Tony O’Neill, gardener and author of the popular “Composting Masterclass” and “Your First Vegetable Garden,” combines lifelong passion and expert knowledge to simplify the art of gardening. His mission? Helping you cultivate a thriving garden.
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It’s that season once more: seed-planting time! And many gardeners ask the same question: Why aren’t my plants growing? What is a Seed Starting Mix? Do you need a seed mix? Will you profit in the end if you buy a seed mix?
Starting your garden from seeds can be a fulfilling and rewarding experience, but it’s essential to know the shelf life of your seed starting mix. Proper storage in low-humidity and low-temperature regions can help extend the life of your mix, but the key ingredient to consider is peat moss. With a lifespan of 1 to 2 years, keeping track of the age of your seed starting mix is crucial to ensure successful plant growth.
Table of Contents
The ideal seed starting mix shouldn’t be excessively high in supplements because it could damage your plants. So for you to create the perfect starter mix, you must be pretty careful.
What is a Seed Starting Mix?
The seed-starting mix is a soil-less medium mainly used to improve the growth of plants.
It’s a better choice for starting seeds than the standard potting soil because it’s lighter and finer.
Is the seed starting mix really necessary?
You might ask, why is using a seed mix necessary when you normally go ahead and plant your seeds in the garden and let them do their thing?
And, for sure, you can go ahead and plant your seeds without using the seed starting mix, but most of them will either get attacked by microbes and start dumping off, or they wouldn’t even grow. So to improve your success rates and reduce the waste of the seeds, it is a great option to go ahead and get a seed starting mix for your garden plants.
Why Good Seeds Decay
Seeds are inactive or inert, although they’re very much alive and undergo processes like living beings, such as respiration; the rate is much lesser than a living plant. Seeds have a definite amount of energy, and a portion keeps consuming with this respiration process.
If the seeds get moistened, germination occurs, resulting in a drastic increase in respiration and, thus, energy consumption.
Seeds must retain plentiful stored energy to sustain seedlings until they develop their first leaves and start photosynthesizing. So to save your seed and allow them to live another day, we would advise you to use a seed starting mix.
Germination in seeds and needs
As germination has been discussed previously, let us touch on what a seed needs to grow and germinate properly.
To thrive, a seed needs proper moisture, light, temperature, and oxygen. However, there may be instances that it will still revert to dormancy and lack of ‘starting’ even when given to them.
To aid you in understanding the germination process and the basic needs for seed growth and care, I have written an article on what seeds need, their germination, and their light considerations. It recounts the needs of a seed, the several steps in germination that you can look into, possible reasons for seed dormancy, and the reasons and maybe even possible benefits for this occurrence.
Damping-off in seeds
In line with the talk of saving seeds and probable changes in them, we would like to introduce the possibility of your seeds damping off.
Damping-off causes failed seed germination due to the humid and cold environments of the seeds. To aid with this, feel free to look into my recent article on preventing seedling damping-off. This covers the symptoms one can spot in damping-off (one sample symp[tom being the stems growing thin and fibrous), the reasons behind it, and tutorials on how to solve this problem.
Determining the shelf life of seeds
You can determine the shelf life of seeds by these steps:
- The amount of stored energy
- The amount of energy used during storage
- Also, the amount of energy needed from germination to leaf development.
With these, let us look into optimal conditions for storing the seed mixes.
Optimal Conditions for Starter Seed Mix Storage
Optimal conditions are used very frequently around us. These conditions hold significant importance regarding seed storage and prolonging your seed mix life.
Generally, the conditions are:
| Low Humidity | Low humidity provides dry conditions for seeds, thus avoiding the potential initiation of germination. |
| Low Temperature | The low temperature tends to decrease the respiration rate, slow down stored energy usage, and increase longevity. |
| Optimal temperature | The optimal temperature for storing seeds and seed starting mix is below 42°F (15°C), while the relative humidity should be between 20 and 40%. |
Temperature and humidity are inversely related here, meaning that as storage temperature reduces, the humidity will increase, and vice versa. However, storage times will increase if somehow both are godown.
Importance of moisture in seed mixes
The moisture level is a pretty important part if you want to enhance the life span of your starting seed mix.
So keep a look and try to make it as required because by creating optimal conditions for your seed starting mix, you will enhance their life span and use them over the next couple of years.
How to create your Seed Starting Mix
This is a basic recipe for creating a seed-starting mix for your plants. Also, you can further customize it as you grow the plants.
Startup by using lightly moist ingredients with a pretty fine water mist, then go ahead and blend thoroughly in a large container such as a wheelbarrow.
This is a simple tutorial that will help you create a pretty simple and effective seed starting mix. But as always, using a seed mix from the shop will be better and may have bigger improvements.
Ingredients for making a seed starting mix
If you own a big land with many plants that make you revenue, you should consider buying a seed starting mix.
| Four parts of screened compost | A part of vermiculite |
| A part of perlite | Two parts of sphagnum peat moss |
Doing this will be very helpful in saving money and being more connected to the seed-growing process.
FAQs
Conclusion with regards to seed starting mixes going bad.
So you have some clues on what is starter seed mix is and how to get the longest shelf life for it. This information is the key for gardeners using the starter seed mix. Although taking care of the conditions of the starter seed mix is important. It’s comforting to know that the starting seed mix isn’t that sensitive, and we can use them without any worries.
If you’re a big business, we suggest you go ahead and stick with starting mixes from the stores. Now that we have the starting seed mix made and how you can use it, the gardeners can consider getting it for the upcoming years.
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