Here in Southwestern PA, the last couple of months have been a weather roller-coaster. We've had everything from 60° and sunny to -12° and icy. I don't know about you, but I sure am ready for sunshine, longer days, and warmer weather.
This time of year I always start to get anxious and tend to jump ahead of myself (and Mother Nature!) on my spring planting. The feed stores and hardware stores have started stocking seeds and growing supplies, and I find it so hard to avoid jumping in headlong and getting started right away. I just keep reminding myself that plants started indoors this time of year will outgrow their pots far too soon and it will still be too cold to move them outside by the time they do.
In the past, that has been one of my biggest gardening challenges: waiting until the right time. I will be the first to admit that I get a bit over zealous sometimes and in my excitement, I put the cart before the horse. One of my own personal gardening goals has been to be able to grow my own food from seed to produce without having to purchase started seedlings. While most people will opt for the convenience and ease of purchasing started plants, I've always felt that I could finally call myself a true farmer (gardener... farmdener?) when I am finally able to grow food from seed successfully.
I've reached a point where I can say that I am successful with growing certain crops from seed, but my biggest challenge has remained with the garden staples: tomatoes and peppers. There are a few reasons why I feel the need to master these particular veggies. First, the simple fact that I have been completely unsuccessful in growing them from seed after approximately 6 years of trying. At this point, it has become a vendetta. ;) The second reason is purely economical. Every year when I give in and buy started heirloom tomatoes and peppers, I cringe at the total the cashier gives me. Organic, heirloom seedlings can range from $3-$5 each depending on how rare the variety is and whether or not you can get them locally. That price can raise astronomically if you have them shipped in. (And of course, that risks damage to delicate plants!) Starting seedlings on my own could not only save significant money, but would also ensure that the plants are grown in a truly organic manner, and that they will be adapted to the unique micro-climate around my homestead. Additionally, any surplus started plants can be shared or sold to others thereby increasing the savings over the cost of purchasing commercially available starts. Finally, from a preparedness standpoint, the more plants that I know I can successfully grow from seed, the more I can expand my seed bank and ensure that I can provide food should the Zombie Apocalypse come. (Hey... growing food and making clothes are going to be important skills when it does come! )
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| Careful planning yields the best harvest! |
To date, I have tried various seed starting kits, levels of fertilizer, soil mixtures, and lighting schemes without much luck. I always seem to get the plants off to a good start by ensuring my seeds are viable and providing the proper germination warmth and light. t aalHowever, i seems to go south when the little plantlings work towards growing their first set of true-leaves. That is the point where disaster typically strikes. There have been different setbacks over the years, including spilled seed trays, starter soil that grew mold, a cat that sat on top of the germination greenhouse thereby squashing the tender little plants, and accidental drying-out as a result of an over-zealous heater in the same room as the seedlings. However, the number one reason I have been unsuccessful in growing tomatoes and peppers from seed remains that the seedlings always seem to start off great but then they get tall and spindly, touch the top of the greenhouse, collapse, wilt, and die.
I've done a lot of reading on this particular issue and I have pinned it down to two possible issues with my seed growing setup. 1.) Potential lack of nutrients in the starting soil mixture, or 2.) Not enough light.
To address issue 1, I'm going to mix up my own starter soil this year. Typically, seed starting greenhouses you can purchase at your local hardware or gardening store come with little disc-pellets that you pour hot water over and they expand. These are made either of peat or coconut fiber. While they are a great, light texture that allows even delicate seeds to take root, they have the major pitfall of being extremely nutrient deficient. Think about it this way, peat comes from bogs. Carnivorous plants evolved to eat insects as a result of living in boggy, largely nutrient poor soils (like peat!). The plants eat bugs in order to get the nutrition that they cannot absorb from the medium that they grow in. Therefore, while being a great starter medium, the little peat or coconut fiber pellets really do not provide enough nutrients to sustain a seedling to full growth without the addition of fertilizer or repotting the seedling very early. The problem with trying to repot early is that the seedlings will be very fragile. It is extremely easy to accidentally bend the stem of a young plant and once that is done, the damage is often irreversible. In addition, young plants often have very delicate, hair-thin root systems that do not respond well to being damaged or disturbed, and plants transplanted too early will often not be able to rebound from even slight damage. So, my plan is to mix my seed starting soil using 3 components in order to ensure that the mix is light to promote root growth, to ensure that the mix has enough nutrients to support growing seedlings, and to ensure that there is proper moisture retention so that the seeds neither drown nor dry out. I'm thinking a mixture of 1/3 peat, 1/3 compost, and 1/3 vermiculite should do the trick nicely.
As to issue 2, I have made an investment in a professional quality grow light. In the past, I have tried everything from putting the greenhouses in a sunny window (which resulted in the cat-squashing-seedlings incident), to attempting to start seedlings under inexpensive fluorescent fixtures available from the housewares department of Wal-Mart. None of my attempts have been 100% successful thus far. Last year, I did make some good progress (which you can see if you visit the Happy Spring post from March of 2013) with a few varieties of pepper and tomatoes, until the aforementioned accidental dry-out incident. Although some seedlings did grow rather well and were starting to shape up nicely into healthy baby plants, a large majority of the plants we started got leggy and spindly and seemed to struggle in general. We did notice, though, that the plants closest to the single fluorescent bulbs that we hung above each of the shevles in our growing area turned out the strongest while the ones further from the light stretched towards it and were not as robust. In an effort to try to provide more intense light, I purchased a 2 foot long light fixture designed for hydroponic growing that is outfitted with four T5 full spectrum fluorescent tubes. Now, I've read arguments for both sides of the issue. Plenty of people report being able to start seedlings successfully under plain old fluorescent shop-light tubes, while others swear by the T5 full spectrum tubes. My theory is that the full spectrum will be an added benefit, but the bigger benefit will be more evenly distributed light with a higher intensity than the little tubes we had tried to use in the past. An interesting future experiment would potentially be to rig up a similarly sized shop-light fixture and test both rigs for starting plants in the same conditions.
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| Like the sun... only smaller! ;) |
With these new insights, I hope to finally be able to conquer my personal challenge of growing tomatoes and peppers from seed to fruit. Now if I can just find a way to keep the deer out of the vegetable patches, I'll be on my way to being a super-productive farmer! ;)
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