Sunday, February 18, 2007
Seed Starting 101
For the past 8 or 9 months I have been trying to start all of my vegetables by seed. Not only is there more personal satisfaction, but it gives me a better choice of verities than what you can pickup at the local nursery.
Success with the seed program has just been ok. I was planting about 6 pots, or cups in my case each week. Now if all of those cups produced respectable transplants, 6 per week would be allot for a small track home garden.
Although the percentage of plants I was actually able to put into the ground was low I was able to keep the gardens reasonably full. I keep readjusting the seed starting mix thinking that might be part of the problem, and moving the cups to different areas of the yard as the weather changed. The problem was that when I would get periods of decent seed production I never really knew if it was because of the potting mix, the location or just the weather.
It normally doesn't freeze here, although we did have 2 days of frost in January. However the nights can still be a bit too cool for quick seed germination. I thought about moving the pots into the house at night but not having the proper trays and carriers this would have been difficult.
I found a seed starting package at Lowe's that had 3 clear plastic lids, 3 carriers and 3 trays that have 72 cells each. Now 216 transplants really is over kill for a home gardener but it is a low cost way of me being able to bring the seedlings into the house at night and hopefully have a better germination rate.
Well I got this on Sunday 2/4. Seeded one flat (72 cells) on Monday 2/5. I thought that maybe I would wait and seed the second tray one or two weeks later and the third tray about two weeks after the second.
Well that thought lasted about a day. The second tray (another 72 cells) was planted on Tuesday 2/6. The third tray (yet another 72 cells was planted Sunday 2/11.
So now I have the full 216 cells planted. The beauty is that so far the system is working great and seeds are germinating.
I put allot of thought into it and felt that if I had just 3 more trays I could space out the plantings and besides who needs 72 transplants at once? With more trays I could seed 10 or 20 cells in a tray not all 72.
So I got 3 more packs. 9 more trays. New total = 12 trays. 864 cells. Thought great at least I have them ready. In a few weeks I could try seeding 10 or 20 of the cells in one tray and keep going from there.
Didn't happen. Tray #4 was seeded Saturday 2/17. All 72 cells.
Only 8 more to go!
Anyone need any transplants?
Labels: Seeds
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