I bought supplies to start some vegetable/flower seeds indoors. I am not doing this to save money but to save sanity. (kidding, but not kidding!) I need the hope of GREEN!
I have planted vegetable gardens for several years and also am generous in the flower planting I do. I am not new to planting. But I usually buy my plants in April/May to sow directly into the ground.
I’m in Northern Ohio. A quick look shows that I should start seed 6 weeks before the last frost here. Hmmmm. That would push me not starting seed until mid March as least. I don’t want to wait that long! Might plants actually take longer than 6 weeks?
I’m just using a seed starter “box” that has a plastic dome top (room for 50 slots I think). It will live on our sunporch which gets quite warm during the winter days when the sun is out. At night I’ll move it to the kitchen since the sun porch can get pretty cool overnight. I don’t plan on using any type of grow light at this point. Just natural sunlight.
Opinions on needed weeks of growth for seedlings? Seed I have includes jalapeno, herbs, early girl tomato, beets and dinosaur kale.
Herbs like basil can take over 30 days to sprout (if at all in my case.). I LOVE my Aerogarden. No muss, no fuss and things sprout quickly. Many people use them to just sprout plants (not me–I grow and enjoy the bounty). A real plus is that you can use it year round–brings the green and light inside.
This reminds me that I want to sprout my scallions. I did that at the beginning of lockdown last year and it was a little endorphin boost to see them growing on the windowsill. Maybe I should follow @abasket’s lead and get a little indoor garden started.
I have been doing this for decades. I only use a small number of tomatoes and eventually gave up starting them and just buy the plants in the spring. However I grow enormous quantities of Basil and therefore start it myself each year.
If the basil is planted too early and gets too large, you can cut it back and plant the cuttings. It is quite easy to grow from cuttings. The cut back parts will also grow just fine.
Mine starts quite a bit faster than the 30 days suggested by @gouf78. My guess is that this might be because I use a heating pad under the seedlings until they sprout. I also use grow lights with a timer.
Basil is very sensitive to frost. It is not unusual for all the basil to be dead on days when the tomatoes did not even notice that we had a frost.
In my experience onions are much, much slower from seed. I think that you could start them now if you are eager to start something.
@abasket, you can certainly start seeds earlier than six weeks before frost. That initial timeframe is a guideline for when a transplant size plant would be ready to go outside. You can certainly keep them inside longer you just will have to move them to larger containers. This is actually a great option as you will probably end up with the earliest pepper and tomato harvest. Kale shouldn’t be a problem setting out earlier than everything else.
Go ahead, start the seeds and enjoy watching them grow. You might want to give a little extra light just to keep the plants from getting *leggy". You can certainly plant the tomato plants deeper when you transplant to a larger pot and I would highly recommend that. It allows the plant to grow a much healthier root system and will be better in the long run.
Good luck and enjoy. I am ready to start some seeds indoors myself.
@MarylandJOE , thank you for the tips. I considered getting a heat pad. Wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world to have larger plants if I’m that lucky!
Didn’t manage to have time this weekend to start so guess I’ll be delayed a couple days anyway!
The heat pad is a very good idea. Also grow lights if you are serious. I used to start things but they just tended to get too leggy, and tomatoes and so on from a greenhouse are better plants than I can start in my northern environment. The onions however are an idea, and you are making me think about leeks, which are one of my favorite things to grow, and it is hard to find starts.
A heating pad will certainly speed up the sprouting and make the peppers and tomatoes happy, they love the heat. I like to presprout some of my seeds also. That can be done as simply as wrapping seeds in a moistened paper towel, sticking it in a Ziploc bag and setting it on top of the refrigerator (warm spot) for a few days.
Yes, larger plants isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Make sure you feed them well and care for them so they don’t get stressed. I would highly recommend supplemental light too as it might be hard to get a high enough amount of natural light.
Kale definitely doesn’t mind a little cold. You can also start all sorts of things and just eat microgreens. Grow lights are IME a must. I brought in my Thai basil last fall and it’s still chugging along looking wimpy but refusing to die!
What a fun idea for a new thread. I’m also itching to see more greenery, get ready for gardening season.
I already have a lot of geraniums growing inside. Most are from my mother’s apartment before she passed away (some that stayed potted in my yard last summer and some spent a few months in the ground, at “summer camp” in my yard). Half are on a small table at the sunny kitchen window and half are in the den under the grow light from mom’s place. I have had limited luck propagating cuttings into new pots, but there is still some space for veggies.
So far I have some lettuce seeds sprouted. I intend to put them in larger pots outside this spring, raised up away from those clever rabbits in the yard. I’ll be watching the ideas here because I still have a little more space (and could open a leaf at my kitchen-window-table if hubby does not balk)
Jalapenos might take the entire 8 weeks for the seedlings to grow. Also, I don’t know the temperature on your sun porch, but I used a heat mat for my hot pepper seedlings and grow lights. I kept them in a heated area of my garage. Hot peppers don’t like cold.
The sun porch can actually reach 80 on a day with some sun - but nights are cool - there is a radiator (we have radiator heat) out there and we have French doors that we keep open to the rest of the house though on really cold nights we close them partway . I thought I’d move the plant tray at night into the kitchen where near another radiator.
But I do think I’ll order a heat pad and I’ll look at lights - I really prefer them where I can see them even if it’s not as successful because I’m probably doing this more for a mental boost than anything!!!
You could just supplement with lights for a few hours a day if they seem like they need it. Then you could leave them in your sunny spot where you can see them well the rest of the time.
You will be able to grow a citrus plant from a seed (I grew a large lemon tree indoors in a pot when I was a kid), but it is unlikely that the tree sprouted from a seed will produce any fruit for a long time or produce the fruit you believe it should produce. You need a grafted plant for that. There is a good explanation of why this happens - in here:
Sometimes I get basil plants from the grocery store or the local nursery, I don’t know how early they appear. But basil is incredibly easy to grow from seeds. It doesn’t mind be transplanted at all.