Hi everyone, happy Monday! More importantly, happy Spring! I know it’s technically been Spring for a couple weeks now, but it hasn’t really felt like it here in Western PA. It’s been cloudy and cold, keeping us inside when we’ve really wanted to launch into the garden. But hey, that’s why we started some seeds indoors!
Here in Zone 6, our average last frost date is around April 30th. Which is crazy late in my mind, and many seed packets tell you not to plant outdoors until 2 weeks after that, which would be mid-May! So Mark and I decided to try our hands at starting seeds indoors this year. We’re also going to be planting some seeds directly into the ground, so we’ll be able to see which plants do better and share what we learn!
For our first year, we started the following seeds: Rosemary, sage, spinach, sweet peas, pumpkins, sweet peppers, yellow squash, zucchini, Spanish onion, red onion, a couple tomato varieties, cucumber, sunflowers, oregano, basil, and parsley. Whew. That’s a lot more than it seemed like when we were planting.
To start, we bought a seed tray, seed-starting brick made from coconut husks (which you crumble up and add to water, it stretches super far), a ton of seed packets, and some LED lights. Here’s a tip we learned this year: You don’t need to specifically buy the expensive lights labelled as ‘grow lights.’ Any LEDs will do. The trade-off though, is that you have to get the lights super close to your seedlings. Like, way closer than you think. A couple inches, if that. We have one grow light, and then 6 LED lights that were meant to be mounted under cabinets in a kitchen! They work just fine on a timer, as long as they’re nice and close to the seedlings.
The earliest seeds we started were back in February, and we’ve been starting other ones based on package instructions ever since. I think everything has sprouted! We use a spray bottle to keep the soil moist, and just check in on them daily to make sure they’re getting the light they need, and that it’s not too cold in our back room. We’ve already had to transplant the sage, pumpkin, and peas because they were getting too big! Notice that we didn’t buy any transitional containers for those; we used whatever we could find, like coffee containers, the container that had spring mix from the store in it, and a cut open 2-liter bottle. We also transplanted the spinach because it was getting kind of weak-looking, into some cute stacking containers donated from my mom. We later found out that the spinach plants were long and spindly because they were “leggy,” usually caused by a light source that’s too far away! So we learned to move the lights closer.
There are some plants that need to be started outside (carrots and potatoes, most notably, but some of the flowers we’ll be planting for the pollinators as well), and we’ll be working on those and also hardening off these seedlings over the next couple weeks. Can’t wait to show you the progress!
Mark & Beth's Homegrown Adventure 