We’re into mint, petunia and lobelia sowing season, so that means one thing! Very, very small seeds! We figure some tips & tricks are appropriate on how to deal with them.
First, when you encounter very tiny seeds, the first thing you should check is whether the seed packet calls for a “surface sow.” Surface sowing is where the seed is not covered by any soil at all after sowing, it just lies on the surface of the soil. You really only see this with these super tiny seeds, nowhere else. They just don’t have enough “oomph” to push through the soil.
Second, these tiny seeds are a little tough to sow. We generally recommend pinching a few between the fingers and then sow them by feel, lightly rubbing your finger tips together until one or more seeds drop.
This is a skill you’ll simply need to practice, but you can get the hang of it after trying it a few times.
Also, fortunately, many of the super small seeds are sowed in small clusters. Unlike how we sow most seeds, one per cell, these clusters are intended to have a number of seeds sowed together. Common targets are 3 to 7 seeds or so. This is also a somewhat typical feature of very small seeds like mint, lobelia and others. So, a few extra probably won’t hurt.
Lastly, if you mess up and accidently dump a bunch of seeds into the soil, you can always trim these up later. We constantly have these mishaps and we’ll use a pair of fine tipped scissors to cull excess germinations. We know it’s hard to bring yourself to this, but it’s truly what’s best for the plant!
Also, let us know if you’d like to see more “low production value, short video” type of content season. As we’ve gotten more into video based content, we’re a bit more comfortable with the idea of quick and relatively fast edits for some of our Facebook posts. They would be something like this, a brief 30 second video with a written narrative, to help give you more visual context. We’re not sure what to think of video content on Facebook, but we’ll do it if that’s what people want!
