My Seedstarting Journey - Repost form March 2008

Here is a writeup of my history with seedstarting from March of 2008.  When I have a moment I will do a step by step through the process I started using then and still use today.

Seed starting has been another area of learning through failure. Four years ago I tried to start seeds without a fluorescent light, put one seed in each 2" soil block. I had poor germination and leggy plants which meant a lot of wasted space. The transplants were decent but it took a lot of energy to set them out every warm day.

The next year I got a 2 tube four foot long shop light and a timer for it. I still did most everything else the same. Wasted space where seeds did not germinate and took a lot of time making the soil blocks and gently watering them. Had very good transplants. I did a lot of setting plants out on warm days to harden them off and let my peppers get too cold but had good plants and good crops that year.

Last year I got a second shop light, decided to use yogurt cups we had saved instead of soil blocks and had read about germinating seed in paper towel. These steps considerably reduced the time and space need and produced transplants that looked better than you could buy. I also had read about the one thing a week and heard that you should not set tomato plants and pepper plants out until night time temperatures are consistently 50 and 55 degrees respectively.

This year I have taken all the learning from previous years and worked on fitting seed starting into small bits of time here and there. I have also been thoughtful about how many transplants I want to raise. I will plant 10 pepper plants and 14 tomato plants, so I want to grow on about twice that number and will only pot up that many sprouted seeds.

I'm really looking forward to Spring and Summer this year.