Methods for Sowing Seed in Garden Soil

Do it right now and enjoy the growing days ahead

Sowing seed starts the miracle of life in your garden. It is wonderful to watch and a great way to transform your empty space with colour, shape and fragrance, not to mention fresh, nutritious and tasty food to eat.

Station sowing beans in between narrow drills

A thriving garden is worth every bit of effort. So do it right and you'll feel encouraged and rewarded.

This page is about how to apply seed to garden soil.

Read on to find methods of sowing seeds of different plants in the garden and in varying conditions including the wet and dry.

First...

What You Should Know to
Make Your Seeds Grow in the Garden

Previous tries at sowing seed failed?  -  Certainly some seeds are more challenging. So discover the joy of gardening with easy-to-grow seed.

For some people it's a matter of survival
Seed failure is a complete waste of time in gardening but it's natural. I like small seeds to be distributed in hermetically sealed foil packs and quality controlled. But you'll find most seed comes in ordinary paper packs.

NOTE: Sometimes a pre-germination treatment is needed
before sowing seeds.

Pay attention to good soil preparation and correct seed sowing depth and you'll vastly improve your success with garden seeds.

Here's What I Do

Prepare fine crumb moisture retentive soil.

Give seed all-around close contact with soil - after sowing seed I use my hand to very very lightly pat down.

Pre-warm your soil when sowing seed early in the year. Cover seedbed with black polythene, or a tunnel cloche, or fleece -
check out my gardening catalog in your country here.

Sandy Soils: warm up quickly and may be sown earlier. Use organic matter during preparation to improve moisture holding. You may need to water seeds if the soil is dry.

Silty Soils: don't over cultivate. In dry conditions, muddy the bottom of the seedbed before sowing if necessary. Don't water after sowing as silty soils break down to cap and seal the seeds in.

Alluvial and Stoney Soils: fit in here somewhere - you need to remove stones before sowing seeds by broadcasting.

Clay Soils: cold and wet. Begin seedbed preparation with organic matter in the Fall. Before sowing seed, when soil is no longer soft and sticky, break down to fine-crumbs - check out the Soil Miller.

Review easy methods with seeded mats

How To Handle Seeds and Seed Sowing

Seeds are either, small and free flowing, or large enough to handle individually.

You may feel constrained by problem eyesight, arthritic fingers or lack of dexterity - Don't let that spoil your gardening.
It's the right time to try one of several simple gardening aids for sowing seed - find them here.

Sowing Small Seeds Manually: Hold the open seed packet steady and slightly inclined. Tap gently underneath watching for a steady flow of seeds down the packet. Move along the row as you keep tapping.

Some gardeners pick up a pinch of seeds between forefinger and thumb to sprinkle along the drill. With nimble fingers I can pour a few seeds onto the palm of one hand and pick them off to sow by finger and thumb.

Avoid sowing seeds densely; this causes overcrowding and more work on thinning etc… and it wastes your seed. Sow seed thinly - the above techniques are well worth practising.

Very tiny seed can be mixed with a carrier such as silver sand before sowing. This also marks out the sown area which, is useful when sowing seed in mixed flowerbeds.

Problem Soil Conditions

With interminably dry soil gently run water into the bottom of the drill to muddy the soil and soak in before sowing. Cover seed with fine dry soil. This slows water movement to the surface.

With sodden ever-wet soil, cover seedbed with clear polythene prior to sowing to warm and dry. Make the seed drill slightly deeper to accommodate a thin lining of sand, grit or fine old potting compost. Sow seed and cover with a sprinkling of fine moist leaf mold.

Grit laid around seed drills may deter slug and snail pests on the wet soil.

Garden line

Dibbers & planting knife

Markers & Labels

Knee cap protectors & kneelers

Cloches polythene & fleece

4 Ways of Sowing Seeds Compared -
Broadcasting - Narrow Drills - Wide Drills - Station Sowing

BROADCASTING:

Lawns from Seed - Wildflowers - Green Manures - Small Flowers - Seed Mixes - Irregular and Sloping Spaces.

An age-old technique involving casting seed out of the hand over the earth. Garden soil should be well prepared, finely raked and stones removed.
Seeds will be covered by lightly raking over them in 2 directions. This method is not therefore, well suited to very large seeds that need deeper burial.

Advantages include the ability to cover a large area quickly. Disadvantages are that weeds are hard to manage when they grow up among the seedlings.

Broadcasting is better used when the sown seed grows rapidly and closely to give dense cover and strongly compete with weeds.
You can protect the site from bird predation by stretching black cotton threads across from stakes positioned down the sides. Don’t walk on the site.





NARROW DRILLS:

Smaller Seeds Sown Thinly For Seedling Rows -
Used for Seed Beds involving Thinning and Transplanting
e.g. lettuce, carrot, spring onions, cabbage...

Involves making a V-shaped slit down to the seed sowing depth. Use properly prepared fine crumb soil. The depth need only be approximate. You need a garden line, or straight edge guide when drawing out the drill.

Most gardeners use a rake edge or tines to draw out the drill and to cover it again. But you have to stand awkwardly side on to do this properly with a rake. The rake head can be used to space the drills while the long handle coming off at 90^o does as a makeshift drill guide.
The garden Swoe is worth recommending to you for the best long-handled tool to draw the drill out. It works along the row, easily draws soil out and re-covers. It's great for weeding along rows too. Check out the Swoe in my catalog in your country from here.
For short drills in small raised beds, a (horizontally) flat-tined hand fork is suitable for making the drill. There are other suitable small tools as well.

You might expect to do some thinning of seedlings but keep this to a minimum by sowing seed thinly.

Sow evenly and thinly along narrow drills

Advantages of narrow drilling are that they are easy to weed - worth considering before you squeeze them too close. The ground in-between can be sown with other crops or flowers, or mulched to keep weeds down and the ground moist.

The seedlings themselves are easy to manage by thinning or transplanting, and the rows will be easy to harvest.

I don't think narrow drills look as pretty in flowerbeds, but it saves space when used before transplanting into flowerbeds.
WIDE DRILLS:

Small Flower Beds e.g. Livingstone Daisies...
Cut-And-Cum Salad Leaves -
Scrambling and Climbing Plants that Use Twiggy Supports e.g. Peas

This involves taking out a wider roughly U-shaped depression to the correct depth.

Wide Drill & Peas in zigzag pattern

Seedlings usually grow to maturity in wide drills but they may be continuously harvested as in cut-and-cum salad leaves or thinned.

I use wide drills to create special soil conditions for some plants e.g. moist soils for watercress. A wide bed gives me an excuse to take it further and deeper in one small area.

For example I can lay peas on an area into which I've incorporated moisture retentive garden compost or worm casts and organic fertilizer. After sowing seeds on the prepared area the covering soil is drawn back.

Get an early start by sowing the likes of peas using prepared compost in a row tray. Simply slide the seedlings into the wide drill. Your country's gardening catalog is here.

Wide drills are harder to weed. I'm not sure whether they are more or less vulnerable to attack from pests, but...

You'll probably find that they protect seedlings in the centre of the drill when those growing on the outside become sacrificial. Be sure to start off with fine well-cultivated soil as this deters pests.

So I recommend using wide drills to sow pest deterrents or distracters around a main crop. Spring onions, I find, really do make a good protection for carrots against carrot root fly. Find more ways to protect your seedlings from the pests here.

STATION SOWING:

Larger Easy to Handle Seeds -
Smaller Seeds when sown in Small Groups at Precisely Spaced Stations -
Raised Beds / Square Foot Gardens -
Expensive F1 Hybrid Seed
VEG: Broad Beans, French Beans, Runner Beans, Sweet Corn...
FLOWERS: Sunflower, Hollyhock...
HERBS: Lovage, Fennel...
you get the idea when you know your plants.

Larger easy to handle seed can be precisely placed at stations e.g. in raised beds. Highly productive individuals - those plants that continue cropping or large flowering individuals, all need to be well spaced.

	Smaller seeds too can be sown in regularly spaced groups. Leeks and Onion are sometimes grown this way without thinning to give bunching crops.
	2 or 3 lettuce seeds sown at each station then thinned.

Sow large seeds in holes made with a planting knife or dibber – I find widgers too flimsy for this. Cover seeds with about 2 times seed length in soil, that means a hole depth of 3X the seed length. Check seed packet, as oddly shaped long thin seeds may be covered to 2X width or more.

When using expensive F1 hybrid seed I usually sow just one seed per station. More rarely when using saved seed, and when germination rate is uncertain, I can sow 2 or more seeds at each station and thin the plants later.

Now for a plant label >>  I discovered that coloured plant labels looked better – really less obvious than white labels. They enable you to colour code.

Organic gardeners also like earthy looking copper and wood labels available on this link.

Next   >  How to Start Seeds in Propagators  - Matching your method to your plant seeds & garden needs & where to buy stuff you need.

My Wheelbarrow

I've mentioned: garden line, dibber, widger, hand fork and planting knife,
Soil Miller and garden rake,
labels, cloches, fleece, bird scarers,

Lawn seed, Spring Onions, Carrots, Beans, Cabbage;
Sunflower, Hollyhocks, Livingstone Daisies...

My Gardening Catalog in your country - follow links from here

The Garden Seat - books by experts about sowing seeds to help your garden grow

My practical gardening experience has been partly based on following advice in
Grow Your Own Vegetables by Joy Larkcom.

Books on seed propagation coming soon...

Garden Gate

The main plot for information on seeds and seed sowing   on this link includes:- planning your seed site & sowing seed, making a seed bed, saving seed, seed compost, growing flowers and vegetables from seed, using: modules, root trainers, deep fiber pots, propagators, ... ... ...

ALSO on The Organic Gardener:-
Flower gardening the organic way

My Neighbour's Garden Plots

Home Of The Organic Gardener

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