4 Reasons Why You Need to Start your Garden from Seed

Who doesn't get excited when the seed catalogs start arriving in the mail or when you browse the web looking at the many different things you can grow from seed? I know I do. So you can imagine how anxious I get as a seed retailer, with thousands of vegetable seeds staring at me, when vegetable gardening season is so close at hand.

Like you, I am ready to get my tomatoes, peppers, eggplant and basil all going, even if the weather tells me otherwise, and in 2013, the weather has been saying all kinds of crazy things. One day it's 80 degrees, the next 50. Those types of temperature swings make it tough to pinpoint when you can move your young seedlings outdoors. I will save that for a future article.

Today, I wanted to concentrate of why you need to start your vegetable, fruits and herbs from seed. Specifically, let's talk about four benefits.

Control
I won't say that I am a control freak, but when it comes to my garden, I sort of am. When planting from seeds, you are in complete control from beginning to end of that plant and your garden. You know where your seeds come from, what is in your soil to make your vegetable seeds grow and so on.

Cost
Buying seeds is much cheaper than buying the equivalent number in plants. So, for example, in a typical tomato seed packet, you will receive a couple hundred seeds. If you were to buy that number of plants, one, you probably would not have enough room for all of them, and two, that cost would be astronomical.

Time
When stored properly, your vegetable seeds can last you for many years. Proper storage simply means a cool, dry location. I have onion seeds that are 9 years old and I am still getting those onion seeds to germinate. This means you won't have to plant all of your seeds from your packet. You can plant the seeds that you need and save the rest of your seeds for subsequent years.

Space Saver
I like to start a bunch of seeds of the same variety in a single planting pot, then thin the seeds out as the seeds germinate and get bigger. This comes in handy when indoor space is limited, such as is the case for what I have available on my window sill. I can have 7 different varieties going at once on one window sill, and when the time comes, I will thin the seedlings out.

I am sure if I were to post the question on our Facebook page, "What are your benefits for starting your veggies, fruits and herbs from seed?", I would get hundreds of different reasons. These are 4 that I believe are good reasons to start your garden from seeds.