Dollar Tree Petunia Seeds | Grow Petunias From Seed || Budget Gardening

It’s February and I’m about 12 weeks from my average last frost date. Learn how easy it is to grow petunias from seed! In this video, I show you how to plant / sow petunia seeds. Propagating plants by seed is a budget friendly way to save money in the garden – and it’s fun!

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hey budget gardeners VCA here join me today as we sew some petunia seeds so let’s [Music] go I live in New Hampshire I Garden in USDA zone 5B and my expected average last frost date is around May 15th today is February 2 and I’m about 12 weeks away from my average last frost date I’m trying to be careful and not get ahead of Myself by starting too many seeds too early I like to count backwards for my average last frost date and then I like to research my seeds and start my seeds based on what the package says I found that if you start your plants way too early sometimes it’s actually not good for the plant it doesn’t Thrive so it’s always important to research what seeds you’re starting when and also to know your average last frost date when it comes to starting petunia seeds there’s a little bit of discrepancy some places will tell you 8 to 10 weeks other places will tell you 10 to 12 weeks before your last frost date well I’m 12 weeks before my date I’m starting them a little early but the reason is I’m planning to pinch back my patunas a few times I want them to be bushier plants and when you pinch back plants it actually sets back the blooming by a few weeks that’s why I’m starting them this early if you don’t know what your average last frost date is you can either do a Google search by entering in your location and putting in what is my average last frost date or you can go to the website down below enter in your zip code and it should tell you pretty accurately what your average last frost dat is there’s also a map on there and the map seems to be a little more accurate now remember when it comes to seed starting you’re not looking necessarily at your Zone The Zone does matter but the zone is more important with knowing which perennials Will Survive where you live it really is important to know your last frost date when seed starting I love patunas and to be honest with you it’s been a number of years since I’ve started them from seed it’s very easy to collect seeds from patunas in fact I’ve collected seeds in the past and the seeds are tiny I’ve made videos showing my process for collecting petunia seeds and I’ll link that video down below it takes petunia seeds anywhere from 1 to 2 weeks to germinate I’ve planted patunas in different areas of my yard but they are usually in some sort of a pot or container I enjoy the fact that they come in a lot of different colors in fact a number of years ago I grew some really interesting and unique looking patunas from seed and I planted those out on my back porch so depending on how my patunas perform this year I may be buying some interesting petunia seeds for me to grow next year depending on the variety of patunas that you’re growing from seed the days to maturity can be anywhere from 70 to up to 105 days and that’s why I wanted to start my seeds a little bit on the earlier side because it can take anywhere from 10 to 14 weeks for the plants to actually Bloom okay so let’s go ahead and sew some petunia seeds together these are patunas that I got from Dollar Tree that’s a great place to get seeds for cheap especially if you’re on a budget or if you’re new to gardening I highly recommend getting seeds from there they’re four for a dollar and you get so many seeds in a seed packet now I winter sewed some of the seeds already from the seed packet it’ll be a good experiment to see which of the seeds do better winter sewing or starting them indoors and that’s what it says on the back one of you had mentioned to me and I thought this was very interesting it shows a height of 6 feet I have to imagine that’s a typo because it is a dwarf beding variety of tuna I’m imagining it should have said 6 in and then these seed packets right here are just seeds that I collected over the last few years so we’re going to be sewing those as well here I have some seed starting mix I like to make my own seed starting mix and I’ll put a link to a video down in the description it’s basically two parts of Pete Moss but you can use cocoa core to one part of very fine vermiculite and then I add a small pinch of dolomite lime which helps offset the pH of the Pete Moss I also poured boiling hot water on my seeds starting mix you want to use premoistened seed starting mix but also the boiling hot water helps kill any possible fungus knat eggs that might be in here when I squeeze my seed starting mix notice there’s no water dripping out but when I let go it’s holding its form and that’s the right consistency that you want for your seed starting or potting mix the reason why I like to use seed starting mix when starting my petunia seeds is because the seed starting mix is definitely a lot fluffier a lot lighter than potting mix and I want my small seeds to have a better chance of germination however once I pot up My Petunia plants I will move them into potting mix I like to use restaurant take out containers because honestly they’re free to me and they make wonderful little green houses in fact this one has little vent holes in it which is wonderful because it in case it gets too hot in there and I did make holes in the bottom of the container because you want to bottom water your seedlings you don’t ever want to water them from above because that can introduce all sorts of problems so I’m going to go ahead and add my seed starting mix to my container and now I’m going to press on the seed starting mix I want to take out any air pockets that might be in there I don’t want to press too hard because I don’t want to compact the seed starting mix too much when it comes to seed starting I do like to use Garden markers because I find that they don’t wear off as easily as a pen or a Sharpie when starting seeds it’s a good habit to label I’m just using small little labels that I had on hand but you can use whatever you want it’s always a good idea to also put the date that you start your seeds especially if you’re trying to keep track of it for recordkeeping like in a spreadsheet that’s what I do so that the following years I can look back and see if I should adjust those dates and start seeds earlier or later so I’ve gone ahead and added the labels to my container and then I just added some dividers so that I know which seeds are where these are the Dollar Tree seeds and you can see there are a lot of seeds there I already sewed a whole bunch from that packet and I’m going to sew the rest of them today say if all of these seeds germinate that’s perfectly fine I can always find a home for the plants I’ve been multi-wing my seeds for years now and that just means sewing the seeds pretty thickly in a container like this you don’t have to do this if you want to you can sew your seeds in some sort of a six cell pack or whatever type of container that you have readily available or that you feel comfortable with doing it this way absolutely is a little bit more work going forward right now it’s easy but as the seeds start germinating I will have to prick out the plants and I will have to bump them up into small little sucel packs I enjoy that process but I get it that process is not for everyone and I know that I am sewing these very very thickly but I’m okay with that I plan on pricking the plants out once they have at least their first set of true leaves next I’m going to go ahead and I want to press the seeds in I want the seeds to make good contact with the soil the rest of the seed packets don’t appear to have a ton of seeds in them and because there isn’t too much of the nonseed material I’m not going to bother separating them if you wanted to do that you could use something like a kitchen strainer with a bowl beneath it and separate the seeds from the non-seed material you can’t do that with every single seed that you collect but you could definitely do that with the petunia seeds and since I collected these seeds there is no guarantee that they’re all going to create the same looking plants it’ll be a fun surprise and I’ll show you definitely when they start blooming what they all look like whenever you collect your own seeds if you collect the seeds from an open pollinated or an heirloom plant be it flour or vegetable then the plant that gets created from those seeds that you collected should come true to the parent plant however if you collect your seeds from a hybrid plant then the chances are pretty high that the plants that get created from the seeds you collect will not look identical to the parent we’ll go ahead and we’re going to press those seeds in now and now we have one that it says basically the center was a cream color and the edge was more of a grape color I collected these from my friend Linda’s house she lives close by to me and again we’re going to sew all the seeds and boy oh boy if they all germinate we’re in trouble and I’m just going to sew those right over here what I may end up doing is doing little garden chats where I talk about a certain topic while I’m potting up plants this winter I think that would be fun there are a lot of topics to talk about that I want to share and that way when I’m potting up plants I don’t feel like I’m just sitting by myself potting up plants I’m actually thinking about and talking about some interesting topics that I think you would be interested in and we’re going to press those seeds in and the final seed we’re going to sew it had a dark purple Center to it and then around the trim it was a cream color and I got it from a park close to my house and there are a lot of seeds in there again I’m just I’m just basically I don’t want to say I’m trying to get rid of my seeds but I guess I am because I want to see how they all do and then but like I said next year I can definitely collect more seeds but I’d also like to buy some petunia seeds if I have good luck with these this year as some of you know I have a lot of shade where I live and I think that’s one of the reasons why I don’t grow a ton of patunas in my yard I grow a lot of impatients a lot of begonias and colas plants that do better in shade but I do have pockets of sun in my yard and that’s why I grow patunas and pots so I can place those pots in those Sunny pockets and one thing I’ve never been good about when it comes to patunas is pinching them back during the season as they get leggy I find that they start to look almost scraggly and I don’t like that look so one of my goals for this year should these plants do well is I want to be better about fertilizing them pinching them back deadheading all the things that you should be doing with patunas that you start from seed and the final pressing in of the seeds into the seed starting mix and I’m just going to use this small hand pump sprayer I like to add a little additional water on top of the seeds just so that they really press into the seed starting mix and have a better chance of germination I’m just slightly going to mist the top layer of the seeds I want to make sure that they’re nice and wet now I’m going to place the cover notice it’s clear so this cover acts as a humidity Dome and because it’s clear it allows light to come in after all the petunia seeds need light to germinate but also it keeps the moisture in there and it keeps it a little bit more humid which is a perfect environment for those seeds to grow in now if you don’t have a restaurant takeout container or you’re doing seed starting and something like six cell packs you can also add a larger humidity Dome you could also use something as simple as clear plastic wrap and put that over your cell packs now I’m placing the restaurant takeout container on a Seedling heat mat which stays on 24 hours a day in order to get the 70 to 75° Fahrenheit range and notice I have my grow lights here these are turned on 16 hours a day from 5:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. remember be patient it might take 2 to 3 weeks to see some sort of germination once I see good germination I will remove this container off of the heat mat but I’ll make sure that they’re still under the grow lights because they will need that nice strong light thinning out and potting up will be done as soon as I have my first set of true leaves as you wait for your petunia seeds to germinate you don’t want the seeds to dry out and seeing that they’re surface Zone it’s important to keep the seeds moist you can do that by covering them with a light layer of vermiculite or you can spray the top of them with water and since I’m going to be keeping my tray on a Seedling heat mat the heat mat dries the soil out quite quickly so I’ll be monitoring the moisture and if I need to Spritz said I’ll definitely do that however once the seedlings start appearing I will definitely start bottom watering from there on out be on the lookout for our videos where I’ll be updating you on when the seeds have germinated my process for potting up the seedlings fertilizing them pinching them back and then planting them out in the landscape I love hearing from you so please let me know if you’ve ever started petunias from seed and if so what were some of your favorite varieties and until the next video make it a great day with gardening