Plant Care Articles

Today’s gardener has many options for planting new plants in the garden.  Plants can be purchased as bare roots, rooted cuttings, plugs, in pots…and the list goes on.  None of these planting options, however, brings the gardener closer to nature than by starting your garden from seed.  It is how nature has done it for millennia.  It is also how our ancestors started their gardens and farms as they shifted towards a more agrarian lifestyle.  The modern gardener should be no different.  Not only is planting seeds in soil reminiscent of our history as a species, but there are some more tangible reasons why using seeds to start a garden makes sense.  Seeds are generally less expensive to purchase than buying whole plants.  Many seeds can be stored for long periods of time.  Since seeds are fairly compact and lightweight, transporting them is much simpler.  It is more difficult to maneuver a car when there is a half-grown tree hanging out the trunk as opposed to having a packet of seeds in a shirt pocket.  Starting from seeds also allows gardeners in colder climates to “begin” their garden indoors before the seedlings can be transplanted in an outside garden as the weather begins to warm.

There are many reasons why a gardener would opt to grow from seeds, but the real question is…is growing from seeds difficult?  In short, the answer is no, however, there are tricks of the trade that optimize this process.  Additionally, these methods require many items that the gardener may find around his or her house.  It is important to note that some seeds require special attention in order to grow.  Some seeds need to be physically damaged, given a period of cold temperatures, or even soaked in water for several days.  For the sake of this article, it is assumed that the seeds being used require no special treatment other than being covered by a light layer of soil and given some water.  Seeds such as beans or marigold seeds do not require any special treatments.

The following is a list of items that a gardener would need to get started…

• Seeds
• A 1-gallon zip lock plastic bag
• A plastic drinking cup (Even better would be a plastic pot that is roughly the size of a drinking cup)
• Enough soil to fill that plastic drinking cup (It is important to have soil that is very airy.  Potting soil, vermiculite or perlite would all be suitable for the task).
• A window sill
• Water
• Sand (this is optional though)

1. After all the items have been collected, the first step would be to cut small holes in the bottom of the plastic drinking cup.  The holes should be small enough to prevent all of the soil from falling out of the cup, but they should also be large enough to allow for adequate drainage.

2. Fill the plastic cup with soil so that there is one inch of space at the top of the cup.  Lightly firm the soil by either tapping the cup or packing it down with your fingers or the bottom of another plastic cup.  (It is important that the firming of the soil is done very lightly.  Compact soils are incapable of providing the seeds with sufficient oxygen, which is drastically needed when starting seeds.  Also, it is important that the soil is slightly packed to allow for adequate moisture retention that will allow water to wick up the soil column).

3. Soak the soil with water so that the soil is completely moist.  Allow all excess water to drain out of the cup, but be sure that all parts of the soil are still holding onto some moisture.
  
4. Bury multiple seeds in the soil.  (The size of the seeds dictates how deep you can bury the seeds.  Larger seeds can be buried deeper than smaller seeds.  Small seeds have less stored energy available to them to grow through dark layers of soil, where little light is available for growth.  Larger seeds have more stored energy available for growing through the dark soil).

If the starter seeds being used are rather small (see the above photo for scale), scatter them on top of the soil.  It would also be best to cover them with a thin layer of sand (sand can be purchased at most garden centers).  The thin layer of sand will keep light away from the seeds, while at the same time providing a layer that the seeds can easily push through to reach the light after germination.

5. Place the plastic drinking cup in the zip lock bag and place them on a window sill that gets some direct light during the day.  Fill the zip lock bag with water until there is about one inch of water at the base of the plastic cup.  Do not close the zip lock bag.
  
6. Wait (this is the hard step).
 
7. When the cup is filled with multiple seedlings and the seedlings are large enough to handle, they should be pricked out.  The seedlings are large enough to handle when the first leaves can be easily grasped between your thumb and index finger.  Pricking out the seedlings prevents overcrowding in the small area of the plastic drinking cup.  The fewer the seedlings the stronger each one will be.  To prick out, first squeeze the plastic cup from all sides to break up the soil.  The use of light and airy soil helps with this process.  Each seedling that is pricked out should be handled by their leaves and not the stem.  Lightly grasp a leaf and gently pull the seedling from the soil.  Use a knife or pencil or anything that is thin and can break up the soil around the seedling as you pull out the seedlings.  These removed seedlings are now ready to be transplanted into larger containers.  They are most likely not at the stage of development where they can be transplanted into their permanent locations.

8. Return the newly spaced out plants (the original cup and the pricked-out seedlings) to their original position on the window sill.

9. Check the water level in the zip lock bag.  Fill it to the previous level (one inch from the bottom).

10. When the seedling are large enough to move to separate pots or outdoors, again, prick out the seedlings gently, and then transplant them.

The average gardener should find these methods very useful.  The more advanced gardeners probably want to know more about the different techniques and special treatments needed to get other than your average seeds to germinate, which is a follow-up article.

Starting plants from seeds may stir up some ancestral emotions which remind us of how we as farmers used to live.  There truly is something to getting your hands dirty while caring for a living, growing plant that started out as a single seed.  Besides all of these more abstract reasons to plant seeds, there is some very fundamental and appreciable logic to it as well.  Growing from seeds is almost always the least expensive method of starting plants and it is rather easy to do once you know how.