For most gardeners who suffer through a winter, onions and leeks are the first plants they will plant in the spring. For gardeners who don't like to buy onion sets or transplants, they are also the first they will start from seed and usually begin in February or early March.
Plant in flats now, it's time!
While I normally plant most of my onions in my Midwestern garden using onion sets and plant them directly in the edge of my gardens in late March or April, I have one variety of oriental onion that I start from seed and I follow that up with American Leeks in late February.
Even if you don't plant leeks or onions from seed, some of the techniques I use can be adopted for planting other vegetables into flats from seed, also saving space and time.
The first mistake many beginner gardeners make is that they think they have to plant seeds in a flat that has little plastic spacers that divide the flat into 36 to 72 cells. If you only want a few plants and you have the plastic flats and plastic dividers or cells saved from planting flowers or something that you bought from the nursery last year, go ahead and use them. If you want 36 to 72 onions, realize that in a garden bed that is only about 2 to 4 square feet. The average American uses about 30 pounds of onions a year.
I shoot to get 300 to 400 onion plants per flat – now you see why I don't use the plastic cells?
But if you want to have plenty of plants or want to give away what you don't end up using, swap, barter or trade as any good sustainable agricultural community member should, then fill the flat with a potting or soil mix to about an inch from the top and plan on using my methods to sow it solid.
First thing you'll discover if you are going to plant a flat without cells is that if you decide to use the 11x22 inch plastic flats, they are flexible and you will need to put something rigid under them. If you don't, no matter how careful you are, they twist and bend when you move them, the soil cracks open tearing roots apart. Or seeds just planted will fall from their proper planting depth deep into one of the cracks and never be seen or heard from again.
Planting methods:
Many people will simply broadcast seeds from the packet out across the flat and thin what comes up later. If you know you won't need more than 50-100 seedlings, then that will work, but for me, the results never were satisfactory. Rarely do you ever achieve 100 percent germination so a bunch of seeds would come up on one area, none in another. When I thinned out the clumps of seedlings, the roots of others became damaged, weakened or I ended up pulling way more out than I intended.
While broad casting or sprinkling seeds across the bed is fast, I've found that taking care to carefully plant the flat evenly so you don't have to thin them later takes no more time than thinning them but with more satisfying results and more seedlings left to transplant in the end.
(Check back here for part II and see how to accurately place the seeds so you don't have to thin them).
Plant in flats now, it's time!
While I normally plant most of my onions in my Midwestern garden using onion sets and plant them directly in the edge of my gardens in late March or April, I have one variety of oriental onion that I start from seed and I follow that up with American Leeks in late February.
Even if you don't plant leeks or onions from seed, some of the techniques I use can be adopted for planting other vegetables into flats from seed, also saving space and time.
The first mistake many beginner gardeners make is that they think they have to plant seeds in a flat that has little plastic spacers that divide the flat into 36 to 72 cells. If you only want a few plants and you have the plastic flats and plastic dividers or cells saved from planting flowers or something that you bought from the nursery last year, go ahead and use them. If you want 36 to 72 onions, realize that in a garden bed that is only about 2 to 4 square feet. The average American uses about 30 pounds of onions a year.
I shoot to get 300 to 400 onion plants per flat – now you see why I don't use the plastic cells?
But if you want to have plenty of plants or want to give away what you don't end up using, swap, barter or trade as any good sustainable agricultural community member should, then fill the flat with a potting or soil mix to about an inch from the top and plan on using my methods to sow it solid.
First thing you'll discover if you are going to plant a flat without cells is that if you decide to use the 11x22 inch plastic flats, they are flexible and you will need to put something rigid under them. If you don't, no matter how careful you are, they twist and bend when you move them, the soil cracks open tearing roots apart. Or seeds just planted will fall from their proper planting depth deep into one of the cracks and never be seen or heard from again.
Planting methods:
Many people will simply broadcast seeds from the packet out across the flat and thin what comes up later. If you know you won't need more than 50-100 seedlings, then that will work, but for me, the results never were satisfactory. Rarely do you ever achieve 100 percent germination so a bunch of seeds would come up on one area, none in another. When I thinned out the clumps of seedlings, the roots of others became damaged, weakened or I ended up pulling way more out than I intended.
While broad casting or sprinkling seeds across the bed is fast, I've found that taking care to carefully plant the flat evenly so you don't have to thin them later takes no more time than thinning them but with more satisfying results and more seedlings left to transplant in the end.
(Check back here for part II and see how to accurately place the seeds so you don't have to thin them).
This was an interesting how-to article. I never thought about planting in flats... that would be easier than making little pots. Do you thin out all seeds the same way you showed me to do basil, parsley, etc.?
ReplyDeletePart II will have a planting method that you will see creates very little need to thin plants out. But if you happen to have a duplicate, just snip it with scissors or gently pull it out, but you run the risk of pulling more than you need out.
ReplyDelete