The turn of the calendar year means the arrival of seed catalogs in mailboxes and seed packets in the nursery. The time to plan is upon us and today we discuss how to decide which seeds are best for your garden.
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We’ve put together a little list of tips to help the novice gardener hoping to start sowing seeds this season. Good for you! You’ll find with a little effort, a lot of hope and dirty hands, you’ll get a lot of joy out of growing vegetables and flowers from seed.
Tips for beginning seed starters:
- Find your focus. What do you want grow to eat? What flowers do you want to see in your garden?
- Make your sowing calendar. Figure out the last and first frost dates and plan what to plant when accordingly. That sounds wildly intimidating to a beginning I know – so you can look up the frost dates and then look up sowing guidelines. Seed packets will almost always tell you when they should planted but you can find charts in books, online. But look now, the time to start is upon us!
- Figure out where you are going to sow your seeds – inside or outside. If you’ve never done it before – we suggest starting outside.
- Soil! We’ve talked about how important your soil is – seed starting mix is fantastic and we have an excellent option for you in our shop.
- Know your lighting situation. Figure out where you get the most sun, when a seed packet says the plant needs full sun, you need 6 hours of daylight – minimum. Some plants grow in part sun/shade and that means 3-6 hours of sun.
- Water – at first, your seeds will need frequent, shallow waterings, but as it grows, watering more deeply and less frequently will promote deep, strong roots.
- Keep a journal. Best intentions can easily be destroyed by real life so take notes, you might not remember the date you planted or the last time you watered but you can look it up if you write it down.
- Stay positive.
