Pre-germinating ("chitting") Your Seeds - Attempt 1 - FAIL!

I was all set to write this post about how I pre-germinated my seeds before I put them into my soil blocks, and how easy it all was. It was going to be great! It was going to be inspirational! It . . . didn't work.

I read about pre-germinating (aka "chitting" your seeds) a few years ago, and have since been chitting my peas before I sow them in the garden. It works great. The idea is that you soak the seeds in warm water overnight to get them to break dormancy, then once they're committed to growing (they can't go back into full dormancy once they've sprouted) you sow them into your garden bed outside. This way you can start your peas a week or so earlier than they would normally sprout outdoors. With peas this works great - they sprout in about 12 hours and you're ready to go.

Another reason to chit your seeds is that you're also doing a germination test at the same time. When you're starting plants indoors, you don't have as much space as you would outside, so you only want to plant seed that you know will grow. When you pre-sprout your seeds, you know which ones will grow and which ones are duds.

For some reason this didn't work for the broccoli, brussels sprout, and parsley seeds I tried to germinate this week. My house is pretty cold, but I had them on a heat mat, so that probably wasn't the problem. The brussels sprout seed was a few years old, so that might have been an issue, but the broccoli and parsley seeds I bought less than a week ago, so they should have been fine. So my best guess is that either 1) I soaked them too long (I think it was over 24 hours; you're only supposed to soak them for around 8, but I got busy and forgot about them) or 2) I let them dry out too much between rinses. I'm thinking the second was my problem, because it looked like some of the broccoli seeds might have started to germinate but then never sent out a root.

I sprout wheat seeds all the time for my sprouted whole wheat flour, so I'm not new to seed sprouting, but I usually do about two cups of seeds at a time. There were much fewer seeds in this experiment (20 broccoli and just 5 parsley), so my guess is that there just weren't enough seeds to stay damp and so they dried out.

Another issue may be germination time - parsley is in the carrot family, and carrots take up to two weeks to germinate. So it was questionable if this method would have worked at all for them.

I will try this again; probably for my May 1st round of seeds. Hopefully I've leared a bit from this failure so I'll be able to post a happier report at that time.

I want to mention that I first read about this method in Steve Solomon's Gardening When It Counts. It's a great resource, and I highly recommend it, especially if you'd like a more comprehensive explanation of this method (I think he only recommends it with the larger seeds like peas and beans, though. That's what I get for trying to be a smarty-pants and do my own thing!)

Have you ever pre-sprouted your seeds? What do you think I did wrong?


Please note - the links above are affiliate links. If you make a purchase after clicking I will receive a small commission, but your price remains the same. Thank you for your support!

Seed Starting Time!

As you may have noticed if you read my 2019 Seed Starting Plan post, this post is about 6 days overdue. The main reason for that is that I was experimenting with pre-germinating seeds (which ended up being a bust - more on that in another upcoming post. I'm considering having a "Friday Fail" series, telling about all of the things I've tried that didn't work out - kind of a "learn from my mistakes so you don't have to make your own" sort of thing. Isn't there a Thomas Edison quote about finding 10,000 things that didn't work? Yeah, something like that . . . I didn't screw up, I made progress!!!)

Anyway, this morning I finally decided to give up on that experiment and just plant like I have in the past. This was liberating - I could just go ahead and do it, no more waiting! I actually got up early this morning so I could get started (that's how excited I am - some people get up early for Black Friday, I get up early for Seed Starting Day!) The first thing I did was get out my mixing pan (I bit the bullet and shelled out $10 for a new one this year - I used my old one for feeding the chickens, and now it's in the garden buried under three feet of snow. It was either shell out the $10 or dig around until I found it. I chose the cash. Three feet of snow is heavy!) I used an old plastic one-gallon pitcher to measure out the soil, then added half that much water and mixed it in. I find this 2:1 ratio works just perfectly to prepare the soil for using my soil blocker. I have to say, I love this tool! I first read about it in Eliot Coleman's New Organic Grower, and have been wanting one ever since. I finally bought one last year, and have been kicking myself for not doing it sooner. I can control what's in my seed starting mix; I have better control of the soil moisture level; and I like the little indentation on top that keeps the seeds in place (with the old Jiffy Pellets I often had seeds slipping down the side and growing from the bottom of the peat pot!)

I punched out my soil blocks into a plastic seed starting tray (the kind without holes - that's very important if you don't want water dripping all over the place). It turned out that my tray could fit about 45 soil blocks - about 24 per gallon of soil, so I ended up mixing two batches - which worked just perfectly for the 37 seeds I wanted to start (you can read my 2019 seed starting plan here). After placing my seeds in their little indentations, I put the tray on a seed starting heat mat and covered it with a plastic cover. In a few days, when the seeds sprout, I'll take off the cover and turn on my grow lights.

It's really very easy when you have the right equipment, but don't be intimidated by the cost. Remember, you'll be saving a couple of dollars per plant, so the equipment will pay for itself very quickly. You can also make homemade versions of some of the items, or find them at yard sales or thrift stores (of course if you're in a hurry and it's not yard sale season, you'll have to just bite the bullet and pay the price - like I did on my mixing pan!)

Sprouted Corn and Soy Free Chicken Feed

Confession time: It's been just over a year now since we moved, and while we've worked hard to make this place our home, I haven't done much to make it a homestead. We have the laying hens, and we raised a batch of meat birds and a couple pigs last year, but honestly I feel like I've been on auto-pilot as far as homesteading is concerned.

Then a few weeks ago I discovered Justin Rhodes' YouTube videos, and in particular the Great American Farm Tour. I've been binge-watching obsessively ever since, trying to stave off cabin fever  by seeing how farmers all around the country manage their farm systems. He calls his videos "edu-tainment", interspersing information about permaculture, seed saving, and animal husbandry with clips of his adorable children and "the Beautiful One" (his wife Rebecca). Even my husband will watch them with me! Mostly to humor me and because the Rhodes kids are so cute, but still . . .)

One of the things in the Rhodes' routine that reminded me of something I needed to start doing again was soaking chicken feed. He claims you can feed 30% less feed if you soak it, due to the higher water content and higher digestibility. While I don't soak/ferment my chicken feed the same way he does, I do like to mix my own corn- and soy-free ration (I posted the recipe here), and this time around I'm stepping it up and doing a four-day sprout on my whole grains.

My Sprouting Station

I re-use old lettuce containers as my sprouting trays, and they work great. On day 1, I put 4 cups of wheat seeds and 2 cups of oats into the container and cover them to about an inch over the seeds with plain water. In the picture above, you can see that I've also been adding some dried pea seeds I had leftover from a couple of years ago - just trying to use them up. I should note that you should only use seed that is meant for animal or human consumption, to be sure that they haven't been treated with chemicals to inhibit sprouting (which of course would defeat the purpose, and also possibly make your animals sick).

On day 2 and 3 I rinse the seeds using this strainer from Amazon, which I bought for straining chicken broth in my Instant Pot (but I use it much more often for rinsing sprouts!) I let them drain out a bit, then return them to the container and put it back on the shelf until the next day. (In case you were wondering, that orange clip is there so that the handle doesn't fall in and stick to the seeds - it just makes things go more smoothly.)

On the fourth day, I pour the sprouts (which have little white seed tails by now) into my feed mixing bucket and add 2 cups of black oil sunflower seeds, 1 cup of ground flax, and 1/4 cup of Fertrell Nutribalancer. I mix it all together and feed it to my birds - 13 old hens, 6 just-starting-to-lay pullets, 1 rooster, and 2 guinea hens. Out of this mix of birds, eating just this home-mixed feed and kitchen scraps, I'm averaging 7 eggs a day, which I think is pretty good for our sub-zero, three-blizzards-last-week mid-February in Wisconsin!

Looking so majestic, standing in his feed trough! Ha!

The links to the seeds above are just for example; this is definitely not the cheapest way to purchase these seeds! I would recommend contacting your local feed mill, buying club, or even Walmart to find what's available in your area. I did buy my Instant Pot and strainer on Amazon, though, so go ahead and get yours there, too. 😉

Also, please note - the links above are affiliate links. If you make a purchase after clicking I will receive a small commission, but your price remains the same. Thank you for your support!