Some swell seed germination techniques submitted by readers:
First up is Peter Kok, who is an urban farmer in Penticton. Check out his website here. He’s been using old window panes to heat his soil. Says Peter: “The panes are raised about six inches off the soil using some old timber as temporary framing. The panes of glass are not secured on, just laid over top without gaps inbetween. I can’t give an exact soil temperature but I do know the soil is quite warm to the touch and things germinated very quickly and are growing like crazy. I also included a picture of a small greenhouse I built over the winter over an existing garden bed. Under the panes I have mostly radishes growing with a bit of spinach and in the greenhouse its spinach, salad greens and radishes. The greenhouse is built with pains of glass and patio doors I scavenged as well as with recycled wood. The carpentry is far from what we would call trim but it works all the same.”
Thanks Peter. Next up is a simple row-tunnel system Vanessa and I are using for our seedlings:
I featured these Ogre’s clothespins in a previous post. They’re easy to make out of recycled lumber and old inner tubes. The hoops are made from recycled electrical conduit and are quite rigid if you run a string along all of them. One-foot pieces of rebar work really well for mounting the hoops as well as anchoring the whole shebang at each end. As you can see, it’s easy to use the Ogre pins to hold up the plastic when you want to vent the system:
Overall I found the conduit combined with rebar combined with the ogre pins to be an excellent row tunnel set-up. It’s kept the seedlings a few degrees warmer at night, which is great since we’re just starting our market garden and don’t have an indoor seed-starting setup yet.
Next up: John Mardlin and Jill Dalton show off their new seedling watering system at Northbrook Farm:
Got questions about anything you see? Post a comment at bottom and I’ll try to facilitate discussion. Moving on…
Daniel Brisebois is a farmer at Tourne-Sol Cooperative farm in Quebec and co-author of Canadian Organic Growers recently released Crop Planning for Organic Vegetable Growers. His blog about seed production is called Going to Seed. Here’s the germination chamber he uses at Tourne-Sol:
This germination chamber is set up in our greenhouse. It's basically a sandbox on legs covered with a tent. There is also a heating coil buried in the sand.
We use the chamber to start seeds that prefer a higher germination temperature (tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, celery, many flowers and herbs). As flats germinate they are moved to the greenhouse tables.
The thermostat.
The thermo-sensor.
I also received an email from Joanne at M’Clintock Valley Farm in which she told me using a heat mat for the first time worked wonders for her onion starts. She also used kelp: “I soaked the soil with a solution made with liquid kelp (Kelpman), scattered the seeds on top, then covered with more soaked soil. I had been told before that a seed soak with seaweed emulsion works very well to speed germination.” Joanne sent me a picture of her onion starts:
April 5/10: more submissions have come in. Here they are:
Owen Bridge of Annapolis Seeds in Nictaux, Nova Scotia shared this great seed-starting setup:
Owen's seed germination chamber is a tunnel within a greenhouse.
"We laid down 1" styrofoam sheets from Home Hardware (duct-taped together in the shot) to act as insulation and to prevent the heat from dissipating into the ground. Each 4'x8' sheet cost around $10."
"... and laid down the heating cables. They're just roof de-icing cables from the hardware store, this is an 80' length and cost about $60. Finally, we covered up the cables with another layer of soil, plugged in the cable and voila! Finished propagation bed! The earth retains the heat from the cables and distributes it fairly evenly. Once the cover is back on the mini-greenhouse it will stay above freezing even on cold nights when the kale in the foreground gets frosted."
Next up: Shannon Jones and Bryan Dyck run Broadfork Farm in the South Shore area of Nova Scotia, and sent in these photos:
"We have a heated bench in our greenhouse with a layer of plastic over it to retain the heat. The bench is heated from the bottom with tubing that circulates hot water (heated from the outdoor wood furnace) and also has fans on either end of the bench that blow warm air if it's a cold night). Our greenhouse only has one layer of plastic (to maximize light transmission, especially for the winter) so we leave the cold sensitive crops under this bench as well (like tomatoes)."
"On sunny days, the plastic gets opened up one one side for ventilation. We often put a layer of row cover over trays that haven't germinated yet to retain moisture. When we're low on space, we stack the trays on top of each other (using pieces of wood) and that retains the moisture too. "
"If the seeds don't need the extra heat or its a warmer time of year, we stack the trays on the ground using bread trays until they germinate which retains moisture and saves us space. There are a bunch of pictures on our facebook page of the construction of the heated bench and also some more pictures on our website. "
Finally, there is the force of will technique:
That’s all I’ve received so far. Thanks to those who submitted. If any readers want to send me photos of their own germination techniques I would be happy to add them to the post. And I encourage people to leave comments or questions, which can be done below.
