When to use weekly feed and preplant with seedlings
I have seen some confusion on how much and when to use nutrients in seedling trays while growing seedlings. I’ve made a short video (see below) that covers when to use weekly feed and preplant in seedling trays.
It is easy to determine which nutrients you will need. If you are placing seeds into a seedling tray, you only need preplant. If you are putting seedlings in a seedling tray, you will need preplant and weekly feed.
When adding preplant to a seedling tray, it is always 1.5 ounces of preplant to a full seedling tray. Weekly feed is 3/4 of an ounce to the full seedling tray. The preplant and weekly feed are added before transplanting the seedlings.
For those whose who do not use the Mittleider seedling tray
If using containers other than seedling trays, such as a seedling pot, you can easily calculate and add the correct amounts of nutrients. Place your growing medium into something like a tote that will allow you to measure how many cubic feet of growing medium you have. For every 1/2 cubic foot of growing medium, add 1.5 ounces of preplant and .75 ounces of weekly feed. Mix it in well and then transfer the mixture into your seedling pots.
Today we are transplanting onions into our garden. We will detail the number or rows and the spacing requirements for onions in a Mittleider garden. There will be a couple picture showing the process and the onion seedlings.
Spacing and row requirements
These are onions we started from seeds and are ready to be transplanted. Onions in a Mittleider garden are grown in 4 rows with 4 inches of spacing. In a 30 foot bed you can expect to yield 362 onions. In the picture below you can see transplanted onion seedlings in the correct number of rows and spacing.
We have always had great success with starting our onions from seeds. We have had a higher success rate come harvest time with our own onions starts as compared to buying store bought bulbs. The seedlings are easy to transplant into the garden and you can get a lot of them into a small amount of space.
Do onions tolerate the cold and how long to grow?
Onions are a hardy crop and tolerate cold weather well. With the average 85 days to maturity for most onions we like to grow two crops. The first crop is grown in the spring, the second in the fall. In our soil beds I add onions in the spring to the garlic I started in the previous fall.
We use a lot of onions in our home. When I harvest the onions from the soil bed shared with the garlic are replaced with the fall batch of onions. The fall batch are grown from seeds and transplanted into the garden. Transplanting a seedling instead of putting the seed directly in the garden will result in a larger yield.
Here is a picture of our onion seedlings before transplanting.
