Seed Germination In Your Growing Dome®

Seed Starting For Fast and Consistent Germination Rates

What are seeds and how do we best “start” them to ensure consistent germination rates? Why do they sprout when they do?

Understanding the fundamentals of seeds and seed germination allows for designing optimal situations and practices for successful starts for your garden.

Meet Roland. He is Growing Spaces® Growing Dome Gardener extraordinaire. Starting seeds, pulling trays out of trees, and packing our Growing Domes with mature plants all year round. Good work Roland.

Pulling trays out of trees? You’ll see. Watch the video below.

What exactly is a seed?

Here Roland explains a seed is an embryonic plant enclosed in a protective covering, often with a small supply of nutrients to feed the plant in its initial stages of growth.

The plant is alive inside the seed, but its growth is on hold and its metabolism is slowed to a crawl.

The process of germination entails “waking up” the seed.

For a seed to wake back up, or germinate, its metabolism must be reactivated by the right environmental conditions.

Externally, this means the proper range of:

• temperature
• moisture
• air
• light or darkness
• presence or absence of particular chemicals

What each particular species or variety needs is closely tied to its natural habitat.

How do we wake them up? For most seeds we start, we can simply place them in the right combination of moisture and air within the right temperature range.

When is it warm enough to plant? Here is a link to our friends over at www.gardeners.com about when it is warm enough to plant along with a table of temperatures for some common garden plants.

Here Roland shows the type of medium he prefers for starting seeds.

His tomato seeds are going into a sterile, dampened mix of coconut coir and perlite and he explains why this is his preferred method.

But where did he get his tray?

I don’t want to give too much away because I want you to watch the video, but here’s a hint.

With his tomato seeds lovingly planted an 1/8 of an inch deep and watered in, they are covered with a plastic cover and placed in a strategic area of the Growing Dome.

Roland uses an elevated plastic cover. If the seeds take varying amounts of time to germinate, they have enough room to grow without pressing up against the cover, trapping too much moisture and making them more susceptible to disease.

The Growing Dome has a much longer season than the outdoors, pretty much all year-long.

So, Roland likes to start seeds regularly to always have plants ready to fill in the spot after something is harvested. 

We hope this video helps you better understand your seeds, so you can have consistent success germinating for your garden. From the Growing Spaces Growing Domes, happy planting!

Please contact us if you’d like to get more information on Growing Domes.  Or to receive more informative gardening and Growing Dome articles, please sign up for our monthly Newsletter “The Happy Grower”

Jason Stuck

For three days in March 2008 Jason Stuck shoveled gravel into a Growing Spaces’ 33’ Growing Dome. That was Jason's first “project” working for Growing Spaces. Jason easily fell in love with the product, the people, and the philosophy of helping the earth by helping others grow their own food. Jason wore many hats at Growing Spaces over the years. Shovel slinger, metal fabricator, shopkeeper and author. Jason wrote many articles for our website and newsletter.

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