Square Foot Gardening in South Africa

We decided to first ’sprout’ our seeds in small containers of vermiculite and then transplant them into normal seedling trays filled with Mel’s Mix once sprouted. When they are a decent size and a bit stronger, we’ll transplant them one final time into bigger pots and 25lt plastic drums. The indoor sprouting in vermiculite was easy to do, cheap and worked like a charm - simply cut the bottoms off a few 2lt coke and milk bottles, poke holes in the bottom for water to seep through, fill the containers with vermiculite and then let them stand in a tray filled with water for a few minutes. You may have to refill the tray a few times as the vermiculite sucks up a surprising amount of water.

Once the vermiculite has soaked up it’s fill of water (it will turn a darker colour all the way through), poke about five or six holes in the vermiculite with the tip of your little finger about 5mm deep and, depending on the size of the seeds, drop 1-3 seeds into each hole. Lightly cover the seeds with a thin layer of vermiculite and leave in a nice warm place for a few days. Top up the trays with water once or twice a day.

Our First Seeds Planted (click on an image to enlarge)

Before we built our seedling rack we had simply kept a small fan heater blowing warm air around the containers during the cold nights. By the way, if you do something similar, don’t place the heater too close or aim it directly at the containers - you don’t want to wake up in the morning to find the seeds completely dried out or even worse, cooked

Seeds sprouted in this manner should be transplanted into seedling trays as soon as they have sprouted their first two leaves - called the seed leaves. The seed leaves are usually fairly large and flat and look nothing like the plant’s regular leaves (the onions and spring onions were the exception to this rule) and the first set of ‘true’ leaves will come out soon after as the stem grows a little higher.

Because we waited until we could transplant most of the sprouts at the same time, the radishes and peas were a little bigger than mentioned above, but it didn’t seem to harm them since they are still growing ‘like weeds’ as we speak. They came up really fast - 3 days for the radishes to sprout and the peas a day later.

We planted the seeds on the 3rd May and transplanted most of them 7 days later on the 10th May. We had excellent results with most of the seeds with a good percentage of them sprouting. Here are the results:
The carrots and radish we sowed in 2lt ice-cream containers and the rest in the coke and milk bottle  bottoms. The tomato seeds were really small, light and difficult to handle accurately and I think I may also have accidentally dropped a few more of the ‘Great Lakes’ lettuce seeds in a hole than I counted because we got 15 sprouts out of (a measured) 8-12 seeds? We also didn’t transplant all of the sprouts since we don’t have enough pots to transplant them all into later.

At the time we transplanted, the carrots, onions, spring onions and the ‘Moneymaker’ tomatoes (a vine variety) still hadn’t sprouted so we left them in for a few more days.

I really was surprised by the speed at which the bulk of the seeds sprouted as well as the high percentage of them that did so successfully. My sowing and planting experiences with previous gardens have been nowhere nearly as successful as this. Even when I have started seeds in seedling trays, only about half of the compartments in the tray would yield anything (and that was with a sizable pinch of seeds in each compartment). Admittedly, my previous attempts were all left outdoors, I’ve always used normal potting soil in them and sometimes they would dry out completely when I forgot about them for a day or two.

The next test I want to do is to compare the sprouting times and success rates between the same plant seeds sprouted in vermiculite to those sown directly into seedling trays with the Mel’s Mix but that’s next weeks task. I will also only be able to run further tests, with the seeds sown outdoors directly into the SFG boxes, in August when the weather is warmer.

Happy gardening
Mark

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