380 Flower Seed Starting Basics

Show Transcript

380 Flower Seeds TRANSCRIPT

Farmer Fred

Hi, it’s Master Gardener Fred Hoffman, Farmer Fred, and today, I’m joined by America’s Favorite Retired College Horticultural Professor, Debbie Flower. And we will do a deep dive into  practical flower seed starting techniques, such as the critical timing for beginning various flowers and the correct depth for planting those seeds. And, Debbie shares with us her trick for careful watering of newly planted seeds. Also, she has tips for transplanting those young flowering plants into the garden.

It’s episode number 380, Flower Seed Starting Basics.

We’re podcasting from Barking Dog Studios here in the beautiful Abutilon Jungle in Suburban Purgatory. It’s the Garden Basics with Farmer Fred podcast, brought to you today by Dave Wilson Nursery. Let’s go! 

FLOWER SEED STARTING BASICS, Pt. 1

Farmer Fred:

Even though it's the dead of winter, now's the time to be starting a lot of seeds. We've talked about tomato seeds and pepper seeds, edible plants. Well, what about some flowering plants? Just a show for your nose or a show to attract beneficials and pollinators that you can be planting out in spring? But you would start them from seed this time of year. What's the best way to start flowering seeds? How do you take care of them? And for that, we turn to Debbie Flower, America's favorite retired college horticultural professor. And I believe in your years and years and years of college education, as far as teaching goes, you have done this with students on sort of a quasi-commercial basis where part of the curriculum of the class is having a plant sale in the spring of things that you grew in the winter. Did that include flowers?

Debbie Flower:

Yes, it did.

Farmer Fred:

 All right. So what kind of flowers did you work with? And you would be doing this probably with your winter class as opposed to your spring class.

Debbie Flower:

 Well, yeah, but we actually had two plant sales a year. And we so I did a sale with each each group each semester. The spring semester starts in January. So we would hit the ground running with peppers first and then tomatoes. After that, we would start with the flowers.

Farmer Fred:

 And  that would still be like in February or March.

Debbie Flower:

 Yes. OK, so we're still pretty early. we aimed for a plant sale in April. So the seed starting was really a beginning of the semester event. Because it takes weeks, I like to have nine weeks between, let's say, starting the peppers and the sale, and then eight weeks for the tomatoes, and then probably seven or six weeks for the flowers to get them to size to sell them.

Farmer Fred:

 So early March.

Debbie Flower:

 Early March or mid-February. We did zinnias. There are so many flowers and I get to buy the seeds. 

Farmer Fred

Well, lucky you. Yeah.

Debbie Flower:

We had to market them, so we had to pick things that we thought people would like to grow and that would be successful for them. So we did zinnias. One thing about zinnias is you don't want them to get root bound. So you have to either keep moving them up really fast into bigger containers, then they cost more to sell, they use more media, et cetera, and it's more lab time. Take that flat or all those six packs of zinnias and move them up. But there are so many beautiful, different zinnias and they attract beneficial insects. So they were always on my list. Sweet alyssum, which is a low-growing ground cover. It's in the broccoli family, actually.

Farmer Fred:

Tiny seeds.

Debbie Flower:

Tiny seeds, right. And alyssum comes in colors, and some of them are fragrant. Not all the sweet alyssum are fragrant. And they attract beneficials. In fact, they're a wonderful thing to plant below roses because they attract beneficials and help keep some of the insects away from the roses.

Farmer Fred:

 The wine grape growers here in California are using alyssum more and more along their rows of vineyards to attract those same beneficial insects to help control the pests that bother wine grapes.

Debbie Flower:

 You call it the Good Bug Hotel. 

Farmer Fred:

Yeah. Exactly what it is.

Debbie Flower:

 And if you're into growing butterfly attracting plants, we didn't grow butterfly weed, which is something that monarch butterflies need to lay their babies on. But if you were growing that and you're trying to attract monarchs to your butterfly weed, you need to feed that butterfly that flies in. So things like zinnias provide nectar. So you attract the parent and provide a meal for the parent, and then they can go over to your butterfly weed and lay their eggs. Marigolds have many different kinds. The simple ones, meaning that they're a flat flower with only about five petals and a center. They're better for attracting beneficials, but the others are so pretty. We would grow those. Cosmos, which tends to be pink, but they're pink and white and there's some striped ones. They're pretty flowers. Nicotiana, which is actually flowering tobacco.

Farmer Fred:

Yeah, but it has a wonderful aroma.

Debbie Flower:

 It does. And often it's at night. And I love the white ones that bloom at night. So when you're sitting on your summer patio at night, you can see those white flowers in the dark and experience the great fragrance. And annual salvias are always good. Sometimes I try to grow a garden or have flowers so that on July 4th, I can have a red, white and blue bouquet. 

Farmer Fred:

 Yeah. There you go.

Debbie Flower:

It's just sort of a nerdy thing to do. And red salvia works well on that. So does a red zinnia. 

Farmer Fred:

 Among some other aromatic flowers that you can grow from seed includes sweet peas, garden phlox, moonflower, the tuberose.

Debbie Flower:

That would be a bulb.

Farmer Fred:

 Yeah. And dianthus. And these are all shows for the nose that you might enjoy planting. Of the ones that you started in your class, did they have different requirements to get them to germinate? What was the easiest? Which was the hardest?

Debbie Flower:

 They were all pretty easy. Having done this for so many years, one of the most interesting things to me was that all seeds, regardless to where they are native, whether it's a cold place or a dry place or a wet place or a hot place, they all need about the same thing to germinate. and that's about room temperature media and not too much water but enough water. And some need light. Those are typically often the very small seeds  and the students hated that. “Oh i got the one that needs light.” Don't panic you just moisten your media, put it in your container, tap it down. We always took the the container and hit it on the potting bench. You didn't push it with your fingers; you don't want to get all the air out of the media. You just want to settle it so there are no big holes in that media that you're starting to put seed into. Then there were those seeds that need to be placed on the surface. That was the hardest part. You need to learn how to fold the seed packet and tap them out. Once i had a student tell me how he poured the seeds out into like a little dish and then he had a another dish of water and a chopstick.  And you dip the chopstick in the water and then touch the seeds and you'd get one seed in that drop of water and then drop it onto the container of media.

Farmer Fred:

] Yeah, you wouldn't want to stick that chopstick, though, into the soil.

Debbie Flower:

 No, no, no. And most of these seeds are pretty small. And so the depth you plant seeds is two to three times the narrowest height of the seed. So if you take a flat seed…  what's a seed people would know? A garden bean, a black bean. If you measure it from one end to the other, it is maybe a half an inch. You measure it, you lay it on a table flat, and that other side, that other measurements can be much smaller. It's going to be maybe a quarter of an inch. And so, if you were to plant a seed like that, you would plant it only about a half an inch deep because the seed from on the flat side,  is only about a quarter of an inch.

Farmer Fred:

 If you were planting sweet peas, for example, though, would you soak the seeds?

Debbie Flower:

 Yes. Sometimes seeds need to be soaked before they're planted to get them to germinate or they need to be scratched open before they germinate. And that information is on many seed packets. It is not on all.

Farmer Fred:

And usually if it's not on the seed packet, you have to take a picture of the QR code that might be on the back.

Debbie Flower:

Get the information that way.

Farmer Fred:

Or go to the website of the catalog where you got the seed from or the name of the company or the URL that's on the seed packet. And hopefully they have more information online. That's a good rule of thumb - when picking out  flower seeds to purchase, make sure there are instructions on the label.

Debbie Flower:

And after making the mistake a couple of times, I realized for students, I needed seed packets with the information on it.  And there are some companies, like the one you showed me  that produces in Missouri, they don't have enough information. And so, it wasn't to my benefit as their instructor to buy from them.

Farmer Fred:

So, when you bought seed, you'd probably go to a nursery or a big box store,  go to the seed rack and find the ones with the most information.

Debbie Flower:

 Right. And then I knew those brands I could reliably order from if I were doing it on the internet.

Farmer Fred:

 Some brands are better than others when it comes to that.

Debbie Flower:

Yes.

Farmer Fred:

And generally, if you are a seeds person and you are selling to stores, you are going to probably have very complete information, hopefully, on that seed package. Whereas if you buy mail order seeds, there's no guarantee that there's going to be any information on the packet other than the name of the plant.

Debbie Flower:

Right. And there are some specialty nurseries that don't have,  as you get more sophisticated in your ability to start seeds and you start hunting down weird things from different places, you better also know how to research to find out how to start them. 

Farmer Fred:

Of course, the internet can help out a lot.

Debbie Flower:

 Yeah. It's a wonderful thing.

Farmer Fred:

 Isn't it? Yeah. So there's always that.

Debbie Flower:

 Right.

Farmer Fred:

 Well, let me reword the question, though. Of the seeds that you started for class, which ones came up first? Which ones came up last?

Debbie Flower:

The ones we had the most trouble with, I don't know that I can answer that specifically. The ones we had the most trouble with were the drought tolerant natives. And I think it's because the conditions in which seeds germinate are very different from where a drought tolerant native grows. However, a drought tolerant native needs water and temperature, but they were much harder.

Farmer Fred:

 Natives.

Debbie Flower:

 The easy ones, zinnias for sure, marigolds are easy, alyssums, cosmos, nicotiana, salvia, they're all very easy ones to grow.

Farmer Fred:

 And for all of these, mostly they would be growing in the container for six weeks before being transplanted outside?

Debbie Flower:

Right, but we would move them up to bigger containers as the plants grew bigger. How big?  I tried to not get into gallons.

Farmer Fred:

 Yeah, that's a lot of media.

Debbie Flower:

 It is. I tried to start in six packs, typically jumbo packs, and then move them to four inch.

Farmer Fred:

In your description there, you talked about media. So which media are you talking about? Is it one on an enemies list somewhere?

Debbie Flower:

 We make container media. And we actually used basically container media to start everything. And that was peat moss or coir, perlite and vermiculite. And it did have fertilizer in it at that stage. And there were a few things, and I can't remember what they were, along the way that didn't come up. And I wondered if it was that the fertilizer can hurt baby roots. If it was the fertilizer that hurt the roots, it could have been a number of things. Too much water, not enough water. 

Farmer Fred:

That's a good point to bring up, too, is that you don't want to love your seedlings to death. (sound of barking dogs) We'll wait for the dogs. Welcome to Barking Dog Studios. Thank you very much.

Farmer Fred:

 The fertilizer that comes in a lot of seed starting mixes, if there is fertilizer in it, it's very, very small amounts.  Whereas I would choose a seed starting mix, a commercial seed starting mix, that definitely didn't have any fertilizer.

Debbie Flower:

 Right. Seeds don't need fertilizer to germinate. They've got all the food they need inside of the seed. That's part of the seed. They got a baby plant. They got the fertilizer and they got the protective coat. All they need is the right conditions to grow. Fertilizer isn't needed until the plant is up out of the media and starts growing.

Farmer Fred:

 To what point? Up to past the cotyledon - the first leaf stage - or the true leaf stage? When do you begin to fertilize?

Debbie Flower:

Well, at school, they had it when the seeds were planted because we didn't make a separate seed starting mix. At home, I wait until the first true leaves.

Farmer Fred:

Okay. And then what are you fertilizing with?

Debbie Flower:

 It depends. If it's something that's really big and fast growing, then i will use a time release. But  i will use it at a dose below what is recommended on the label because you can always add fertilizer, but you can't take it back. If it's something that is a more frail plant, it grows more slowly; in that case, i will use a fish emulsion.

Farmer Fred:

 Fish emulsion is a very weak concoction of nitrogen phosphorus and potassium usually it's like a 2-1-1 or a 4-1-1.

Debbie Flower:

 Low analysis, right.

Farmer Fred:

 And that helps ensure that you won't burn that plant.

Debbie Flower:

Right. And I don't use time release once I put it in the ground. I go to the organics, the fish emulsion, et cetera.

Farmer Fred:

 I thought you once said that you do use the time release fertilizer for container plants.

Debbie Flower:

For container plants, I do, yes.  They have limited ability to go distances to find food for their roots. So, I do use it in containers, yes.

Farmer Fred:

You're applying that weekly, weakly?

Debbie Flower:

No. The time-release fertilizer will say it's good for, let's say, three months. Some of them are three months, some of them are four months, some of them are six months. And that is based on... an even temperature of about 70 degrees. Well, no place has an even temperature, maybe Hawaii, of about 70 degrees. If it's warmer, then the fertilizer breaks down faster. If it's colder, then the fertilizer breaks down much more slowly. So I will use maybe half the dose, maybe two-thirds of what is recommended on the label. And then note when I do it and watch the temperatures.

Farmer Fred:

 Is that based on planting in soil or in a container?

Debbie Flower:

 It's container media. It's the only place I use it.

Farmer Fred:

 All right. And because you need to water that container more often, because it tends to dry out more often, will that fertilizer, those pellets, get washed down out of the root zone?

Debbie Flower:

The pellets themselves don't, but when the pellets break down and release the fertilizer inside, that does wash down through the root zone. But it also goes out the bottom. I don't have these in a flat that holds water. The water flows out the bottom. So, any excess fertilizer is washing out. And then you watch for deficiencies. They're not growing fast enough. They're yellow, that kind of thing, and fertilize accordingly.

Farmer Fred:

 I think among a lot of gardeners, when they see a suffering plant, the first thing they say is, “oh, it needs water”.

Debbie Flower:

 Oops.

Farmer Fred:

If it's in a container, you better check drainage. 

Debbie Flower:

 Check drainage. Stick your finger in there, even if it's in the ground. Stick your finger in there or use a moisture meter. But you have to know how a moisture meter works and check before you start applying water.

Farmer Fred:

But let's talk about direct sowing the flower seeds. And I think that's what most people will do. And you would do that, I would think, well after the last frost.

Debbie Flower:

Well, yes. Most of these want warmer temperatures. So you're going to wait probably till...

Farmer Fred:

 Mother's Day.

Debbie Flower:

 Yeah. When we'd be putting your tomatoes in the ground, whenever that is where you are. That's when you can start the direct seed. Zinnias do very well that way. Sunflowers, I only like to do direct. I've tried them in containers and they just poop out when you put them in the ground. Direct seed. Tithonia, which is a sunflower-ish plant and grows quite large. Sweet peas do well, direct seeded. Foxglove, I used to grow when I lived in a different climate and loved it. That's a biennial.

Farmer Fred:

 And you better define that.

Debbie Flower:

 Right. An annual completes its life cycle in one year. And it's typically just part of that year, one growing season. And  annual means yearly. And to complete its life cycle means It starts from seed, it grows up, flowers, fruits, produces seed, ripens seed, and then it dies. It has to die for the life cycle to be over. So, annuals are only good for one growing season, one summer, one winter, one spring, but they produce the most flowers for the size of the plant that they are. They just bloom their little hearts out because their job in the world is to produce seed, to replace themselves. So, they just keep making flowers and making seed. Perennials are persistent. They last more than one year. They can last 10 years. They can last 20 years if conditions are good.

Farmer Fred:

 I believe the official definition states sort of contractually that perennials last more than one year.

Debbie Flower:

Yes, that is true. More than one year. But they can last quite a long time. And so they start from seed one year, grow up, flower, produce fruit and seed. and then stop. Some of them die to the ground. Those are herbaceous perennials. You don't see them, but they'll reappear the next year. Others just sit around without flowers on them for a while. And then when the season comes around again for good growing, they'll grow and flower and fruit and produce seed again. That's a perennial, it’s persistent. And then there are biennials. Bi means two, and annual refers to year. And those are plants that complete their life cycle in two years. Foxglove is one. Hollyhocks typically are biennials, classically they are biennials. There's been a lot of breeding in both plants to push them out to be annuals, because annuals are more satisfying to people, right? They're going to get flowers that first year. They don't have to wait for the second year. 

Farmer Fred:

 Parsley in the vegetable garden is a biennial. It's one of my favorites. I'm even reluctant to yank out parsley in its second year because it produces flowers. I think that's one of the signs of a biennial is that in year number two, if you're growing it for the leaves, in the case of parsley, they may get a little bitter in Year 2. But the flower display is fabulous and it's attracting all sorts of beneficial insects.

Debbie Flower:

 Right. And occasionally, I haven't had it happen lately in my yard, but occasionally I'll get baby plants to come from that. 

Farmer Fred:

 Yeah. Seeds that have fallen to the ground and germinated.

Debbie Flower:

 Yes.  It's probably because I'm messing too much with my soil that I don't get them. I haven't gotten them lately. But yeah. So a biennial grows from seed and produces a plant the first year, that is just leaves. And it often doesn't look like the final plant. In the second year, it continues to grow. But then in the second year, as you said, it flowers and produces seed.

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Farmer Fred

Let’s continue talking flower seed starting basics with Debbie Flower. Let’s tackle the question, just how the heck do you plant a wildflower garden?

FLOWER SEED STARTING BASICS, Pt. 2

Farmer Fred:

One very popular flower to plant is not really a single one. It's usually a mix, a wildflower mix. And a wildflower mix is a little special in that, you are going to direct sow it into the garden at the right time of year for it to either germinate or wait until the rain becomes more consistent, which may not be until November or later and last through February or so.

Debbie Flower:

 Right.

Farmer Fred:

 And even though it's still a little cold outside, it's not freezing. But that gives the plant a better chance to germinate.

Debbie Flower:

Yeah. Whenever we direct seed, we want to prepare the soil, roughing it up. You don't want to plant on a hard, flat soil. The seeds will just roll away.

Farmer Fred:

 Pull the weeds out.

Debbie Flower:

 Pull the weeds out, right. Roughing up the soil, maybe add amendments. I'm not a big fan of that. And then plant the seeds and then cover them over. And then you have to make sure they stay moist until you know that they're established. And spacing is critical in direct seeding. That's the hardest thing for me with a mix. It's a mix of plants of different sizes. And some will germinate before others. You typically want the tall ones in the back and the short ones in the front, and you want them spaced enough that they can become a mature plant. And when people say, well, how much is that? And seed packets often don't tell you how wide a plant will get. They tell you how tall. And if they don't tell you how wide, then assume it'll get just as wide as it's going to get tall.

Farmer Fred:

  Now you have to explain to people why you're not a big fan of soil amendments in starting a new garden like that.

Debbie Flower:

 Well, the roots of a plant go, typical for a tree anyway, is two to three times away in distance, away from the trunk as the plant is tall. So, that means if you have a 10-foot tall tree or shrub, the roots in all directions will go 20 to 30 feet away from the plant.

Farmer Fred:

[20:57] Is that true with annuals too?

Debbie Flower:

 No. Annuals, they do spread, but not as far as with a tree. But they do spread. And so, if you're going to amend, you have to amend the whole root area.

Farmer Fred:

 We should point out too, for annual spreading, if it was planted correctly, they'll spread. If you take a cramped annual out of its little six pack and it's just a mass of roots and you don't try to separate those roots out and just plunk it into the soil, you just might have a stunted plant.

Debbie Flower:

 Right. 

Farmer Fred:

So how do you free up roots?

Debbie Flower:

I cut them. 

Farmer Fred

You cut them. 

Debbie Flower:

I cut them.

Farmer Fred:

 But through the side.

Debbie Flower:

I cut down the sides. If it's just like out of a jumbo pack, a really little, that's what, like an inch and a half, two inch. I'll just cut it in half with my pruning shears or a pair of scissors right across the bottom and maybe about halfway up the depth of the media.  Because it's so small.

Farmer Fred:

 You don’t run  your fingernails through the sides?

Debbie Flower:

I don't like to pull because it's like pulling your hair.  It goes all the way to the attachment to the plant. I would rather cut, get a clean cut. The plant has a better ability to close that wound that you make with a clean cut than it does one that's ragged from pulling. And you'll get new roots growing from behind the cut.

Farmer Fred:

 Then how do you get any satisfaction of dirt