Nature’s Call

Soaking Vegetable seeds before planting

Should you soak your vegetable seeds before planting? This is an often asked question, and the answer is yes for two reasons. It will probably result in a faster and higher germination rate.

Soaking can be done, even with such tiny seeds as carrots and lettuce. Doing so, however, normally causes them to clump together, making them much more difficult to separate and individually plant.

Some vegetable seeds require a lot of moisture to induce germination. If planted without soaking, they have to soak up the needed moisture from the soil. Soaking seeds overnight makes them soft and ready to start growing.

When growing vegetables for the needy, I stay with the basics, which include multiple varieties of corn, cucumbers, okra, peppers, and tomatoes. Tomato and peppers seeds, to me, are small enough that I don’t bother. They’re planted in six pack containers and well watered, which is more than sufficient. Cucumbers are more than large enough to use soaking. Corn and okra seeds have a very hard shell, and overnight or up to 12 hours of soaking removes the hardness, making them moist, soft, and ready to germinate right away. By “right away,” that means germinating up to days ahead of normal germination, plus the germination rate will be higher.

Soaking requires very little water, but, planting seeds dry requires considerable water to keep them and the soil moist. There’s no steadfast rule on water temperature. I normally use slightly warm water, but whatever temperature, the liquid will quickly become room temperature! Just make sure the seeds are totally covered with water.

There is one potential exception to the rule. You can always soak seeds, but if you’re having a wet season when the soil is very moist and temperatures are cool, there is simply no need to soak.

The Forgotten Need for Good Soil

Healthy soil provides healthy plants that aren’t bothered by pests. Many articles have mentioned the need for good soil. Items such as synthetic fertilizers contain salts; Synthetic fertilizers don’t improve the soil, but degrade it; Poor soils result in higher pathogens that plants can’t fight; Vegetable nutritional value has been significantly reduced in our lifetime; and so on.

There is, however, one additional result of poor soil all of us have experienced, almost certainly without knowing it. That one quality of poor soil totally overlooked is rotting vegetables. We buy four good apples, knowing we have to eat them within the next few days or they will start to rot. The same is true for many other vegetables, and we limit our purchase quantity to ensure we can consume all of it before rotting begins. Unfortunately, all of us just accept rotting as an unavoidable fact.

In buying vegetables from a store or open market, you have no say so or choice in the matter. Your garden, however, does have a choice. The reason is healthy vegetables do not decompose or rot in storage or refrigerator; they just dehydrate. Rotting is a matter of mineral nutritional content. When HEALTHY SOIL mineral nutrition is balanced, the carbohydrate and protein content is much different from when the mineral nutrition is unbalanced.

It’s estimated that 40% of our annual food production is wasted. A large portion of that waste is spoilage in the store or your home. Vegetables apples and oranges for example, should be able to sit in your home for AT LEAST a few months dehydrating perhaps, but not spoiling. The reason they don’t spoil is due to the quality of the soil in which they were grown.

Healthy soils produce healthy plants. It’s something to think about for your gardens!