Light for Indoor Seed Starting

Tomato "Mortgage Lifter" - robust seedlings

I thought you might enjoy my latest article for MainLine Gardening on light conditions needed for seed starting.  I offer some suggestions for easy seed starting using natural sunlight as well as ideas for using florescent lighting.

After my last post on my seed starting epic fail - which hasn't turned out all that bad, just slower germination than usual - Liz, my mentor in the Master Gardener trainee program, gave me a good handout from Virginia Cooperative Extension on seed starting.  Here is a link to the PDF Seed for the Garden which covers all your seed starting basics.  Enjoy!

My seedlings are actually doing a little better. No more peppers have germinated, but there were more cherry tomato seeds germinating today, and now the Early Girl tomatoes are showing up for the party.   The Mortgage Lifter giant beefsteak tomatoes are already burly seedlings. Even the plants on these guys are big!

A few folks at my Master Gardener class commented on how early I'd started my seedlings, but with our raised beds and the dark, compost-rich soil we have, I can typically plant my vegetables a few weeks earlier than others.  The dark soil and the raised beds tend to create a micro climate a few degrees warmer than the ground-level soil.

Time for Seed Starting

At last! The snows melted enough so that I could get into the garden shed and find my seed starting supplies. I cleaned the lights and checked to make sure everything worked. Shadow came outside with me while I filled the seed trays. (I fill my seed starting tray outside so I don't make a mess with the soil.) She was digging around in the snow and emerged, ecstatic, tail whipping back and forth. She'd found her tennis ball that she lost during the first snow storm. It had been buried, but she remembered where it was!






I planted the following seeds yesterday:

• Vegetables - cherry tomatoes, tomato "Better Boy", pepper "California Wonder", pepper "Rainbow mix"
• Herbs - Genovese basil, dill
• Annual flowers - snapdragons
• Perennials - Spanish lavender "Purple Ribbon", Echinacea "Bravadao", Missouri Primrose (yellow), and mixed California poppies, English primrose "Pacific Giant Crescendo Mix"

Next weekend, I'll start more of the butterfly gardening flowers. If my Park Seed order arrives, I'll have petunias to start from seed, along with platycodon ("Balloon Flower"). I bought a variety of platycodon seeds called Komachi that I used to grow as a kid. Unlike other Balloon flowers, these keep the balloon shape and never fully open. I loved those plants and miss them. It's been over 15 years since I've grown them!

The snow continues to melt....50 degrees yesterday. I walked Shadow along the edge of the woods and surprised the flock of Bobwhite quail again. They sure can fly fast. They startled me when they popped up and out of the brush! Lots of cardinals, sparrows, and other small birds, and the bluebirds have been hanging around the vegetable garden fence. We had a skunk visit the front porch on Friday evening, leaving his 'calling card.' Boy was that potent. Thankfully, by morning the scent was gone.

Spring...let's hope the warmth continues. As for now, I have more seed starting kits to clean, seed starting equipment to ready, and more packages to arrive!