Growing your own seedlings

If you are one of those backyard gardeners who bought their plants this year at their local garden centers, you are missing out on one of the most pleasant aspects of gardening — growing your own seedlings.

It’s great fun to plant your own seeds indoors in the middle of winter in anticipation of the spring and summer ahead. In early February, when everything outside looks cold and dreary, you can give yourself a big lift by starting your indoor gardening. Watching those fresh young plants growing day by day will go a long way to dull the winter blues.                                       

But you can’t do this without some preparation. First, you need a window with a good southern exposure because that is the part of the house that gets sun all year round, and we all know how essential sunlight is for growing plants.

There is not much one can do with just a narrow window sill so to improve one’s capabilities, it would be nice to construct a window box (plant incubator) that can be hung outside that window, giving you a lot more space to work with. A box, jutting out a couple of feet, and depending on its width, can give you enough space to grow three or more trays of seedlings, enough to give you a great head start when it becomes time to put your first plants into the ground. If you can’t have an incubator you can use indoor grow lights.

You will also need cell packs. They come in many configurations: those that hold 4 cells that will accommodate 4 plants, 6 cells and 12 cells. You will need trays in which the cell packs fit, giving you totals of 36 to 48 cells in which to grow an equivalent number of plants. Other variations come in arrangements where the cells and trays are of a single unit. There are lots of combinations to choose from.

  Next, you will need soil. Good grades of soil can be bought in 40-pound bags for less than four dollars. When the soil is mixed with some handfuls of perlite or vermiculite, mineral amendments that will keep the soil loose and friable, and a sprinkling of starter fertilizer, it becomes a great habitat for small plants.

A bag of seed starter, a non-soil mixture designed to help seeds sprout easier and faster, practically guarantees success. After that, all you need to do is buy the seeds and get started.

  Generally speaking, there is a lapse of 6 to 8 weeks between starting your seeds indoors and putting the resulting plants in the ground, meaning you must plan that far ahead.

Cold weather plants like lettuces, beets, onions and those others that will be planted in early April should be started in early February. Warm weather crops like tomatoes, peppers and eggplants that will be planted in early to mid-May can be started in the middle of March.

So if you are someone who loves to see plants grow, here is one way you can stretch out the experience while saving a lot of money.

Frank Salerno wrote the book From Seed To Salad. Reach him at seedsalad@verizon.net.