How To Read A Seed Packet
It’s so easy to fall in love with a flower, get swept up in the moment, and add it to your garden…then wonder why it’s not doing so hot. Before planting anything, it’s important to fully understand your plant. And a seed packet is a gardener’s most useful tool for this!
Just like reading a recipe – you need to know all the “ingredients” to help get the best results. I encourage you to slow down, read your seed packet, and truly get to know your plant.
Let’s take a closer look at a seed packet and break it down!
Plant Height
This is the plant’s height at its mature stage of growth. This is useful when designing and planting your cottage beds. For instance, if you have a taller plant, you can place it in the mid-to-back row, and smaller and broader plants can be pulled to the front. I like to color code and tag my seed packets to remember who is who.
When To Sow + Germination
This is usually an estimate in weeks from the average last frost date in your zone and the average minimum soil temperature. Don’t know your frost date? You can find it here.
This will also include special germination information. That means a pretreatment of the seeds is recommended to enable germination such as soaking seeds, stratifying (chilling seeds), or scarification (nicking or scratching the seed coat).
Days To Emerge
This is how many days till germination. This is useful because if your seeds do not germinate (you don’t see little sprouts starting to rise) within that window of time, you will need to resow.
Plant Spacing
This is helpful when thinning your seedlings. It is usually dictated by the size of a mature plant, to avoid overcrowding. Planted too closely, they will compete for nutrition and have less airflow, which can translate to fungus in a hot and humid environment.
Planting Depth
This informs how deeply to plant the seed. Some seeds require light to germinate and some seeds require dark. How deeply you plant the seed dictates how much light it will receive (as a general rule of thumb a 1/4 inch or less is considered “light”).
Seed Count
This is how many seeds are in a packet aka how many plants you can expect. Many packets or catalogs will also include % of germination – meaning the percentage of the seeds that will most likely germinate. It’s always a good idea to take this into consideration, so you will have the number of plants you need.
The “M” on seed packets equals one thousand seeds. For example, if you are ordering seed in large quantities and see 1M, this means the pack will have one thousand seeds.
Still have questions?
Not every seed company includes all these details on their packets or website. We love referring to the Ball Culture Guide: The Encyclopedia of Seed Germination when we have questions about germination, spacing, and planting depth.
