Indoor Seed Starting Essentials

!±8± Indoor Seed Starting Essentials

Right after the New Year's party, the mailman starts dropping seed catalogues into my mailbox. They are some of the most wonderful mail. They inspire dreams of the coming year's gardens and help to fill the dark days of winter with visions of tasty vegetables and colourful flowers. The best part of spending the winter months gardening through the catalogues is the complete lack of weeds or sore backs.

If the garden centres are filled with thousands of boxes of vegetable and flower plants in the spring, why would I spend the time, money and effort to grow my own? It's about puttering in the basement with soil and water and little green growing things when there is wind and snow swirling outside the window. It's about the yearly renewal of that life cycle. It's about choice. I can pick up a seed catalogue and spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to choose one of the 65 varieties of Tomatoes listed. It's a rare garden centre that will offer you more than half a dozen.

First we have to get the seed to germinate. Germinate, a 10 cent horticultural word that appears to mean 'start growing' but which actually reveals some of the hurdles. Technically, 'germinate' means to encounter the conditions that overcome a seed's natural dormancy. For the vast majority of annual flower and vegetable seeds the presence of sufficient available moisture is the primary requirement for germination. Some of the tricky bits are in those two words - sufficient and available. We can throw our tomato seeds into a puddle of icy outdoor water in the spring and they will certainly have 'sufficient' but there are other factors in that seed's dormancy that prevent that 'sufficient' water from being 'available.' What's missing. Understanding what's missing from the puddle is what can make you a successful seed gardener.

Back to the puddle. Plants are living organisms similar to you and me in many ways. We couldn't survive in the puddle either because it provides its 'sufficient' water to the exclusion of one other element. Plants breathe just as we do and at the bottom of the puddle there is a significant lack of air. Providing a growing medium that provides both air and water in the right balance is one of the keys to successful seed gardening. Every garden centre will be happy to sell you a bag of light soilless mix designed to make a good germinating medium.

When you first plant your seeds you will have the soil at the optimum moisture level if you followed the directions on the bag. My favourite technique is to stand each seed tray in a saucer of water so that the soil can absorb as much water as possible. By letting it soak up from the bottom the seeds do not get disturbed by any stream of water hitting the soil. A seed that has begun to germinate and then is allowed to dry out, is dead. Water exposed to the air, as on the surface of a tray of damp soil, will naturally evaporate. Applying additional water on a regular basis is a solution but not the best one. Covering the seed tray in some manner to prevent the evaporation is a far better answer to this problem. The covering should be clear to allow light to enter and it should be far enough above the soil line so that the emerging seedlings do not bump against it. There are lots of commercial clear plastic seed flat covers available or if you are cheap like me then you discover the top half of many food packaging containers will do quite nicely on smaller seed flats. Those seed flats can often be guaranteed to fit if you simply use the bottom of those same containers and punch enough holes in the bottom to ensure good drainage. Reuse! Recycle! Nobody cares what they look like as long as the seeds grow in them.

The other thing that was missing in that icy puddle was sufficient warmth to tell the seed that it had at least a moderate chance of growing if it started to absorb the apparently 'available' water. Seeds tend not to be suicidal and will not come out of their comfortable dormant state until they feel that the conditions for successful growth and continuation of their species are present. That is the second hurdle that we must overcome. Putting some nice fresh seed into a perfect germinating soil mix that has been properly moistened will produce very few seedlings unless the optimum temperature for germination is present.

Now seed growing starts to get even trickier. Most of would tend to setup our seed growing operation in the basement or some other out of the way location where the presence of soil and water will not upset the tidier members of our households. These are probably not the warmest spots in our homes. Now we need to supply some supplemental heat. The best solution is a heat mat that is designed for the purpose. It's water proof, got a thermostat, (to avoid actually cooking your seeds,) and almost every seed catalogue has them at a reasonable price. Our tomato seeds would like a soil temperature around 75 F / 24 C and are quite happy if the air is several degrees cooler.

The primary requirement now, is for sufficient light to drive the growth process. Nice bright windowsills have produced some reasonable tomato plants but they are far from the ideal. The light is unidirectional and the plants will naturally bend toward it. Yes, the dedicated among us can turn the plants every day to overcome some of this problem but that's not me and it's probably not most of you.

For the vast majority of our seedlings, ordinary fluorescent light will be more than sufficient. Keeping the tubes within an inch or two of your plants is the big secret to success. This obviously requires some method of adjustment so that the distance can change as the plants grow. There are some commercial light and tray structures available or you can create one that fits the space that you have available.

It should be becoming obvious that there is a fair amount of setup and investment involved in this seed starting operation. Just remind yourself and anybody else in your household that is questioning your activities, that this setup, once done, will last for many years and make their world a better and tastier place throughout those years.