7 Solutions For Stunted Seedlings

If you've ever grown a ton of seedlings and you're really excited to get them in the garden and then when you look at them after they come up and they look a little stunted, then this video is for you. Kevin Espiritu here from Epic Gardening. As you can see, we've started quite a few seedlings here on this table. Some have done better than others. And in this video, I want to talk about the things that are your fault if the seedlings are stunted and some of the reasons that they might be stunted that aren't your fault. But either way, you're going to learn how to make vibrant healthy seedlings a lot more like this bad boy right here. So cultivate that Like button and I'll bless you with 75% more success with your seedlings. And let's get into the first tip. Problem number one you might run into is just simply having bad seed or storing your seed improperly. I recommend storing them in these little photo organizer boxes. We did a video on this, which you can check out, but you want to make sure to store your seeds in a cool, dry and dark place. Properly stored, you've got three to 10 plus years of life in your seedlings. But if you get them in a place that's hot, cold, sunny, not, that sort of thing, which I've certainly done before, you can have a degraded seed which can cause some stuntedness. But let's take a look at one of these really quickly and I'll show you the more common example next. Take a look at these two seedlings. Of course they're different seedlings. We have celery here and we have arugula here, but look at this one. This one's looking a lot more vigorous. It's still early, but it's looking healthy. Whereas these ones are a little bit smaller. Now the plants grow differently, but what you can notice is you have one, two, three, four little celery plants in here as compared to only one over here. And that's because what I did is I went through and I picked out on my arugula plants, the weaker seedlings. I just did a little thin like this. Now it's good to sow a lot at the start to make sure you get germination. I did that in these. I did that in the arugula as well. But you want to come through and thin out so you can allow these to size up. The next most likely reason you have stunted seedlings is because you're overwatering them. I've done this more times than I care to admit. And there are a lot of different ways to prevent it. But why is it a big deal? Well, if you keep this soil here moist all of the time, the roots really aren't stretching out to go find moisture. Number two, they're just going to rot out. They have the potential to just rot and die before the plant even gets off to its life. So how do you prevent this? There's actually many ways. First of all, you can use a soil mix that doesn't retain a lot of water. We're going to talk about that in a second in one of these later tips. You can use a pot with drainage holes at the bottom. I'm of course, preferable to the Epic six cell trays, which we've done a full video on. You can see some nice root development here, but a really big bottom hole so that not only does it not hold onto a ton of water, but it's also very easy to pop out when you are done and ready to transplant. And then you can also use trays that have drainage holes underneath. This is a heavier duty 10-20 tray with drainage holes. That's helpful, especially if you're in a rainy climate, because if you put these in a tray that doesn't have them, it's just going to sit there and you can forget. And then you're just rotting your seedlings out. So make sure not to overwater your seedlings. One final tip before we go on, on over watering. In winter, it's easier to overwater because it doesn't evaporate as quickly. So you can use a freer soil mix, maybe mix in a little bit of perlite or something like that into your soil mix when you're starting in fall as compared to summer. The third tip I have for you for stunted seedlings is to remember where you're actually placing the seedlings themselves. So I have this seedling table, as you can see right here. We built this out on the Epic Homesteading channel. There's a full guide to this, but it's mobile. So I can move this wherever I want in my garden, which is right now in winter, why it's hanging out right about here. The sun's coming in over this way. We're not getting as much sun as we did in summer. And so I'm getting a lot more sun exposure on this. But there's a trade-off because there's a lot of wind that can come through this area. So when you get a lot of windiness, you can stunt your seedlings quite a bit. So you want to protect them in a perfect world from a lot of afternoon sun, but a lot of rustling and bustling of wind whipping through. So if I wanted to, I could just pick this up and move this somewhere a little bit more convenient for me. In the past, I used to have it right over there. I found it wasn't getting enough sun. But the placement itself of where you're growing your seedlings has a huge impact on their growth. Counterintuitively, something that can cause stuntedness is actually leaving them to grow for too long in the pot that you're starting your seeds in. So let's take a look right here. We have a purple cauliflower variety. Fingers crossed for me on Nebraska this year. I tend to struggle with them. We'll see if I do well this year. I hope so. But take a look at the root structure here. I wouldn't call this root bound, but that is what's going to cause your stuntedness. Take a look. You can see the roots starting to spiral around the bottom. You can see this one coming across the top here. If I gave this another week or so, and it's kind of reasonable, you might just forget, right? Well this is going to get all matted and knotted and it's just an unhealthy root structure. Now let's take a look at this leak right here in the Epic six cell tray. Let's pop it open. Look at the root structure here. It's not really rooting around the bottom. There's little bits of roots coming out of these sides here because of the slats in the tray. So it's a really effective way to prevent it. But even this doesn't buy you all the time in the world. You still have to transplant this out into the garden. Although you could also pot it up. And this is the moment where I finally get to release or showcase a little product that we've been working on for a while, which is the Epic four cell tray. So let's take a look. This is the same plant, cauliflower, cauliflower. Let's take a look at the root structure on this one here. I'm just going to pop out one in the middle here. So take a look. You see a lot more root growth kind of around the edges here, especially on those slatted corners. And then here at the bottom, you don't see any spiraling down here. All you see are these little root hairs developing in a pretty natural structure. I would say this is still time to plant out. But in the four cell, which is roughly the same size as this guy right here, it's a lot healthier. And I will say this, these are coming in December of this year, 2021. But if you are an owner of the Epic six cells, you get the first crack at these. Because we want to give everyone who supported this tray the opportunity to get this tray first. These kept selling out in like two minutes in the spring. These probably will do the same. So we want to give you that opportunity. But for now, make sure to not keep your seedlings root bound. Get them in the ground or pot them up. One of the things that you can do wrong when you're starting your seedlings, it's not having to do with anything that you did to the seedling itself. It's actually the soil that you used. A lot of people don't know this, but seed starting mix, which this is, sometimes it's just devoid of nutrients whatsoever. It's not meant to bring a plant all the way through its useful life as a plant. It's meant to start the seed and then you transplant it out. However, there are ways to improve a seed starting mix to give it a little bit more staying power. And I'm going to summon the resident garden hermit of Epic Gardening, Jacques, to show us his method. And here he is. So you have a technique that you like to use because you tend not to buy seed starting mix, right? And why is that? So I tend to not buy seed starting mix because I don't like having multiple different kinds of things. And I also generally never get around to transplanting things as early as I should. Which I think we can all say we all do that. We all for sure do that. You know, if you're working on a farm and you're growing in seed starting mix, you're transplanting out as soon as you can. And that's fine. Because you're running and gunning. So what Jacques has done is basically a way to take any sort of potting mix, even recycled potting mix, which we've done a video on before and get it to a level where it's going to sustain growth for how much longer than average seed starting mix. I mean, you should be able to get at least like two weeks more, really. All right, let's see it. So what I like to do is actually tend to just buy a really good mix. And you're saying a potting mix? Yeah, like a top potting mix. And the thing is is with potting mix it's for a final plant. So it tends to have a lot of bigger kind of woody stuff in it, which you don't really want when you're starting seeds because the wood's going to block the seeds from coming up. So what we're going to do here is just screen this. And I think this is quarter inch screen. Yep. Yeah, I built this years ago, many years ago. And so we don't have to get it all, but basically you could see what's left is very coarse material. Pretty large chunks here. Yeah. Which is great. Again, that's great in some mixes, not great in our seed starting mix. So then we're going to remove. Yep. And then so what we're left with is something that looks like that, which is really kind of what seed starting mix looks like. This is the black gold of seed starting mix. But even this, if you take a look at this up close, you would notice that it's pretty peaty. It's a decent amount of perlite and there's a lot of wood product in it. So it's probably still not the most nutritive. Exactly. Yeah. And this does, the bag did say it had some stuff in it, but. That's why he's got this. The secret. The black gold. What this is is worm castings. So worm castings are really nice. Kevin's done a ton of videos on worm castings. But basically you can mix in up to like 20% of your entire mix of worm castings and the worm castings are going to have a lot more basic nutrients in there. And they're also going to have a lot of beneficial microbes. Yeah. So if we do a quick little shuffle here, you can start to see the texture of this soil change and darken up. It's way darker. It's actually going to hold water a little bit more. And so overall this works really, really well for you. So if you're wondering, Hey, I feel like my soil's messed up when I'm starting my seeds. I've certainly felt that before. A great thing to do is just go grab any old, potting soil. It doesn't even matter if it's growing something before and then just rejuvenate it this way and you've got a perfect seed starting mix. Yeah. And you only got another two weeks or so. Easy. So Jacques, we've actually started quite a few seeds here. This isn't even all the seeds we started and we've understarted the seeds for the homestead. So something that I've noticed that we can tend to do, and probably all of you watching have done this as well, is you overgrow them in the pot and then you go, Oh, well, this soil is fine. It's just going to keep growing. And it's not true. I would say about two weeks or so you need to start hitting it with some kind of fertilizer. Absolutely. And it's like something we've noticed all the time. When we go buy seedlings from like a nursery, they're like this big in a tiny little soil. That's because they're grown in a greenhouse. It's like, why can't we do that? Oh, it's because they're perfectly optimized. And so I would say a dilute version of a fish fertilizer, this one from Espoma is great. You can use whatever's at your local nursery if you can't find it. Just dilute it down to a quarter strength or so. Water it in in your normal watering routine. You should see a lot more growth coming out. But that still doesn't mean that you can just let it go there forever. Cause you'll run into the root bound problem. You'll run into all sorts of problems. So it's still better to just get it in the ground as soon as you can. But as far as any other weird seedling problems, this is a big problem in gardening. Because if you start your seeds off incorrectly or unhealthily, the entire rest of the lifetime of that plant is just messed up. You're playing catch up. You're playing catch up and you never will catch up because the plant just can't outgrow a healthy seedling. And so I would say making sure if you're growing indoors, you have some sort of wind stress on the plant, a little bit of fan, not too much, but a little bit really helps bulk those seedlings up. Another huge mistake for stunted seedlings is just if you have a light source, really close to the surface, as close as you can get it to the surface without actually burning and damaging the plants is going to be a good bet. Closer than you think is a really good rule of thumb here. You have one you want to fire off? Yeah. I'd say like on the reverse of that is if you have it somewhere outside, somewhere where it's just getting blasted by wind all the time, that's really going to dry out your plants. And you'll end up seeing like the leaves starting to curl and burn. It'll basically evaporative cool the top, which is not what's going to happen. It's going to suck the water straight out. And then you get that underwater problem. So a comprehensive guide on all the reasons that we've come up with for stunted seedlings as you move into fall, as you move into spring. Just make sure, run a checklist. Am I doing any of these things? And until next time, good luck in the garden and keep on growing.