The MOST DIFFICULT Seeds to Start!

Sarah starts the most difficult seeds today!

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Hi everybody Welcome Back To Living Traditions Homestead well I am out here by the Sprout house today I am going to be starting some more seeds I have more difficult to start seeds in here uh Kevin made me this fun pouch so I could carry my seeds around and not lose them

Today I am starting some of the herb seeds that are a little bit more difficult to start and take longer to germinate and longer to grow big enough to either sell at the farmers market or plant in the ground come spring my hope today is to help you all learn some tips

And tricks of starting herb seeds that can notoriously be difficult to start let’s head inside and get going as we come in I’m just going to set down my seeds and give you a little bit of a tour this is our Sprout house which is our building that we start all

Of our seeds for ourself and to sell at the farmers market we have a nice workbench here that’s where we work to all the seeds we have a heater here that keeps us warm and keeps it warm inside of here little storage room storage closet a little storage shelf here with

Lights this is where we store the bigger plants and the 3in pots that are going to the farmers market a little table here for a coffee pot which we need to bring out yet more shelving for the bigger plants and then these shelves over here have lights and heat mats this

Is where we germinate all of our seeds in a recent video Kevin and I started some of our tomato plants pepper plants and uh some of the spring plants that will be growing cauliflower two types of cabbage and collared greens so that is what is on these heat mats right here uh

These are really just the tomatoes and the peppers are really just the plants that we’ll be growing in the greenhouse we’ve got lots more to start for our garden area and for the farmers market but today I’m going to be concentrating on starting herb seeds and I do have a

Lot of packets of seeds in this little pouch here that Kevin made for me I am going to be starting a lot of these today because a lot of them take a long time to get large enough to either plant outside or sell at the farmers market

Right now I have about 11 weeks until we start going to the farmers market and probably about 13 weeks until I will start planting these out either in pots or in the ground so because some of these take about 10 weeks to grow to be ready enough to be sold and planted I

Need to get a move on now there are lots of things things that can make starting herb seeds seem really complicated um how far ahead of time to plant the seeds is just one of them a lot of these seeds are super tiny so it can be confusing

Like do you plant them deep in the ground do you plant them right on the top of the ground do you put just a tiny bit of soil on top of them or do you just water them in do you have to freeze the seeds before you start them um in

Little pots to kind of mimic what happens over the winter and what about those seeds that have a really hard shell that have a hard time germinating breaking through that shell there are a lot of things about starting herb seeds that can be very intimidating so today I’m hoping to

Demystify starting herb seeds let’s start off by me just sharing the herbs I’m going to be starting some of these are for my personal use and some of them are just popular herbs that I sell at the farmers market uh actually herbs are one of the most popular things for us to

Sell at the farmers market because I think we’re we might be the only ones that sell herbs at the farmers market so they go really quickly so I want to make sure that I uh bring a nice variety of herbs that are popular that we’ve sold

Out really quickly um in the past and that just are just kind of a well-rounded variety of herbs some of them are for cooking some of them are medicinal and I’m really not going to get into the medicinal properties of any of these um if you’re interested you can

You know look it up in books and online also the majority of the seeds that I am planting this year are either from em I Gardener or they’re from just the store this year we were at Menards in Springfield and I saw they had a really great selection of seeds from Burpee and

They had a good selection of herbs the things that I wanted to grow so I just picked up a bunch of seed pack ET there also so I’m going to be growing German chamomile Big Italy parsley um eona perua which is purple cone flour marshmallow holy basil cinnamon basil dwarf Greek basil geneves

Basil St John’s wart common English time um English lavender broadleaf Sage Rosemary and Stevia I actually got these sedia seeds from a friend I also plan to be uh bringing Dill to the farmers market but Dill grows so fast that I need to wait probably another month

Before I plant Dill generally each seed packet has planting instructions on the back either when to start the seeds inside and how to do that or when to start them outside and how to do that but it can be very overwhelming when you’re starting this many different

Types of seeds like keeping all of that information straight so I just quickly want to show you that I have gathered all of that information for lots of types of seeds lots of flowers and lots of vegetables all into one group into some seed starting cheat sheets now like

I said I have a cheat sheet for vegetable a cheat sheet for herbs and a cheat sheet for flowers I’m going to be referencing and kind of showing you about the herb cheat sheet that I’m going to be using today now these three cheat sheets are sold together on our

Website for $2 for all three of them our website is Living Traditions homestead.com these are in our shop and if you’re interested in getting these to have reference for yourself in a binder like this go ahead and check out our website like I said $2 for all of this

Information now with this herb starting cheat sheet you can see here uh that it lists the herb name how many weeks before planting that you should start the seeds how deep to start the seeds about how many days it should take for the seeds to germinate if you need a

Heat mat and any other kind of special notes this is where the special information about uh what your seeds like in order to germinate that’s where this will be explained one factor that I pay the most attention to initially is whether or not the seeds need light to

Germinate or they prefer no light to germinate so when I’m deciding what seeds I’m going to start together in a tray I want the seeds that are the same so I want seeds in the tray that they all need the lights toab to be on in

Order for them to germinate and seeds in a different tray that don’t need any light or don’t want any light so that is really my first consideration when determining which seeds I’m going to start with which seeds the reason that is important to me is because I start

Seeds in a seed tray that holds 72 seeds so hopefully if all of them germinate there will be 72 different little plants in here I’m not starting 72 plants of chamomile and 72 plants of Rosemary I’m actually going to be just starting you know maybe 18 or 24 of them each in here

So it makes sense for me to have you know three different types of plants in this tray that require light in order to germinate that’s really the only thing that I’m going to consider when I’m deciding what I’m going to grow with what now with that said I’m going to go

Through my pile of seed packets here and I’m going to just separate them into different piles of which ones need light to germinate and which ones don’t need light to germinate now another really great aspect of these herb cheat sheets or really all the cheat sheets is I

Don’t remember from year to year what they specifically need I mean I’ve done a lot of growing in my life and I have done a lot of seed starting but there’s no way that I can remember all the specifics and all the details of what each one of these plants requires so

That’s what I’m going to go ahead and do real quick just separate these into two piles so those two groups were separated so these are the seeds that don’t need light in order to germinate and these do need light to germinate now before we move on I do want to talk about two

Things that are not included within this seed starting cheat sheet and really it’s because I don’t feel that that information is really necessary some of of you may completely disagree with what I’m about to say and that’s okay everybody has their own opinion the two things that are not included on these

Sheets is whether the seeds need to be stratified or scarified stratified or stratification means freezing the seeds for a certain amount of time to basically trick the seeds into thinking that they went through winter then when they’re thought out and planted they are more likely or it’s required in order for them to

Germinate now I disagree with that at least on the seeds that you can buy from the store okay uh for example some of the seeds that people or organizations say should be stratified or frozen before germinating or before planting are anasp beebalm catnip chamomile eona lavender lemon balm marshmallow Mullen

Stinging nettle rosemary sage St John wart Valyrian a lot of those are the seeds I’m going to be starting and a lot of those are seeds that I have been starting almost every year for a decade honestly and I can tell you that um I have never had to freeze seeds in order

For them to germinate maybe that’s because the companies are doing that for me I don’t know but I can tell you that there are some seeds that the internet people say need to be stratified that there’s no way that I believe that for instance Anis hiip is something that we

Grow Here We Grow it for tea because it tastes lovely when those plants flower and go to seed and the wind takes some places they germinate that same year with no trouble at all in fact they have actually germinated everywhere the same goes for chamomile I can have chamomile

Come up same year from seeds without being frozen in between there are many other seeds that I talked about that are the same for sure so because not only from personal experience buying seeds and packets and not freezing them personal experience to me says it’s not necessary uh you may get better

Germination if you freeze them ahead of time but I don’t want to confuse people saying this has to be frozen in order for it to germinate when I’ve not had that experience myself so that’s why I have not included requirements for seeds that need to be stratified before

Germinating into my list the other is scarification now scarification is um kind of scratching off part of the seed Coating in order to help seed seeds germinate and normally that is for seeds with that are kind of on the large side and have like a really thick coating I

Have not needed to scarify seeds in order for them to germinate the main seed that you all would probably be familiar with that they say on the internet that needs to be scarified are nestum seeds I plant nestum seeds almost every single year they germinate they

Don’t have a problem doing that so for that reason I also do not include scarification requirements within our seed starting cheat sheets a couple things that I do include in the seed starting cheat sheets that we probably won’t go over with any of these seeds today are seeds that do best if they’re

Direct sewn which means they do better if you just sew the seeds in the ground right away rather than transplanting them after you start them in the greenhouse or your house or anything and those plants that actually do best from cuting and one example is anything in the mint family peppermint uh peppermint

Spearmint those mints they actually are really difficult to start from seed but they’re super easy to start from a cutting so once they’ve come back to life in the spring you can cut off a sprig stick it in some water The Roots will grow and you can just plant that

Little baby plant with the roots in it right in the ground that’s a much easier way to start U mint plants so that kind of information is also in my my seed starting cheat sheet okay let’s get started planting some seeds the first thing we need to do is to fill this tray

With seed starting mix this tub we have here is filled with our seed starting mix and I’m just going to put handfuls in there I’ll just move it around to fill all of these cells the next step is I’m going to label this tray with a big old line of masking tape

So that I can section off each of the rows I plant this way and I can Mark which rows have what herb this is just the easiest and fastest probably cheapest way that we have found to Mark these seed trays I’m going to be planting in 24 of these cells per type

Of herb so I’m going to be marking off these sections and writing what is planted in each of these sections so I’m going to start off with St John’s War then I’ll plant thyme uh then I’ll plant Rosary now over here according to my seed starting uh cheat sheet it says St

John’s wart uh you should sew the seeds on the surface and it does need light we knew that already don’t cover the seeds so this will be pretty easy now these seeds here St John’s wart from em my Gardener they are really little seeds there are

500 seeds in here and they are just teeny tiny things you can see so I’m just going to take a tiny pinch and I’m just going to drop a few seeds on the top of each one of these now that is all that is required

To be done for those St John wart seeds the time seeds say surface sew needs light don’t cover same as the St John’s W that’ll be easy this package has 300 seeds in it and they are actually packaged in another little baggie in there can see how small they are because they’re so

Tiny and there are a lot of them I’m just going to put a couple seeds in each cell now for the Rosemary surface sew needs light we need that Pat gently so that means we’re just going to Pat the seed down onto the soil so that it

Makes really good contact with the soil so it never dries out these seeds are small but not quite as small as the others so I will be able to plant about one seed per cell now that we have them all in there we’re just going to go back with our

Finger and just pat pat those seeds down into the soil so they make really good contact with the soil since these three types of seeds are done they’re planted I’m going to go ahead and give them a good watering and I’m going to put on a dome domes are really

Important for starting seeds because they trap in the uh humidity the moisture inside of here and it’s really important for herbs especially those that are surface zwn it’s going to be so important for them to stay moist and stay wet so that the seeds their shells soften and the insides can germinate and

Pop out and start growing so if you don’t have domes it’s fine you can use some plastic wrap over the top to maintain that humidity but as soon as the those seeds germinate you’ll want to take the plastic wrap off if you have a dome like this it’s still okay if they

Germinate because they won’t pop up and touch this plastic right away it’ll take them a while they have to grow for them to touch this plastic so now I need to decide whether or not I should put these on a heat band it turns out that all

Three of these herbs uh St John’s wart Thyme and rosemary they do not need heat in order to germinate we are keeping this Sprout house um at about 65 to 72° that will be warm enough for these to germinate so I’m just going to put these onto uh one of our shelves we’ll

Turn the light on and we’ll move On Okay For [Applause] The next three we will plant are chamomile sage and Stevia chamomile likes to be sewn on the surface needs light don’t cover Sage needs to be surface Zone needs light pat down gently and Stevia needs light covered lightly these three will be put on a heat mat the next three are

Eonia lavender and the dwarf Greek basil which we will just treat like regular basil the eona needs to be a/ qu inch under the dirt needs light cover lightly it does need a heat mat the lavender surface sew needs light Pat gently it needs a heat mat the

Basil an eighth of an inch under the soil rake the soil and it does need a heat mat I’m getting there I still have three different Basils to plant and parsley and marshmallow all of those I’m going to plant the exact same way meaning I’m

Going to come over here to my herb seed starting cheat sheet basically just follow the instructions until they’re all planted For N Well the herb seeds that I have to start I got them all started today so that is awesome like I said there are a few things that I’ll need to start later that grow really quickly it doesn’t make sense for me to start those now because

They’d be much too big by the time Farmers Market comes now if you are looking for like seed trays and domes and and these kinds of things uh we get those from Growers solution.com they also sell these heat mats if you are looking for lights like ours they’re in

Our Amazon shop but really just plain old shop lights will do for starting seeds as long as you hang them really low close to the trays and as the plants grow you’ll want to move them up a little bit at a time these purple lights you can just keep at this height and

They’ll be good to go until you move them outside remember that our cheat sheets are available on our website Living Traditions homestead.com and Kevin came in and let me know that he can make more of these and put these on our website also these little seed bags

U so if you’re interested in one of these you can check it out on our website as well you guys I hope you enjoyed some time with me as I taught a little bit more advanced seed starting techniques with these herb seeds really once you get the hang of it it’s all

Really easy you just need some kind of reference as to what the seeds really want and what they need you guys if you’re enjoying videos like this I would sure love it if you would hit that subscribe button also remember the best way you can help us here on the

Homestead is just to share our videos on your social media until next time thank you so much for stopping by your homestead take care and God bless