Talking green: Where's the seed?

Today I want to talk about seed sizes for a moment. Seeds come in a wide range of sizes and the smallest I have seen are Lobelia seeds which are incredibly tiny. I would say the size of a grain of sand possibly. The reason I titled this what I did is because I showed the Lobelia seeds to my dad when I was planting them and that was his response. One of the questions I got from my sister was how to plant seeds like this because it is almost next to impossible to control where the seed falls first of all and second to know how much has dropped on to the soil is tough to know. You can count them if you are really willing to spend that much time and effort but if you are like me then you will not have the patience for it. lol So my rule of thumb for the really tiny seeds is to sprinkle a few onto the soil and place a very fine layer of soil over top and then once they are big enough I do what is called pricking out (which I will talk about in another post). With seeds this tiny it is very important to use a spray bottle to water them until they are bigger as to not wash away the seed. Also in my experience the smaller the seed, the longer they seem to take to grow. I could be wrong about this but it seems to be the case. Lobelia take a very long time to grow and I usually start them quite a bit before the other seeds to give them time to grow.
Next I want to touch on the seeds in between the tiny seeds and the big seeds. I like to plant more seeds than what I plan on needing just in case every seed doesn't sprout. Also if they all come up then I have some extras and you can never have too many! If you have limited room, the extra plants make great gifts. Anyways for the seeds that I can see fairly easily like Marigold or cosmos seeds, I will plant two to a cell. This is my own personal choice of course and if you prefer to just plant one-that is perfectly fine. I am not an expert and I am just sharing how I do things and how it works for me. One thing to keep in mind when planting is the age of the seed also. The older the seed is, the less likely it will be to sprout. Depending on how well seed is cared for, it can last many years or as little as a year. I have read that it is a good idea to keep seed in a cool dry place like a fridge and I would love to do this but there just isn't room in the fridge! So I try to keep them in a cupboard that stays cool. Some seeds seem to last longer than others also. So just keep that in mind. When the seeds sprout, if I need to, I prick out the extras and put in other cells.
Now to the other side of the scale in terms of size of seed. The really big seeds are seeds like some sunflower seeds, Nasturtium, Sweet Peas, 4 o'clocks etc. With big seeds I tend to plant one seed per cell because they take up a fair bit of room and for extra seeds I just plant more cells. I find the big seeds sprout pretty fast and you should see them popping up fairly quickly. Also the bigger the seed, the deeper you should plant it. I usually follow the instructions on the package and if I don't have a package then I just plant the seed about the depth of the seed size. I hope this information is useful!