It’s that time of year again! Time to start your seedlings for an early garden harvest and today I’ve got 8 Tips for starting Seeds Indoors that I’ve picked up through the years.
Why Start Your Own Seeds
One reason I like starting my own seeds is it can save quite a chunk of change-As a homeschooling big family mama saving my hubby’s hard earned moolah generally catches my attention!
Another reason is because it’s a great early elementary botany project for kids. This year the timing worked out perfectly for our homeschool-when it came time to start the seeds indoors we were actually studying this seeds in the early elementary children’s science! I love it when that kind of thing happens.
Another and 3rd great reason to start your seeds indoors is because you can choose the very best varieties for your area. For example, in our area I needed varieties that would grow well in northern regions with less sun. Last year I wasn’t able to find my preferred northern variety starters and as a result I didn’t feel like the harvest was as good as it could have been.
A fourth reason is you can choose varieties that fill your unique garden’s needs, so to speak. For example, I needed varieties that would be compact and do well with square foot gardening since I don’t have a ton of space.
Some varieties I chose this year are Cherokee Purple and Black Krim tomato’s, Early Jersey Wakefield for cabbage…If you live in the north be sure to check out my recent post, Square Foot Gardening In Low Sun Vegetable Beds, for the other seed variety’s that do well in the north that I settled on.
8 Tips for Starting Seeds Indoors
- When you first start your seeds keep them in the dark until they pop up. Once they’ve been up a couple days you can put them in a south facing window. If you don’t have a south facing window you could put them in your east window in morning and west in the afternoon-or you could get a grow light.
- Grow lights are a great idea anyways for the cloudy days! They are supposed to help keep seedlings from getting to stringy.
- Get a small window fan- a little gentle breeze on the starters will help strengthen them and prepare them for outdoors.
- A spray bottle works better for watering seedlings just popping up.
- Be really careful with watering-if the soil is too wet they will dampen off-this is where they die at the base of the seedling. Of course you don’t want them to dry out either.
- If you don’t have a warm place for them you can put a heating pad under them.
- Fertilize once a week-but don’t use too much or you’ll burn the plants-be sure to follow directions.
- As they get bigger you can transfer them to larger containers.
That’s all for today but I did want to tell you that if you are going to start your seeds you can look up your growing zone on the internet and find out the best time for you to start seeds in your area, also if you enjoyed this be sure to look up companion planting. I’m looking at doing a video on companion/square ft. gardening-do me a favor and let me know in the comments if you would like that.
Hey, be sure to check out my recent video….click the image below to head to my YouTube channel and check it out!
8 Tips for starting Seeds Indoors
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