's a water soluble fertilizer that way you can just mix it and it dissolves readily in water. Then you can go ahead and water your plants. If there are guidelines on the back of the container for seedlings, go ahead and follow those. Oftentimes you won't see any guidelines on the back for seedlings but they might have something for house plants. And just use it at half strength if you're using the house plant recommendation, whatever it's suggesting, just cut that in half and then you can go ahead and fertilize and like I said, you can go ahead and fertilize weekly and then when you're watering or the plants need water between fertilizer applications, just make sure you water enough that you do get some of that water that drains out of the bottom of the pot to make sure that you're flushing out any potential soluble salts that could be in there. I talked about earlier the biodegradable pots like the peat pots and this would even be true for the coconut koi pots or if you're going on the recyclable end, the paper pots or the cardboard egg carton containers, they are unique in the sense that the plants are pulling out water through transpiration. You're losing water due to evaporation from the soil surface but the sides of those containers also allow water to move out. And the example here being this top photo, we have peat pots and again, we're gonna lose more water from these peat pots compared to the plastic containers in the bottom. The plastic containers that you're looking at, obviously we're losing some from evaporation. The plants are transpiring but that plastic container is not allowing any water to move out. What that means is that you may end up watering some of the biodegradable pots more frequently than you will those that are made of plastic. As far as the type of water you wanna use, that's a real common question. If you live in the city or maybe you're out where you have your own well, you could use city water or well water. I've used both and I've had really good luck with growing vegetable seedlings and even most flower seedlings. And the water I've used has even gone through a softener before and I've been fine using that water too. Again, you're not growing them indoors for several months. Usually it's just gonna be a couple of months, two, three months at the most and then they're gonna go outdoors. And as long as you leach your pots, I've never seen a buildup of soluble salts. Another option, if you want to, if you have the time and the ability, you can actually take snow, put it into a five gallon pail or a container if your choice, allow that to melt and warm up to room temperature and you can use that water to water your seedlings. If you'd like to, my grandmother did that for a number of years and her plants turned out fine. But like I said, if you don't wanna go that route, go ahead, you should be fine using your city water or even your well water. I wanna talk a little bit about seed starting dates. And this is important because you wanna make sure that you have enough time to allow those seedlings to get large enough to safely move them outdoors. At the same time, you don't wanna start them too early where they just become essentially root bound and stunted in those containers. With vegetables, the earliest one or another way to look at it, the one that would need the longest amount of time to grow would be seed onion. And these onions would be the ones that you're starting by seed and then you're taking those transplants and putting them outdoors. If anybody's ever purchased onion transplants, they were at some point started by seed and essentially that's what you're doing. You're just doing that indoors. They need roughly about 14 weeks of growth indoors. So you're looking at about early February for a start time. In early March, it would be good to start broccoli, cabbage, Brussels sprouts, cauliflower, head lettuce. And then looking at mid-March, pepper, eggplant, and clorobi, not everybody starts their clorobi inside. I know a lot of people will direct seed it. I've had real good luck starting clorobi, again, roughly about mid-March and then we get an early crop of that in the summer since we're starting those a bit earlier. Tomato, roughly right around mid-April. Pepper is a little bit slower than tomato so we're starting our peppers about mid-March. And again, tomatoes tend to grow pretty fast. So we're looking at mid-April. And then if you do start your cucumber, cantaloupe, winter squash, if you do start those indoors, usually it's about a month or say four weeks of growing time before you're transplanting those outside. Not everybody will start their cucumbers and cantaloupes inside some. I know we'll just direct seed it. What I found in particular with both cucumber and cantaloupe is that I gain about three or four weeks of time by starting them indoors. My first picking of the fruit is about three to four weeks earlier when I start them indoors compared with just direct seeding those outside. When it comes to hardening off the seedlings, this is very important because you've just spent a number of weeks and quite a bit of time into growing beautiful transplants. And if you harden them off improperly, it is very easy to kill them. Think about it this way. These plants have been indoors, a very little wind, no direct sunlight, and now all of a sudden they're gonna be transitioned outdoors where you have intense sun, you have wind. That can be devastating if it's done improperly. To start out with, you wanna put your seedlings in the shade and ideally just do it for an hour or two, maybe for the first couple of days and just slowly increase the amount of time that they spend outdoors as well as the sun exposure. And it's really gonna be important to have them in a protected area where they're not gonna have a lot of wind damage. Because again, these are pretty sensitive plants and if you get a lot of wind it can snap them off really easy. So again, put them out in the shade in a protected area and then slowly start to build up the amount of time that they're outside as well as keep putting them or keep increasing the amount of sun exposure they're gonna have. And over time, they're gonna build up some tolerance to the wind too. So at some point they'll be able to withstand our wind. When you are hardening your plants off outside, some of the biodegradable pots and the examples I have here would be our peat moss, pots on top and then the coconut koi pots on the bottom. Again, these are losing water not only through transpiration but also through soil evaporation and then through the sidewalls of those containers. And on a warm day with some wind, you might have to water these a bare minimum daily, sometimes even twice a day because you can lose a lot of water. So just keep that in mind. When you're planting these biodegradable pots, you don't wanna have any of the top portion of this container showing. What'll happen if this is exposed to the atmosphere, it actually wicks water out of that root ball area and your plants are gonna dry out. When I use these containers, what I usually do is I will just break off that upper half to even the upper two thirds of that pot and just dispose of it. And then I'll go ahead and plant that transplant and then I don't have to worry about over time any portion of that biodegradable container resurfacing and risk drying that plant out. And if you had a real good luck with that and oftentimes what you're gonna find that even though these containers are technically biodegradable, it could take a few seasons before they actually degrade. Therefore, removing portions of that container usually allows root growth to go out into your native soil a lot quicker than if you were to keep those biodegradable pots intact. With that, if you have any questions on seed starting, please feel free to contact me. Well, thank you very much, Randy, for that interesting webinar. And I invite all of the listeners to check out the Field to Fork website because we have links to some of the University of Minnesota publications as well as NDSU. So thank you, Randy, and thanks everybody for watching. Thank you, Julie.