Tag: seedlings

Now that many weeks of cold stratification are done, its finally time to sow the wild flower seeds.

Sowing wild flower seeds is easy, many of them require light to germinate, so you simply have to spread them on top of the soil and wait.  I cold stratify my seeds in slightly damp sand, so I simply spread the sand along with the seeds onto small seed starting cells. The sand keeps the minuscule seeds from moving around, and still allows light to filter to the seed.

This year I am trying to do a much larger variety, and less of each plant.

I use 11×21 cell seed starting trays, first I pack in a potting mix then push all the dirt down and put even more dirt in.  I bottom water in trays so its important that ever cell is well filled with soil so that it will wick appropriately.

I have a series of tools that help me place one or a few seeds in each cell.  This takes a long time, so I usually listen to music of a podcast while carefully placing seeds in each cell.  In this picture I am doing milk weed which have comparatively huge seeds some are basically dust.

Most wild flower seeds just need to be placed on top of the soil. you can see the sand in some cells for the much smaller seeds.

Labeling each row is vital because later they will have to be potted into larger containers and its vital to remember what is what, as they can all look very similar when seedlings.

They are then placed into a home made “plant wall” in trays, so I can just pour water into the tray and it will wick up into the trays.

For this round of seed starting I ended up with 40 different kinds of flower, 6 trays at 231 seedlings per tray, roughly 1400 plants if all of them germinate.  This will end up being the stock for the nursery this year combined with all the other plants that will get started outside in a few weeks.

In just a few short weeks these plants will be ready to plant, you can purchase them by visiting the nursery.