Sowing Seeds

OK, so now we're going to show you how to sew seeds. Now seeds come in all different shapes and sizes, so as such it's quite hared to give one difinitive answer of how you sew seeds. You can sew them inside and outside, in, in trays, in pots, but basically what seeds need is soil and water in order to grow. So I'm just going to show you a very general way of planting seeds. What you'll need in this instance is a shallow tray with water drainage. Now these trays, you can pick them up at any good garden center, and you can reuse them year after year. Just try and make sure it's as clean as possible so that there is not residual fungus from old soil. You want to half fill the tray with a good peat free compost to provide the initial bed that the seeds are going to lay on when you sew them. It's important to use peat free compost because peat free is a very, very valuable habitat, and it's gradually being, well no, it's very quickly being dug up for uses of things like soil, and it's just not necessary because there are very good peat free alternatives available. So we're going to sew some Hellinium seeds, which we harvested ourselves from our wild life garden. Hellinium is a really great flowering wild life plant which provides a lot of nectar for butterflies and bees. And you can see, we still kept the seed heads in there, and grant you, the seeds have been falling off them. I'm going to reach down at the bottom of the bag to grab a handful of seeds. And what you do, the principal is just to scatter the seeds very evenly across the bead of the soil. You'll be planting, it looks like you're planting them very, in a very congested way, but that's because some will take and some won't, and so you want to be sure to have a good crop with every tray. OK, and once you've done that, you just want to put a thin layer of soil on top of the seeds to cover them, and so press it down lightly so the seeds are all covered in soil. Once you've done that, it's just, all you have to do then is give, give the tray a good water so that the water goes straight through to the bottom, but not too much so it floods out, because you don't want waster water. And then all you want to do then is write a label so you can remind yourself exactly what's in there, and when you planted it. We're going to be using a typical white label that you'd get from a garden center. Write the name down, Hellinium planted, pop that in. And that's how you sew seedlings.