Sunday, December 18, 2011

Quick Tip #1 - Dampen your seedling potting soil.

Howdy,

Welcome to my Dubai based container vegetable gardening blog.

I will be posting something new called Quick Tips.  This blogging can be time consuming depending how long winded I get, number of images, links and/or videos I place in the blog.  Other times I do something and think I will blog about that with some more info to go along with it....... then it eventually is blogged later than it should be or forgot about it completely.  So, I hope this new format - Quick Tip -  will I be more timely information. 

So, I'll stop banging my gums and get to the tip!

Today I checked my pepper propergation packets to see if anymore seeds have sprouted.  Luckly some have.  So, I got my peat pots and filled them with some very dry potting soil that I had just the other day sifted with a sieve.  So, what was sifted was quite fine and of course very dry.  After placing the sprouted seeds in the peat pots and applied water the water just beaded up on the surface and took a long time to finally soak into the soil.  I then applied water to the tray the peat pots where in so they could soak up the water in time and make the soil wet. 




All of this would have been easier if I had just dampen the soil first.  As I was in  a hurry, I did not take the time to bother doing this and thus was stressed out about will the water get to the sprouted seed before the very dry pottong soil surrounding it will suck the life out of it.  So, now I know to dampen the soil first before planting any sprouted seeds - for just a seed it does not make a difference.  The water will eventually get to it.

Actually, it might just be better to make a habit of dampen your old used potting soil before using it.  The amount of dust I created sieving the old dry soil was a danger to the jets flying nearby (I leave near DXB airport).  Actually, new potting soil you buy in the bags is already moist and not such a problem.

Thanks for stopping by!

Bubba




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