Prairie View

Thursday, March 05, 2009

How to Grow Plants from Seed Indoors

Prerequisites:

1. No outdoor potting shed or greenhouse
2. A patient husband
3. A need for hundreds of baby plants not locally available elsewhere
4. Some professional experience and many more years of trial and error experience
5. Tolerance for tedious work
6. Limited finances, but not too limited
7. Bird feeders outside the windows--for diversion and relief of eye-strain
8. Time
9. Room in the house
10. A love for gardening

Materials:

1. Flats (plant trays)--some with drainage holes, and some without
2. Poly packs (inserts for the plant trays)
3. Jiffy-7s (cookie-shaped dried, compressed peat moss that expands into a small plantable pot)
4. Potting soil from Stutzmans, or something similar--several 40-lb bags for starters
5. Seeds
6. Labeling material--plastic or wooden stakes, fade-proof, water-proof marking pens, weather-proof stick-on labels
7. Filing system for seeds--gallon-size zip-lock bags for corralling all the seeds to be planted each week--inserted into a regular folder which is then dropped into a hanging file--in a small plastic table-top filing basket
8. A potting tub--about six inches deep, except for the cut-away front, which is only two inches
9. Another tub--big enough to accommodate an entire filled flat, for bottom watering
10. Milled sphagnum moss--naturally anti-fungal, for covering planted seeds
11. A library of books on starting plants from seeds. I have Park's Success with Seed by Karen Park Jennings, From Seed to Bloom by Eileen Powell, The Seed Starter's Handbook by Nancy Bubel, and Plant Propagation A-Z: Growing Plants for Free by Geoff Bryant.
12. Dibblers, dibbers, or dibbles--depending on what you call those pencil-shaped things you poke into the soil to make a hole. Hiromi is making a multi-pronged one like we used to use at Stutzmans.
13. Heating mat--(or plant propagation mat) for raising the planted seeds to the proper germinating temperature
14. Plastic wrap--for preserving the moisture in planted, but unsprouted seedling packs
15. Florescent lights--four-foot shop light fixtures with ordinary bulbs
16. Chick grit--to cover anything you're going to stratify (cold treat) outdoors--so rainfall doesn't splash out your seeds.
17. A small refrigerator downstairs to store your seeds from one year to the next.
18. Chamomile tea--to use as a fungicide if mold starts growing somewhere on the surface of planted packs
19. Spray bottles--to moisten the tops of planted packs when the seeds are surface-sown and germinate too slowly to stay moist from the initial bottom watering
20. Watering can--to use after seeds are germinated and growing well
21. Shelves or tabletops--to hold flats
22. A spiral notebook--to use as a diary
23. A loose-leaf notebook to collect records--seed orders, germinating requirements, etc.
24. A small notebook to use for writing down daily "to-do" tasks
25. A sifter/screen--hardware cloth forming the bottom of a wooden "box"--when finer soil is needed
26. Fertilizer--liquid, preferably
27. Scoops--various sizes, for moving soil and filling containers (Tin cans to the rescue here.)
28. A big sink--for washing containers that are being reused. I don't have this.
29. Scrub brush
30. Bleach--to mix with water in a 1:9 ratio for disinfecting reused containers
31. Timers--to control the grow lights automatically to come on for 16 hours a day
32. Extra chains--for suspending the grow lights and making the height adjustable
33. A place for filing receipts--to document expenses
34. Small soil tampers and row-makers--Hiromi is making these for me.
35. Salt shaker--for distributing fine seeds
36. Extension cords and power strips--for connecting all the lights to a receptacle

Procedure:

1. Choose varieties of seeds to order. I base this on information from our state extension service, lectures I've heard, reading I've done, tolerance to heat and drought, suitability for my purposes, and my own experience. Obsess over this till you're sure you've got the best value for your money. Wish you could afford to order plugs for everything--plants already growing, and ready to pot on into bigger containers.

2. Make sure funds are available, swallow hard, and place the orders.

3. Wait on pins and needles till the seeds arrive. Plan to be home when the UPS man comes so the dog doesn't open the seed packages before you see them.

4. File them immediately when they arrive--by the week in which they should be planted. Everything hinges on the Average Frost Free Date (AFFD)--April 15 here. If transplants go into the garden then, and they need 8 weeks to grow to that size, the seed packet goes into the folder marked Week 8, which, in my case, gives it a Feb. 18 sowing date. Onions need to be planted 12 weeks before setting out--on Jan. 1. This gets them ready for the garden 2 weeks before the AFFD, when they should be planted outdoors. (That's why I don't do onions from seed.)

5. Collect all the above supplies from their scattered storage or landing places. (Sigh. That dedicated potting shed would really be nice--as would built-in organizing powers.)

6. Hyperfocus on planting one or more days each week. Decide if the seeds should be direct-seeded outdoors. If the answer is no, proceed to the next step. First you empty the seed packet into a tiny flat, preferably white, dish--like the Japanese dipping sauce dishes we have an abundance of. Place each seed individually, in rows, unless they're so fine that breathing hard on them would scatter them into oblivion. Then you pinch as few as you can and drop them as precisely as possible, planning to thin later. Or you mix them with sugar or fine sand and spread them with a salt shaker--giving up on the rows. Don't cover any of the seeds that need light to germinate. You will need to research this, if you're planting flowers. Also, use the Jiffy-7s for any plants that do not tolerate transplanting. You will need to research this also. Figure out if there are special germination temperature requirements--like alternating day/night temps, cold treatment, extra warmth, etc. More research required. Pray that you don't get lots of seeds like pansies which require surface sowing and darkness to germinate. If the seeds cost 75 cents each, don't waste a single seed. Think Crambe (Sea Kale) or Purple Majesty Millet.

7. Label every single kind of thing you plant. Otherwise, you will forget. Don't use any writing method the sun will fade or the water will wash away. Wish you had enough money to buy all the ready-made labels you need. They even have a picture.

8. Set all the planted packs into the watering tub to absorb water till the surface of the soil is wet. Drain the excess water, and find an empty spot in the dining room for the flat, unless it needs the heating mat in the basement. Appropriate all your baking pans to catch drips, until the flats are dry enough to move to newspapers. Have plastic wrap ready to cover the flats if they've gone more than five days or so without sprouting. Tell then, they'll likely stay fairly moist.

9. Multiple times a day, check the planted packs in the dining room for signs of sprouting. At the first sign, hurry them to a spot under the lights. If you don't do this, the stem will elongate disgustingly and you'll end up with leggy plants. If you don't keep them in the dining room, you'll forget to check them, and they'll dry out and all the previous expense and effort will be wasted. The lights should be within inches of the sprouts.

10. Let the seedlings grow for several weeks, till they have several true leaves (as opposed to seedling leaves--which are usually quite different). Then transplant them into individual cells to grow on to planting-out size.

11. Water daily and fertilize weekly.

12. Find a way to grow them in a protected place outdoors when you run out of indoor space. I've used fiberglass calf hutches successfully, but I hate crawling into and stumbling out of them. Wish fervently for a proper greenhouse.

13. Move plants to the garden, or sell the plants to other gardeners who will never go to all this bother, but would like to have flowers for cutting, vegetable novelties--for beautiful colors or shapes, popping-good flavor, stellar nutritional qualities, well-adapted to local conditions, extraordinary keeping quality, etc.

14. Thank God for Hiromi's help this year, and pray for God's blessing on the project.

15. Pray that people will be understanding when you price your plants and seeds so that all this hard work will do more than pay for the materials cost.

If you're trying to figure out if growing from seeds is for you, and if you're not close enough to buy your plants from me, go ahead and try something--anything--and you will learn from it, and might even have wonderfully sturdy little plants to put in the garden when the time comes. Growing vegetables is relatively simple because nearly all of the seeds are reasonably large, most will germinate fairly quickly at room temperature, and they don't need light to germinate.

No matter what you do, rejoice in the miracle of life in a seed, and worship the God who created all life.

2 Comments:

  • Miriam,
    According to your materials list, #15, regular florescent bulbs will work in your "grow light"? My son & I had been discussing that recently, and I'd be glad to know one doesn't need to buy the more expensive Gro Bulbs.

    "Susanna's sister"

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 3/06/2009  

  • As I understand it, if you want to grow flowering plants under florescent lights, you will need to get a bulb that produces light from the red end of the spectrum. Regular bulbs are often mostly from the blue end. Grow bulbs probably contain both. You could put one blue and one red bulb in every two-bulb fixture and get virtually the same effect as using a grow light. I don't know which would cost more. Since I am not growing any of my plants to flowering size, the blue bulbs are fine, and cheaper than the other options.

    By Blogger Mrs. I, at 3/06/2009  

Post a Comment



<< Home