Grow It Local's Guide to Starting your Seeds with Flori

Getting your seeds started off on the right foot is the critical first step in growing your own food.

A lot of different varieties of veggie seeds like to grow in a warm, humid environment, and most places in Australia only have a few months of the year that offer these conditions. 

Using a seed propagation kit like Flori means that you can provide the ideal environment for starting seeds for a good chunk of the year. This gives your seeds and your patch a head start to get you on your way to growing a bumper crop!

What you'll need

• 1 x Flori Seed Raising Kit- you can find Flori at your local Mitre 10 or garden centre
• Your Grow it Local Seeds
• Good quality seed raising mix - look for a dedicated seed raising mix at your local garden centre
• Watering can or spray bottle

What to do?

1. Fill your punnet trays with your seed raising mix. Fill them right up to the top and then give them a good tap on the bench to settle the mix in and remove any air pockets.

2. Use your finger, the end of a pencil or a dibber to make a small indent in the centre of each cell. How deep you go will depend on what you’re planting. As a general rule of thumb, plant seeds 2-3 times as deep as the seeds are wide.

3. Pop your seeds into the indents that you’ve made. If you have plenty of seeds, Paul suggests putting two seeds into each hole to cover your bases in case you have patchy germination. 

4. Scatter over a little more of the seed raising mix to cover your seeds and give the surface a little pat.

5. Time to water your seeds. Use a watering can or a mister and water from above. You want the soil to be moist, like a wrung out sponge. This will give you the ideal conditions for germination. 

6. Lock Flori’s cover in place, this will keep the cover nice and secure, making sure weather, pests or unruly kids don’t knock it off. Pop your Flori somewhere warm and sunny, either indoors or outdoors. In the cooler months, you can keep your Flori indoors, because the extra shelter of the house, coupled with the shelter that Flori offers, makes for a double greenhouse and nice warm temperatures for germinating seeds. 

7. Make sure you check on your seeds every day and keep the soil moist but not soggy. Depending on what you’re growing, your seeds will germinate in anywhere from three days to two weeks.  

8. Keep growing your seedlings in Flori, making sure that the soil is kept moist. Once the seedlings have a couple of sets of true leaves, they are nearly ready to plant out.

Next steps:

Before planting your seedlings out in the garden, you’ll need to harden them off. Start by removing the cover off Flori and leaving the tray outside uncovered on nice days and inside (still with the cover off) at night and on cold days. 

After a week or so, leave Flori outside uncovered both day and night (just make sure it’s somewhere birds or possums won’t get at your tasty seedlings). After a week outside, uncovered, your seedlings are hardened off and ready to plant in your patch!

Happy growing!