Starting Seeds for Your Garden Indoors

In much of the United States, the only way to take advantage of a full growing season is to start your plants from seeds indoors. In areas where the last frost can be as late as the end of May, and the first as early as the beginning of October, the abbreviated growing season can mean a short garden season and a severe limitation on plants and flowers that would otherwise flourish. One solution is to choose only native plants for your garden. A more workable solution is to cover your kitchen table with newspaper one day in March (and since we are in the alst day of March, NOW is the time!), pull out the potting soil, seeds and pots, and give your garden an early jump on the season.

What You Need to Start Plants Indoors

Location - Your best option is a room with south-facing windows that get direct sun at least 6-8 hours a day – but not having one is no excuse. Grow lights are fairly inexpensive and very easy to set up. Just be sure there’s enough space for you to move around and water the plants.

Equipment and Supplies – You can buy commercial ‘flats’ at any department or home supply store for under $5. They’re flat ‘trays’ with individual compartments each meant to hold one seedling. An alternative that works quite well are cardboard egg cartons. They’re biodegradable, provide drainage and can easily be cut apart when it’s time to transplant your seedlings outside.

Purchased potting soil is a good growing medium, but if you want to really give your plants a great start, you can mix up a batch of potting soil with compost and peat moss, or leave the soil out entirely and grow in peat moss, vermiculite and compost. Or you can do as my grandmother did if you’ve thought ahead. At the end of each growing season, she dug up several buckets full of rich soil from the garden and baked it in a 300 degree oven for a couple of hours to sterilize it. In spring, she brought it out to use as potting soil for her new seedlings.

Seeds of course!  – Basil, tomatoes, carrots, asters, marigolds, nasturtiums, petunias and pansies are all good candidates for starting indoors, but you can choose any garden plant that can be started from seed.

When to Plant - Most garden plants can be started indoors about six weeks before the anticipated last frost. In most northern states, that’s mid-March. You can transplant the seedlings outside when they’ve reached 4-6” in height, after the last frost.

Seed Starting Method Using Egg Shells - Loosely fill each egg cup with enough garden soil to just below the top. Do not pack down! Use your index finger to poke a hole about an inch into the soil. Drop seeds into the hole. For large seeds like beans, use ONE seed per cup. For tinier seeds, sprinkle a pinch into the hole. Lightly cover the seed by raking soil over it with your fingertips. Move trays to a sunny window (or beneath grow lights). Water well – but don’t over-soak. Loosely cover each egg tray with a sheet of clear plastic wrap. Now LEAVE THEM ALONE. Check daily for signs of moisture, and when you don’t see any, lift the plastic wrap and mist well with a mister, then recover. You can remove the wrap when seedlings have two leaves, or are touching the plastic. When the seedlings are 1-2 inches tall, it’s time to thin them. In any container that holds more than two seedlings, pluck out all but the hardiest so that they’ll have the best chance at setting root and growing. Water and mist frequently until the danger of frost is past, then transplant to your garden outside.

For more seed starting methods and ideas see Tifaffany’s blog at http://www.naturemoms.com/blog/2008/02/06/recycling-stuff-for-your-garden/

Shopping for Plants? Here Are Some Helpful Tips

When shopping for plants, sometimes things can become a bit confusing. It’s not uncommong to come home with too much or too little, and you might even find that you purchased things which weren’t overly compatible either. Then of course, there is the quality of the plants themselves… did you pick a dud that can’t be revived, or did you pick a very slow growing plant while it’s too small for your tastes and needs?

While none of us is perfect, there are some things you can do to help make your plant shopping trips more productive, so we’ll create a general checklist for you which may help.

1. Where do you intend to put the new plants? If you’re shopping for new plants which will be kept in pots inside your house, try to decide where you think the new plants will actually reside. This will allow you to know how much or how little sunlight that specific place in your home has available.

The same rules apply to outside plants too. Whether you’re putting them in a new garden bed or a container, you need to have an idea of where exactly you’ll be putting them.

2. Are there other plants already in place? If you’re shopping for plants with the intention of filling out or supplementing an existing garden bed or container, you’ll need to be aware of what you already have in place so that you don’t cause yourself additional headaches down the road.

For instance: Are those existing plants at their full mature sizes? If not, then how much extra room will they take up once they’re fully grown? If they’re not fully grown, then you may want to consider buying annual plants so there will still be room for your existing plants to grow as needed. If you buy perennials to fill the bare spaces, then by the time everything is grown up you may find that your garden bed is over filled, and this may even cause growth problems with the plants in time too.

Also think about the plants which are already there. If you have a garden bed with invasive plants such as ivy or mint planted for instance, you may not have much luck trying to put rose bushes or tulips in there too.

3. What do you want to accomplish? When you go shopping for plants, it helps to have an idea of the end results you’d like before you start actually buying the plants and flowers. If you want to simply add some different flower colors or textures to a garden bed, then it’s usually safe to buy whatever catches your fancy. If however, your garden bed already has too much red in it and you want to balance that out, then it may help to make notes about which colors you’d like to add to the existing mix.

If there’s a certain garden design style you’re trying to attain, knowing this before going shopping helps dramaticly too. If you want an old fashioned English cottage garden for instance, you’d need to look for different types of plants than those which would go into a desert cactus garden.

4. How to the plants themselves look? Once you’re at the garden center or nursery, you want to pay attention to how the plants actually look, and be honest with yourself about your personal gardening abilities. If you’re not sure how to take care of a Begonia for instance, then it might not be wise to buy one which looks like it needs extra tender loving care.

5. What is your budget? This may seem obvious, but most of us plant lovers tend to spend much more than we ever intended every time we go plant shopping. So if you have a budget that must be adhered to, keep this in mind as you’re shopping. It may help to write down your budget, and write down the cost of each plant you want too. Then if you find yourself over extended, go through your list and decide which ones can be left for the next shopping trip instead.