Veg Seedlings help please

[leli]

In home seclusion I'm taking up the opportunity to garden. Always wanted to, never had time. Starting another thread to show the greenhouse DH and I ordered for my birthday, it's not arrived yet though. Ordered seeds and compost from Amazon, bought some mini plants from the garden centre. So I sowed courgette and dwarf bean seeds a week ago and they're going great guns - see images. And I bought mini tomato plants, also growing very fast. All plants in the house on window sills. I'm also attempting lettuces, chilli peppers and bell peppers. The lettuces are tiny wispy beginning shoots and I'm just seeing signs of the first tiny beginnings of the chilli peppers and bell peppers.

We are in the deep South East, near Rye in Sussex. I have a mini grow house to harden off plants.

Question: what do I do with the seedlings now at the stage they're at? Do I re-pot all the courgette and dwarf beans seedlings into plastic plant pots with John Innes no 1 and then keep them indoors for a few more weeks? When do I put them in the grow house to harden off? And should I put the tomato plants out into the grow house now?

I've looked at YouTube etc but the presenters often seem to assume more basic knowledge than super basic gardeners like me possess.

The courgettes still have their fleshy "seed leaves" and don't have any true leaves yet. Too early to transplant them, they're still very brittle. Let them grow a bit longer.

The beans have got their first set of true leaves, and in theory you could pot them on into a bigger pot. But better to leave them a while - when the roots are filling the pot, the roots and soil will all come out as a single ball, and I think there's less disturbance to the roots than if you pot them on sooner.

You can still see the seed leaves of the beans - the flshy leaves below the true leaves.

Next year, you might like to try sowing the courgettes in individual pots - less disturbance when you repot. I use the seed trays that bedding plants come in, but you can use anything - small yogurt pots with a hole made in the base, old egg boxes.

Thank you very much Mere, you are a lovely diligent helper to those of us challenged in the garden.

I will take your advice and I'm guessing there will be a lot to learn from this year. I'm presuming it gets a bit less intense as I get to know intuitively when to pot things on and put them out. Trial and error I suppose.

What's so weird is the way some things grow incredibly fast and you can almost see them pushing through the soil and other seeds, in my case, haven't germinated at all. Parsley and sorrel I'm talking to you!

Watching with interest.

I'm also new to growing veg, I have planted seeds for dwarf beans, tomatoes, cucumbers and peppers so far, all in trays on my window sill... before putting in the greenhouse. I have carrots, beetroot, peas, radish seeds ready to go straight into raised bed.

leli Yes, best way to learn is to spend a lot of time watching your plants and thinking about what you have done and how they've responded - that's basically what "intuition" is

Big seeds tend to grow fast because they have good energy stores in the big fat "seed leaves". Parsley is a member of the carrot family - they're all a bit slow to germinate, and their seed goes off quickly - you can't reliably keep it from year to year in the way you can with beans.

Sorrel is in the dock family. I've never grown it so have no idea how it responds.

Parsley and sorrel are best bought as plants.
I have never been able to grow parsley from seed successfully.
I buy it as an established plant every two years.

I have a patch of red reined sorrel too, bought as plug plants from eBay!

Have tomatoes, cucumbers, brocolli, kale and leek seedlings waiting to be planted here and runner beans, carrots, lettuce, peas, Swiss chard and beetroot waiting to germinate

Ok my top tip is to talk to friends who grow things as well and trade some of those courgette plants for other things! I think I have counted 10, you will live to regret it if you plant them all in your garden as unless it’s a particularly bad year you will have more courgettes than you know what to do with !

I’m growing parsley from seed for the first time this year - I started it a week last Sunday and it only started showing yesterday so looks like it takes around ten days to germinate. Had a plastic cover in the top of it and on a windowsill above a warm radiator. I go through tons of it so I’m really hoping it goes the distance.

I'm getting the idea that gardening is like cooking, you do it by the recipe/rules but there's a lot of space for individual variation and you get the feel for it after experience. I'm already feeling a tad more confident.

I love parsley which is why I was trying to grow it. My pack says it can take up to 6 weeks to germinate so I'll give it the 6 weeks just in case.

Interestingly the sorrel and parsley were both in my bought in seed propagators. I have honestly had more success with my food container plantings. And best of all with my Amazon bought Mr Fothergill packs of courgettes, chilli and bell peppers.

Very excited that the chill and bell pepper seeds are now poking their heads through. Very satisfying. And I have got alyssum, lobelia, lupin, antirrhinum, busy tizzies and hollyhocks sprouting too.

I'll take some photos tomorrow. Thanks for listening.

And re the courgette plants. I'm sure you're right that I've got too many, but having never grown any veg I can hardly believe they will actually grow. And I'll probably have to put them in the greenhouse because my garden is wedge from a Sussex meadow so totally overrun with rabbits!

I don't sow courgette seeds anymore for that exact reason - I was sick of eating so many! I get one green and one yellow plug plant from the garden centre now and that does me fine.

Re parsley - I was actually reading up on it this morning and apparently it germinates best at around 70 degrees, which could explain why I had success over a radiator. Maybe warm things up a bit?

If your having trouble with parsley or besil then wait until it is warmer .Get a super market plant and stlit it into 4 and repot those smaller plants.,then plant into garden when the roots fill the pot.
If you plant parsley into a well prepared area it will self seed and next year you will have plenty.
Basil,grows in a pot but better in the garden.In autumn watch out for frost which will finish it.Pick all leaves before then and make pesto or add to your tomato sauces .

courgette plants. I'm sure you're right that I've got too many, but having never grown any veg I can hardly believe they will actually grow

😂
I don’t grow courgette as they are big plants and no one really likes them here but Courgette is one of the easiest, if not the easiest and most generous vegetable out there!
You’ll be absolutely swimming in courgettes!

I’ve put all of my seeds in pots in the plastic tiered greenhouse thing. Should I bring them indoors until they start sprouting? I think I have done this all wrong!

chockaholic72 Once parsley germinates it gets away pretty strongly.You shouldn't have any problem from now on.

I'm getting the idea that gardening is like cooking, you do it by the recipe/rules but there's a lot of space for individual variation and you get the feel for it after experience. I'm already feeling a tad more confident. It helps to remember that a lot of gardening lore is from the days of big kitchen gardens in country houses - these were the gardeners who were able to share their knowledge with a wide audience. So they were going for maximum yield, with several full time under-gardeners so plenty of labour, and no need to worry how boring the work was.

In a small garden with a gardener who isn't full time, some of the rules don't apply. Strict crop rotation doesn't have the same benefits when the entire vegetable garden is only yards across - fortunate, because the standard rotation relies on a fondness for cabbage. The principle of the 80:20 rule applies - you can get 80% of the yield with 20% of the effort (or maybe 50% or the effort), so if it's not critical to get that last 20% of yield, you can save yourself some time.

You can grow courgettes in containers in the greenhouse. They won't yield anywhere near as much as outside, and it helps to hand pollinate the flowers - you'll get male flowers with visible polled, and females flower with an obvious embryo courgette behind the flower - take a male flower (preferably from a different plant) and upend it into the females flower and leave it there.

In an attempt to prevent self-fertilisation (because the whole point of flowers is to gain robustness of the species by widening the gene pool by cross fertisation), the plant will tend to produce lots of male flowers at first and only later start producing female flowers.

Male flowers can be eaten in salads or dipped in batter and deep-fried. So can female flowers if you have a courgette glut.

Dolly They'll probably germinate quicker indoors but then you need to have space to keep them indoors until you can take them out again. Outdoors, they'll germinate when ready, and the weather is already warming up. I'm having good germination in my unheated greenhouse. No, you haven't "done this all wrong".

Top tip for all those courgettes.....peel the skin off and freeze in chunks then add to boiling potatoes when making mash...it makes the mash taste really creamy, it's delicious...kids don't know it's in there either 👍

Potted on my courgette and dwarf bean seedlings yesterday, also my mini lettuce seedlings. Thrilled with progress so far.

Thank you for the advice re greenhouse courgettes and herbs.

Actually I adore courgettes to eat and will now add to potato mash, thank you for the tip. Though eek - fertilisation!!! I thought they did it themselves. If only we didn't live on Watership Down I'd grow everything out in beds. Walking in local farmland yesterday I came upon the bunny proof veg garden in my photo. Maybe something like these for the future would be good in our garden.

I have got thyme, chive and oregano seedlings going, 2 x plug parsley, 1 x plug mint and a supermarket basil so I am going to put some veg mix topsoil and compost in a legged planter and see if I can make a herb garden. Just a question of how high bunnies can jump. I'm going to put the planter on our patio close to the house to see if that might protect our little herb plants.

I bought on Amazon a fruit cage and I am going to put the fruit cage over other legged planters for lettuces to see if that stops the bunny buggers too. Maybe I'll put the courgettes in those instead of the greenhouse and reserve the greenhouse for tomatoes, bell peppers and chill peppers.

I'm enjoying this fecundity. So today I will be sowing some more lettuce seeds inside in the hope I can get more seeds going ready to plant out in the planters. The ground's too dangerous because of the rabbits .......

I have got thyme, chive and oregano seedlings going, 2 x plug parsley, 1 x plug mint and a supermarket basil so I am going to put some veg mix topsoil and compost in a legged planter and see if I can make a herb garden

Be aware that mint is very invasive.
I have it growing next to other herbs (open ground, not in a pot) and you have to be really dedicated keeping it under control else it spreads everywhere and chokes everything out.

It’s not just a case of regular leaf pruning to keep it small either, it sends runners out underground.

O re mint! Maybe I'd better put it in its own container then.....

I thought they did it themselves. No, they need bees to take the pollen from the male flowers to the female flowers. If they're in a greenhouse, you may not get enough bees. You can buy parthenogenetic varieties, but that's a bit scary as they have only about 5 seeds in a packet, so you have to be confident about your ability to get them to germinate. I'm going to bite the bullet and get parthogenetic ones once my current seed packet has run out.

leli remember rabbits go down as well as up. You need either to bury the bottom of the wire surprisingly deep, or bend it over at the bottom and run it along the ground for a couple of feet. Though if your planters are on a patio you should be OK with just putting the fruit cage over them.