The Serrano seeds from Wahaca that I planted in the first week in January are looking really healthy.
As mentioned before i wish i’d only planted one seed per cell as I don’t enjoy thinning out seedlings. As you can see in the shot below some of the Wahaca seed sticks had up to 5 seeds each. With almost 100% germination rates culling some of the weaker seedling is the only option.
Rather than trying to separate out the roots i’ve decided to take a pair of scissors and snip out the weaker looking stems, leaving just one seedling per cell. This will allow the remaining seedlings to maximise their root growth and grow strong without having to compete with neighbouring plants.
Here are the poor soldiers that didn’t make it. It seems harsh but the remaining plants will thank me with higher yields come the summer time.
Enjoyed the read, I’ve just sown several into one peat pots and planned to cut up and thin out but next year I’m going to go for the one seed per cell, saves time in the long run. The peat pots were all I had around in numbers, started about 13 pepper varieties lol
Andrew,
I generally prefer to sow one seed per cell these days as I find it ’emotionally’ hard to cull the weaker looking seedlings!!!
I’m actually quite releived at this post. I bought a shed load of different seeds from chilliseeds.co.uk, and some of them aren’t doing so well (my fault entirely, germination rate was great). I was focusing on keeping them all alive, but I’ve got a few really healthy ones of each variety, so I’ll just focus on those for now!