Seed Starting for Your Garden
Learn when and the proper way to start seeds to plant in your garden this year. This is an invaluable skill that all homesteaders should know and at least try. Food security is vital and something you won’t ever regret having in your arsenal.
Why should I Start seeds?
There are many benefits to starting your own seeds for a backyard garden. For example, you know how the seeds were grown and there won’t be any doubts of use of pesticides or insecticides. You can control how many plants you want. My biggest reason is that starting seeds is much cheaper than buying starts from a nursery.
Now, I’m not knocking that route and sometimes given the circumstances it’s a better way to go. I have purchased starts from the store many times and had great success. I find that starting your own seeds also gives a sense of pride and accomplishment. Those little seeds are like your babies, and you helped them grow and mature into a thriving plant to produce food for your family.
Supplies Needed for Seed Starting
Some things are needed to ensure you have some good string seedlings. It won’t cost much, and you can use them year after year if you take care of them. I’ll list some of what I use but if you’re on a budget you can get the roasting pans (with lids) from the dollar store, and they work perfectly. You can use toilet paper rolls (cut in half) to hold your seedlings and the cardboard will breakdown into compost when planted. The lid with the roasting pan is a must to help with germination of your seeds. It creates a mini greenhouse effect form them.
I also like to use the cell trays (like these) for starting my flowers in. They have a tray underneath to help hold water to the base of the plant and usually come with a lid also. You’ll want to grab a bag of seed starting mix to fill your trays with.
Now, other than that you should be good to go! Provide a warm space with some sunshine and keep the soil moist (not soaking wet) to provide good germination and watch God do his work.
Extra Supplies for Seed Starting (not a must have)
Now some people have a larger budget to work with and if you are really planning to put forth some extra money you can buy items to make things a little more coinvent for you. These are things like:
- A heating pad for seedlings
- Grow lights
- Shelves for all the seedlings
Like I said, these are definitely not necessary to have a successful garden. You can have a successful garden with some seed starting soil, a container to hold your dirt, seeds and some water. BAM! you’re in business.
What Seeds Should I Start?
I would recommend sitting down and making a list of anything you’re interested in growing. Then make note of what your family loves to eat and go from there. It’s easy to get excited about growing things but you don’t want to wasteful if it’s something you and your family truly won’t eat. You can also learn to preserve your harvest to have and eat on all year long so it doesn’t go to waste by learning to can and water-bath can, dehydrate or freeze dry items.
You know your family best and what they like to eat and that’s what I would start growing.
Planning for Seed Starting
Having a successful garden does take some planning in advanced to give the seedling time they need to fully mature and produce a harvest. You’ll want to look up your last frost date and your first frost date according to what zone you’re in.
This will determine when you can plant store-bought seedlings outside or when to start your seeds indoors. You won’t plant anything until there is no longer any danger of frost and the soil is loose enough to work.
I have the perfect Seed Starting Planner for your Garden. It is a FREE resource for you to use to help ensure you have the best gardening season yet!
Easily plan what you’ll plant with a check list and the plotting chart for where to plant your seeds. Sometimes it can be confusing remembering what seeds are where unless you label well. I also have a plot chart to allow you to label as a backup. A list of tools that may be helpful for the garden season will also come in handy.
https://thevalleyfarmhouse.ck.page/642263acf6
The best thing about this Seed Starting Planning is that it is totally customizable to you and your needs for your garden. Even if you buy seedlings instead of starting your own seeds you can still make use of your planner!
If you aren’t sure about gardening yet you can check out my other posts on gardening linked below.