How to Start Your Vegetable Seeds

You have begun receiving your vegetable seed catalogs or you have been receiving vegetable seeds every month with your Vegetable Seeds of the Month Club subscription. Thoughts of bountiful harvests from all of those vegetable seeds are dancing through your head, but before you get ahead of yourself, you want to ensure that the vegetable seeds you already own or the vegetable seeds you are about to buy, will germinate and thrive.

Here are some tips to help start your vegetable seeds.

Read, understand and follow the planting instructions on the back of your vegetable seed packets. These vegetable seed instructions pertain to the vegetable seeds within that packet and will help increase the chances of success. On the back of your vegetable seed packets you will see everything from planting depths to distances and when you can expect your vegetable seed to fully mature into fruits that you can actually harvest.

Many, if not most of your vegetable seeds will be started indoors. This gives you a jump start on your vegetable garden while the temperatures outdoors might be too cold. The items you will need to start your vegetable seeds indoors, are of course, your vegetable seeds, vegetable seed starting soil (homemade or purchased), something to put your seed starting soil in, and an area that receives adequate sunlight throughout the day such as a window sill.

Once your pots (or other vegetable seed starting container) are set up with your vegetable seed starting soil, place your vegetable seeds in the pot as per the directions on your vegetable seed packet. You will thin them out later into their own pots. Make sure you label your vegetable seed pots. You may think you will remember where you planted your vegetable seeds, but over the course of a few weeks, you may forget.

Water your pots that contain your vegetable seeds, but do not saturate.

The best environment for starting vegetable seeds is a humidity dome and/or a green house. Obviously a greenhouse takes up a lot of room and can be costly; a humidity dome on the other hand can cost just a couple of dollars and takes up very little space. Consider one of these options when starting your vegetable seeds. You will also have to water less with a humidity dome.

Once your vegetable seeds have germinated and become seedlings, you will need to thin them out into their own pots. So be sure to plan ahead if you are limited on room. Once you start thinning your vegetable seedlings, room is a factor.

 As your vegetable seedlings turn into larger plants, be sure to transplant into larger planting containers with new vegetable seed starting soil. This will make sure you are not restricting their root’s growth.

On a final note. Before you can transplant your vegetable plants from the indoors to the outdoors, you have to harden them off. That means acclimating your vegetable plants to the outdoors. This is simply done, by taking them outdoors during the day, and bringing them in at night when the temperatures to begin to drop. Once the temperatures are where they should be for the variety of vegetable seed you have planted, you can leave them outdoors overnight or transplant them into their permanent location in your vegetable garden.

How to Make your Own Vegetable Seed Starting Soil

If you want to ensure that the vegetables you grow are the healthiest they can be, then you must be involved in the growth of your vegetables from the start and that means growing them directly from vegetable seeds as opposed to buying established vegetable plants.

Now that is not to say that the vegetable plants you buy from your local garden nursery or home center are bad. It simply means when you start your vegetable plants at home from vegetable seeds you are in complete control of the environment in which your vegetable seeds will germinate and where they will grow.

This is important, because when you start directly from vegetable seeds, you get to choose the vegetable seed starting soil. The better the vegetable seed starting soil, the better the start will be for your vegetable plants, and in turn the healthier they can become.

Just like a tall skyscraper needs an excellent foundation, so do your vegetable plants. This foundation is your vegetable seed starting soil. The best vegetable seed starting soil you can have is one that actually contains no soil at all. Instead your vegetable seed starting soil is made up of three different ingredients.

Whether you make your own vegetable seed starting soil or buy commercially packaged vegetable seed starting soil, all should have these three main ingredients. Each of these three ingredients serves a purpose that helps your vegetable seeds germinate.

What you should be looking for in your vegetable seed starting soil is an ingredient that helps with water absorption so that you do not over water. That usually comes in the form of perlite or vermiculite. Both readily available at any garden center in its own form and will also be included in many commercial vegetable seed starting soils.

The second ingredient that should be on your radar is something that will make your vegetable seed starting soil loose and friable. Two good choices are sphagnum moss aka peat, or coir, which is the fiber extracted from the husks of coconuts. Both can be found at local home and garden centers or online.

Finally, your vegetable seed starting soil must contain some form of fertilizer otherwise the vegetable seed will not get the nutrients needed for proper germination. There are a wide variety of choices and combinations here, but the simplest vegetable seed starting fertilizer you will find is compost. Easily made at home, you can add in your own compost to your vegetable seed starting soil, which gives you a true, self made vegetable seed starting soil.

So how do you make your own vegetable seed starting soil with the items mentioned above? Making your own vegetable seed starting soil is very simple. Combine equal parts of all three ingredients, that is one part perlite or vermiculite, one part peat or coir, and one part compost, then mix them together.

Your homemade vegetable seed starting soil has everything your vegetable seeds need to germinate properly.

As mentioned earlier, you can also purchase vegetable seed starting soil from your local home or garden center. There a variety of different combinations of ingredients that are used with commercial vegetable seed starting soils, so be sure to read the packaging to know exactly what you are buying. Some are formulated for specific vegetable varieties, such as tomato or pepper mixes, make sure you read the bag before you buy.

Seed Starting with Homemade Starter Pots

Your vegetable seeds come in all shapes and size.  Just as many sizes and shapes your vegetables come in is as many ways and methods to germinate your vegetable seeds.  One way to start your vegetable seeds that I addressed in a previous vegetable seed starting video is to use vegetable seed starting peat pellets.  These are expandable pods that you add hot water to and they expand so you can plant your vegetable seeds in them.  Here is a link to that vegetable seed starting video.

The vegetable seed starting (creative) pots I wanted to talk about today, were a couple of things I have done myself with good success.  The best part of these two vegetable seed starting pot options is that they are made from a couple of household items that you already have in your home.

Of course, as we all know, regardless of what you use as a vegetable seed starting pot, your vegetable seeds do not stand much of a chance, if you do not give your vegetable seeds a great seed starting soil.  You can either buy vegetable seed starting soil, or make your own vegetable seed starting soil with a mix of compost, peat and perlite in equal parts.

Now that you have your vegetable seed starting soil, let’s begin with talking about our first home made vegetable seed starting pot, and that is using empty cardboard toilet paper rolls.  Cardboard toilet paper rolls are great to use.  Cardboard toilet paper rolls are biodegradable, which makes them perfect for starting your vegetable seeds in because as the seeds germinate and the plants grow, the roots will want to expand.  If the cardboard toilet paper roll did not break down, the roots would have nowhere to grow. 

The water and the environment will break down the cardboard toilet paper roll for you, so you do not have to worry about it.  Here is an excellent step by step guide for turning your cardboard toilet paper rolls into vegetable seed starters: http://www.yougrowgirl.com/2007/04/13/toilet-roll-seed-starter/

I don’t believe in reinventing the wheel, and in this case, retelling the same vegetable seed starter story, so I had to link to it since YouGrowGirl.com does a nice job explaining the process of turning your cardboard toilet paper rolls into vegetable seed starters.

The second crafty vegetable seed starting pot you can use is turning in those cardboard egg cartons into vegetable seed starters.  Cardboard egg cartons work great because they are plentiful, making vegetable seed planting and space saving a great combination, and just like with the cardboard toilet paper roll, they will breakdown when you plant them into your garden.

“Growing up Creative” has a wonderful step by step tutorial showing you that it is so easy to start your vegetable seeds in a cardboard egg carton that even a small child can do it!  This is true as I have seen my own 5 year old son use an egg carton to start some vegetable seeds.  Here is a link to the vegetable seed starter with cardboard egg carton tutorial: http://www.growingupcreative.com/2010/03/howto-egg-carton-seed-starter.html

Sure neither of these homemade vegetable seed starting pots is earth shattering news, but if you are looking for some projects to do with the kids, or needed a good use for all of those cardboard ‘extras”, these are two more ideas in your arsenal.