Sowing Seeds: A Guide to Starting and Planting Seeds

Enlarge Image Image Gallery "Sugar Snaps and Strawberries: Simple Solutions for Creating Your Own Small-Space Edible Garden" gives you the dirt on growing gorgeous organic food with very little square footage, from how to create and maintain healthy soil to deciding what and when to plant. Photo Courtesy Timber Press

The following is an excerpt from "Sugar Snaps and Strawberries: Simple Solutions for Creating Your Own Small-Space Edible Garden" by Andrea Bellamy (Timber Press, 2010). The excerpt is from Chapter 7: Sowing Seeds. 

Time to get your hands dirty. Starting seeds is easy. You just push a seed into the dirt, right? Sure, the how is simple, but the when requires a bit more thought.

Plant a seed too early, and cold temperatures will prevent it from germinating. Plant it too late, and it won’t have time to grow up and produce fruit before winter chills hit. Catching that planting window is the key to seed-starting success.

Of course, you don’t have to start all your edibles from seed: buying ready-to-plant veggies from the nursery does have its merits. Whichever route you choose, this chapter will teach you how to get your garden started.

Sowing Seeds 

I never fail to be amazed by seeds—or the incredible bounty that I can harvest from what began as tiny, shriveled specks. Some beginning gardeners regard seed starting with a healthy dose of fear, but the fact is, seeds are designed to survive, thrive, and eventually reproduce. We simply help them along by providing a little loving care.

Where to sow 

You can start seeds in two main ways: Start them indoors in little pots, to be transplanted outdoors once the time is right. Or plant them outdoors in the place you want them to grow and mature into their full-grown selves.

If planting them directly outdoors sounds easier, it is—at least for you. Starting seeds indoors can be more involved. But some vegetables, especially warm-season crops such as tomatoes, melons, eggplant, and peppers, need to be started indoors, because they require consistent warmth and a long growing season. In most climates (I’m not talking about you, California), by the time the soil is warm enough for their seeds to germinate outdoors, these plants won’t have time to produce a crop before chilly autumn temperatures roll around again. So we start them indoors, weeks before the last frost date, and then transplant them outdoors after temperatures warm up. Not all seeds can or should be started indoors, however. Some plants, notably root crops such as carrots and beets, do not like to be disturbed once they have, well, put down roots.