On Starting Seeds

I noticed this blog post over at Kitchen Gardeners International about economizing on starting seeds. Anyone who’s been gardening for a while has no doubt considered starting their own transplants from seed, and it is certainly IS a seductive notion when all those seed catalogs show up in the mailbox midwinter.

Years ago when we lived on an old farm and I started my first big kitchen garden, I had a light kit which I had a lot of success with, but sadly it got left behind in one of our many moves. Since then I’ve tried intermittently to start my own seeds, with equally intermittent success. This year, facing the loss of our CSA share and having decided to expand our kitchen garden again, I’m starting tomatoes and tomatillos.

Honestly, most gardeners with small plots really don’t need to start their own plants, since they will only require a few and the cost will be similar to or cheaper than the cost of starting their own. We are also fortunate in being able to get a good selection of varieties suited to our region at the Mobile Botanical Gardens plant sale in late March, grown by their excellent greenhouse volunteers.

So why grow your own? To get a jump on the growing season, to handpick the varieties you grow, and to control growing conditions if you’re strict about organic practices. It can also be fun; as every elementary school science teacher knows, it’s thrilling to see the bright green seed leaves pushing through the earth and leaning toward the light for the first time.

While I’m not about to set up shop lights (at least, not this year), I did find the tips from the article about rolling your own newspaper pots and making your own seed starting mix to be pretty useful. While it may look like I have dirt in the pots pictured above, it’s actually a starting mix I put together from ingredients I had on hand. Before I did anything I sterilized the containers I’d saved by soaking them in a weak bleach solution, and set them out to dry. Then I gathered my materials for the mix – some starting mix I already had that contained peat moss, vermiculite, and perlite; sand; worm castings; and a small amount of container mix. I put all the ingredients in a bucket, wetted them down, mixed thoroughly, divided it into the containers, and then planted the seeds according to the directions. When the plants start growing I’ll be feeding them with a seaweed solution which I ordered online.

I’m trying four varieties of tomato: two hybrids and two heirlooms. In the five and a half years we’ve lived here I’ve had the most success growing hybrid, disease resistant slicing tomatoes, as well as cherry tomatoes, many of which do remarkably well under the most brutal growing conditions, including neglect (as I can verify!). When selecting hybrids be sure to get varieties that are nematode resistant if you are growing in-ground, because they are common in the soil here. Bill Finch recommends fast-maturing varieties (75 days or less) for the Gulf Coast so you can get a crop in before the summer heat descends. The two hybrids I’m growing are Celebrity, which was grown with great success by our CSA, and Golden Girl. And while heirloom tomatoes, with their long maturation periods and less resistance to disease, do not do tremendously well in our climate, I’m a sucker for their large fruits and bold flavors so there will always be room in my garden for a few plants. My heirlooms are Cherokee Purple and Martino’s Roma, a small paste tomato, both varieties which should be more amenable to our area than some of the classic heirlooms. We had pounds and pounds of romas from the CSA last year and I could not get enough of the delectable fresh tomato sauce. Unfortunately for my husband I’m not a fan of cherry tomatoes, so I’ll be picking up a single plant later in the season for him.

If you’re starting seeds this year, what’s your strategy?