So this was my first year of doing a vegetable garden and I have had some hits and misses.
My main miss seems to be with starting my seeds indoors under a grow light. I watch Monty Don of Gardeners World do lettuce trays of plugs and he gets these great plants ready for transplanting but I seem to be missing something.
- I use seedling starting soil from the local supplier.
- I plant the seeds to the recommended depth.
- I've been watering from the bottom up to encourage root depth development.
- I cover them for humidity then remove once they start to germinate.
The issues I've seen are:
- seedlings getting leggy
- Seedlings not progressing past the initial sprout leaf stage or if they do get secondary leaves they don't develop much more.
- Lettuce seedlings getting leggy then producing more roots further up the stem.
The leggy bit I figured was not enough light so I raised the trays and added an additional LED bar and that seems to be helping with the legginess but not the development.
Should I be fertilizing these things as well and if so what type and how often?
My tomato seedlings were a joke and my kohlrabi seedlings also sort of grew to 2-4 inches then haven't done much else since.
Is there a definitive guide to the whole process because obviously I've missed something that should be dead simple. Every video I watch has people doing what I think I'm doing then later they show these wonderful ready to transplant plugs. Heck, I remember my dad starting saved marigold seeds every year in the basement under grow lights and he never had any troubles while I can't seem to get a tomato to germinate much further than the two secondary leaves.
Garden sown seeds I appear to be a green thumbed god but as a tray starting newbie I'm a total embarrassment.
