Planting Flower or Garden Seeds

It is getting time to start thinking about planting flower or garden seeds indoors. Certainly, time to clean and get the area ready and order the seeds and stuff you will need for germinating seedlings. Everyone has a little area they can start a few seeds. I use a back room just for this purpose.

Organize your leftover seeds from last year

Why not wait and buy the plants from a greenhouse or nursery? For instance, you can find 50+ varieties in a catalog instead of a couple of dozen in a retail store. Like a tomato, you have a larger selection of colors, sizes, maturity dates, types of heirloom varieties, etc. Other things you can pick from are tomatoes for drying, yellow watermelons, cabbage that will keep until next March, and other qualities of certain vegetables. Did you know there are pink and white eggplants?

PVC light setup

First, you need to get your seeds ordered. Then you will need to get or buy some cheap fluorescent light fixtures. I replace the light tubes with grow lights.

Getting everything ready

Find your germinating containers, either buy the ones for this purpose or recycle cut down milk cartons, cottage cheese containers, small cake pans, etc. Make sure they all have drainage holes. If you used plastic containers from last year, dip them into a 10% solution of bleach then rinse. This removes any disease materials left over.

Get your planting media, do not use soil. I have found the easiest solution for myself is to get regular germinating media. I usually purchase this from a greenhouse supplier in a larger bag instead of getting the smaller more expensive bags you find in retail stores.

Later I will write when it is time to start germinating the seeds after you get everything set up. Even now it is not too early to start onions, geraniums, begonias, and petunias if you’re adventurous.