If you start your own seeds indoors to put out in the garden later you may have encountered or might yet encounter some problems with your seed starting. Sometimes our seeds don’t want to sprout, sometimes they do sprout but look think and sickly and sometime they start off all nice and healthy and then suddenly they just keel over. The keeling over is called damping off and it comes from not having sown the seeds in sterile soil.
The Free Range Life shares fixes for a few common seed starting problems. From how deep the seeds should be planted to how much light and water to give them. I know I stopped having damping off once I learned to sterilize my potting soil. There are all kinds of organisms n soil and even if you purchase a bag of sterile soil it could get some of the bad organisms in it after you have opened it and left it sitting in a shed or garage. I easiest way to sterilize your soil is to put it in a roasting pan. I keep and aluminum roasting pan from the disposable ones they sell at Thanksgiving for this job.
Put about 4 inches of soil in the pan, cover with foil and them bake it at 185 for around a half hour. You don’t want to go hotter than that because over heating the soil can produce toxins. The best way is to use a thermometer and take the pan out of the oven once the soil gets to 180 degrees. Let it cool before using and any left over should be stored in an airtight container. Read the article for more fixes to seed starting problems and get your garden off to a good start this year.
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