Â鶹¹ÙÍøÊ×Ò³Èë¿Ú

It is now time for me to start seed sowing indoors. On the bench, I will have a range of containers, suitable growing medium, a sieve, a 'firmer' and tweezers.

The bag of growing medium has been opened up and sat on the glasshouse bench for several days to warm up and perhaps even dry out a little. When you come to use the stuff it should easily run through your fingers as you break up the lumps.

In the old days, when filling pots, we would put a layer of broken clay pot shards in the bottom, over the drainage hole, to prevent it from being blocked with compacted compost. That advice is no longer relevant but I tell you what, I save the coarser material collected by sieving some growing medium and put some that in the bottom of the pot for two reasons:

Firstly, it allows you to re-cycle it and of course it does improve the drainage of excess water from the container. Secondly and more importantly, I find that some people will only half fill the pot with growing medium arguing that it is wasteful to fill the pot since the seedlings are going to be in there for a short time. That is a relevant argument but it has a serious flaw. Sowing in the early part of the year when light levels can be poor, seedlings germinating halfway down inside a pot will become drawn and spindly as they 'reach for the sky'. In my view it is a much better practice to fill the bottom third of the pot with ballast in the form of the roughage then loosely fill the pot to the brim with sieved material. If you are using standard depth seed trays, I find that a drainage layer in the bottom is unnecessary.

Once filled, gently tamp the material down with the finger tips, tap the pot/tray on the bench and sieve a little more g-medium on top before tamping with a firmer to achieve a perfectly level surface. The aim is to finish with a container of evenly graded, evenly consolidated growing medium.

I don't want to belabour the sieving thing but the reason for it is to try and match the particle size (roughly) with the size of the seeds you are going to sow. It follows that the larger the seeds the less finicky you need be and vice versa. For dust-like seeds, you might use a fine sieve to cover the prepared surface with an even, shallow layer of sand then sow into the surface and firm gently; seeds are then held firmly in place amongst the grains of sand. Other wise, once the seeds are sown; they are covered with a layer of medium shaken over the pot from the sieve. When the seeds are covered, firm gently with the tamper. This is essential to ensure that the seeds are in close contact with the compost particles because they first thing they need to do is take in water - from the growing medium.

Such attention to detail should result in an even germination of seed so long as you do not ruin the job by watering carelessly. Once I have sown the seeds, the pots/trays are stood in a shallow bath of water which has had the chill taken off it. There they will remain until the medium has drawn the water up, indicated by the surface becoming much darker in colour. My point is, sloshing water over the top, even with a fine rose on the watering can may well re-distribute the seeds unevenly.

Now let's go back to the sowing process itself. Numerous techniques have been devised for delivering the seeds from the packet to the surface of the growing medium. Frankly it doesn't matter how you do it, the important thing is to finish up with the seeds evenly spread over the surface. Because I don't need very many of any one thing and arguably I have plenty of time on my hands, I use tweezers to lift and place individual seeds on the surface, so long as they can be readily picked up. Tomatoes, peppers, lettuce and all the brassicas for transplanting are treated this way. The same applies to flower seeds, until I get down to the really small ones when I would pour some out of the packet onto the palm of one hand, move over the top of pot and sprinkle the seed using the fingers of my other hand.

Do you have any sowing tips you can share?