No “Seed Failure” Here

There’s a guy at the Hollywood Farmers Market on Sunday who sells fantastic seedlings. He is an organic farmer, who grows vegetable and herb seedlings (and some fruit trees too) on the grounds of his small bungalow home in Hollywood. He has top quality stuff – I’ve bought and planted a lot of it in the past. Great stuff, but buying seedlings it is a very expensive way to establish a garden.

On my last trip to his nursery/home he said many people buy seedlings from him and other growers because many home gardeners experience “seed failure.”  Seed failure (as he explained it to me) means people plant seeds but they don’t germinate. I thought about it and there really is no good reason for that much seed failure in a climate like we have in Los Angeles. But it does sounds like a good way to encourage people to buying seedlings instead of growing their own.

I wanted to test my theory that seed starting is easy so I decided to plant the majority of my garden from seed this spring.

So far I've planted two groups– the first on March 29 and the second on April 9. That was Friday. Today is Tuesday April 13 and already two of the three types of seeds I planted in the new raised bed (SDG) have germinated!

It’s very crazy because one of them is the Pak Choi (photo at top left) who's number of “Days to Germination” (or PG - Projected Germination as I have it abbreviated on the sign in photo at right) according to the seed packed is 10-14 days.

But it germinated in five days. The other one to germinate is the zucchini (last photo at bottom), which has the PG listed as 7-10 days.

I think the dirt I have (the homemade dirt from the lasagna garden) can take part of the credit for this accelerated germination time. The rest of the credit probably should go to the nice rain we had over the weekend. I think it was at least an inch. Seeds really need to be kept moist to germinate.

Most of the seeds I planted on March 29, which was all in pots, are doing OK too. Here are photos of the carrot (in brown peet trays photo below) and cantaloupe seedlings (in green/aqua colored trays photo at left). The others that are doing well are the bunching onions, broccoli, radish, spinach and even some tomato seedlings.  Only the okra is alluding me at the moment (but I have grown it from seed successfully in the past).

It might be too late (too hot) for the spinach and broccoli to grow to maturity but I guess I will see how that goes. They are “cool season” vegetables.

There’s a little challenge I always face when it comes to thinning seedlings. It’s very hard to bring myself to "Darwinize" by pull out all but the one best seedling per pot. I usually just don’t do it and then the beds end up overcrowded. I’ve already done some thinning in the little pots and I’ll try to keep it up. From what I’ve learned from books and videos there really should be only one seedling per pot.

Now I am waiting for the first “true set of leaves” and then I will transplant some into the SDG and give some away.  If anyone would like some let me know and I’d be happy to share/exchange.

I bought a bunch of nice, simple plastic seed started kits (pots, tray, cover) so I will plant some more seeds in pots tomorrow.