It’s never to early to plan your veggie garden for spring! Some of the most successful greenhouse operations start planning for the next year as soon as the current spring crop winds down. New seed orders are sent in post haste so they are sure to get the varieties they want. My order doesn’t go in quite that fast. I order seeds when the fall nursery season winds down.
A lot of flashy new catalogues came out this past year highlighting new vegetable varieties. Many bedding plant growers south of the border are dropping flower production to grow edibles. Of course, we are still a few months away from actually planting seeds in the earth. Ironically, the retail seed racks just came off the truck this morning.
If you have a greenhouse, you may still want to wait for higher light levels later in the spring before planting. The way the wind has been blowing I might delay seeding this week’s complement of seeds until the weather breaks. It is hard to keep the temperatures up in the greenhouse with all the wind. The whole trick to germinating seeds is to have the temperatures just right and not have the seeds too wet for too long. This combination varies for almost every crop, so in the propagation greenhouse we look for warmer and cooler spots to keep everything happy.
When deciding when the best time to seed a crop is, I look at how long a crop will take to flower and this is measured in weeks. For pansies, it might be 15 weeks to flower. These flowers need to be growing within a few days of the new year or they won’t be ready for sale in mid-April. Pansies are frost tolerant, so they are sold early. Marigolds are targeted to flower for week 19 or 20 after the danger of frost. So to recap, the year is broken down into weeks starting with week one (seed the pansies).
Seeds are placed into clean trays with new peat-based growing mixes. Small seeds need a fine mix so they won’t fall too far down. Some seeds like the light and other need darkness to germinate. To cover these seeds that like darkness, I use a light coating of vermiculite. Once the seed imbibes water, the enzymes inside start to change the seed. The first tiny root, known as the radical, emerges and should find its way down while the seed leaves then work themselves free of the seed coat and grow up.
Keep seeds relatively moist when the root is emerging and mist them regularly until the seed coat falls off. Then dry them down a bit. These processes can take as little as a few days in the case of large cucumber seed to as long as three weeks for tiny begonia seed.
I generally move the newly seeded trays off the germination table, which is heated to 25 Celsius and over to a cooler table under supplemental lighting. Cooler temperatures combined with extra light help keep seedlings compact. Plants benefit from light in the blue and red spectrums more than the others. Not all light is equal. Seedlings are very efficient at taking up sunlight but this time of year we can be socked in with valley fog, hence the lights to keep everything growing on time.
Fertilizer is added to a barrel of pre-heated water at the rate of 0.5 grams per liter to start. The water temperature out of the tap has burned seedlings in years past — it is that cold. I try to let them dry down as much as possible before soaking them in again. Damping off is a catchall phrase for several varieties of fungi that kill seedlings. It can make its appearance at this time of year if you are not careful. This is where using sterile trays, growing mix and clean fresh water pay off. I usually bleach the tables and trays before the first seeds are sown. Weeds are removed from the floor of the greenhouse to prevent overwintering insects, as well.
That’s all for now. Keep your eyes open for the new and unusual varieties this year. There looks to be some really neat ones!
Evan Davies owns Beltane Nursery at 2915 Highway 3 in Erickson.