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Growing garden annuals from seed is oftentimes a daunting task for many gardeners but it's really quite simple.
If one takes a look at the kind of seedlings they want to grow and the techniques to grow
it,
It becomes a really easy process for the home gardener. We're going to look at growing two common
garden annuals from seed: marigolds and zinnias.
Both of them are quite easy and quite fast.
Generally for gardeners in zone five here in Illinois it takes about anywhere from four
to six weeks to grow a usable transplant from seed. So that means we would not put these
out in the garden until mid to latter part of may
when danger of frost has passed. So you just count back four to six weeks
and that gives you a timeframe in which you
can sow the seed
and allow enough time to grow and not have the seedling get too tall.
So timing is one issue. The other issue is
do you grown in a community flat, meaning throw all the seeds down the row and then
transplant from that flat into individual containers, or do you grow in the container
that they will be transplanted from out in the garden?
I prefer sowing seed direct into these cell packs for both marigolds and zinnias bypassing
the transplant stage. It makes it much easier. We have here a couple of examples. This here
is a flat of marigolds. As you can see,
we were using a four cell pack
and putting one to two seeds in every pack.
You then
moisten this thing, put it in a location where it's warm
and the seed will be up in about a week to ten days.
And what this does, now we have the seedling growing on container without
any need to transplant. So it kind of eliminates a step.
This than can be placed in a bright, sunny location, grown on
until ready to put out the garden. So this way we eliminate a transplant stage.
In the zinnia flat over here, you can see
that the same thing was done and here you can see multiple seed put in each cell.
When they are at this stage right here
showing no true leaves, what we would do is come in and remove all but one seedling
thinning it out to one seedling
per cell pack.
And now what we've got is, again, we've got a flat of
zinnias
that will be
grown in the container
that they will be transplanted from but we've eliminated the transplant stage. I think this
is a much easier way to grow both marigold and zinnias, easy crops from seed, as opposed to sowing
a solid row,
digging them up, and putting them in individual cells. And this again is going to give you
I think an excellent crop for the garden so try that. If you're frustrated with sowing some of
these seeds in a row flat, try them
by direct sowing into the cells an then pulling out the additional seedlings, leaving one per cell
to grow on for the garden