Starting seeds indoors ?? what kind of containers

Gymgirl - that trick works with my son, but not my hubby. The former, unfortunately, still lives in Florida, the latter will just sit there and watch me do it!

Ugh..now I am even more confused.
I am hoping to plants seeds, for the first time, for my vegetable garden in the spring. I was going to use small paper cups and plant 2-3 seeds per cup. Now I see all these other ideas and am wondering if my method will be correct. I plan on having tomatoes (cherry and beefsteak), cucumbers, summer squash, and maybe some other veggies. Can someone tell me if my method would be ok to use? This will be my first time so i am lost. Theres a lot of information on the internet, almost too much information to grasp. (haha)

One more thing....I will need to transplant the seedlings in April, so when should I start planting the seeds?

This message was edited Jan 21, 2011 10:07 AM

Melissa_in_sc:
The paper cups aren't working. As bookerc1 experienced -- and I am now -- the paper cups turn all weird and yucky and moldy in short order. Use plastic.

As for when to start seeds, find out your last frost date and then go to this webpage. Plug in that date and you'll get the seed-starting dates for each veggie. Very handy site:

http://www.johnnyseeds.com/e-PDGSeedStart.aspx?source=SeedCalcGrowGuide

Hope this helps!
LiseP

Melissa,
This is how I did mine. I counted backwards 6-8 weeks from my intended transplant date of the week of February 19th, which put me at the weekend of January 8th (I chose the 6 week timeframe, because I have a short growing window and couldn't wait the additional two weeks). In order to meet that 2/19 target, I had to sow seeds by that weekend. Pull out your calendar, and you can follow my timeframe. I calculated this way:
►I sowed my tomato seeds on Monday, January 10th
►It took approximately the first week for the tomatoes to come up (they burst out on Sunday, January 16th, and most all were up by Tuesday, Jan 18th)
►Today (end of week #1 + 4 more days...), I noticed a good number of the seedlings have their 1st set of true leaves; the rest will have one set by mid-week next week)
►I'll start potting them up to 16 oz solo cups once most all of them have 1 true leaf and are going into their 2nd true leaf (probably by the 24th, the end of week #2). I'll pot them only halfway down in the cup, and add potting mix as the seedling grows taller. I'll also move the cups to a cooler room to slow down their growth rate and make them get robust and sturdy.
►Weeks 3-5 will be "hurry up and grow to a safe size for hardening off!"
►End of Week 5 (Jan 14th) will start the field trips outside to harden them off
►End of week 5 + 5 more days (February 19th!), Transplanting outside begins. "Sink or swim, you're heading out to the garden, guys!"
►I won't plant them all out on the 19th. Only the most robust ones that are truly ready to make a stand. I'll stagger the others out as they become better prepared for the garden.
►My entire plant out window for tomatoes is from February 19th to March 19th, so some seedlings will be 9 weeks + 5 days by March 19th.

See how it goes? (for me, at least )

So, there's my plan. Hope it helps you out. Holler if you need more questions or advice (not that mine is the best, but I'm listening)

Linda ^^_^^ (rejoicing because her seedlings have 1 true leaf today!)

For those of you that are using plastic cups. I've found Dollar General to be the cheapest place to buy them and their house brand seems to be as good as any other semi-transparent cup.
I've also found the easiest way to put a drain hole in them is to take the stack out of the package and place it top down on a bench or something. Take a power drill with a bit around a quarter of an inch and drill as far as the bit will go into the stack, grab some of the cups off the stack and repeat. As long as there is a cup on top of the stack that has a hole in it you know that you haven't missed one and if there are 3 or 4 that works too. I can do a couple of hundred a minute this way.

Hey Melissa,
Slight schedule adjustment. After careful examination last night I have some robust Black Krim seedlings that are working like gangbusters and are putting on 2nd true leaves already.

Consequently, I will start teasing these out of the community flat to their own individual 16 oz. Red plastic Solo Cup.

So, today marks the end of week #1 + 5 days (or, 12 days).

Linda

Last year, we bought a bag of 500 solo cups at Sam's. I haven't even made a dent in them!! LOL

I picked up some of the Dollar Store cups today. They also had some nifty 72-cell seed-starter trays there, with bottom tray and domed lid for $4. It seemed like a good price so I caved and
bought one. And then I went nuts and planted 48 tomato seeds in it, as well as some broccoli -- where the heck would I ever put 48 tomato plants? But as sucky as I am at getting seeds to grow, I figured it was good to hedge my bets and I want at least one of 8 different varieties to actually plant in the ground. LOL

I got 90 seedlings to pot up and find a place for...

Personally, I don't care for the cell-trays because it's hard to remove seedlings without disturbing their roots. With individual 3oz cups holding one seedling each, they don't suffer "transplant shock" when setting outside if handled carefully.

I plant 2 seeds per cup. Whichever one I decide to thin, I use cuticle scissors to cut it off rather than pulling it out. When you pull out a seedling, it disturbs everything and you run the risk of pulling up both seedlings.

I'm planting today, btw!!

I just found the 3oz plastic cups at Target yesterday after checking two grocery stores. I got a bag of 80 green for around $2.50. Now just need to order my heat mat and stop by the big box hardware store for a shop light. Plus, the dollar tree for trays with lids (thanks for that tip!)

Very excited! The first weekend in February is the big seed exchange, so I should have all my seeds after that. Between leftovers of my small garden last year, freebies from friends, and this event, I will not have to purchase seeds at all this year!

Kindlekat - I'm so glad you found the cups. I've had mine for several years. I have a shop light that needs replacing, and am toying with the idea of purchasing three more so I can have three on each shelf instead of two.

I'm seeing a BIG difference between using one Lite kit (2 bulbs) per shelf vs. 2 kits per shelves (4 Bulbs).

My seedlings look stronger and have 2 true leaves already. Time to pot up.

Gymgirl - my shelves are wide enough for at least three kits, which means I'll have 6 tubes per shelf. I plan to start many more seeds indoors this year seeing as I'm "unemployed" - I've decided growing more vegetables is my "job" description for this year (LOL)

HoneybeeNC,
With the sorry, common, tomato seedling stock I saw on the Big Box shelves for sale last year ($$), you could very well start down a new path of employment!

Melissa:
Got my 16 oz cups clipped and sterlized for potting up tonight. I used a pair of Corona "snips" with the red padded handles to snip the bottoms of the cups for drainage. Works like a charm, especially since I couldn't find my real scissors with a point vs. the one's from the $ store that are purely for decoration...

I sterilized the cups in a hot bath with Lemon Ajax, Bleach, and Listerine (blue) added, and a hot rinse. They are well sterilized...and my seedlings are just about jumping outta the community flat and deep cell trays!

I need strength...

Gymgirl - my neighbor suggested I set up a veggie stand on the corner - of course he was only joking.

I have four neighbors that I share "extras" with. One neighbor just brought over some homemade black bean soup for our dinner tonight. This summer she'll bring her basket, and go home with lots of tomatoes, onions and garlic.

My daughter still works for the same company I was laid off from - she has already offered to take in tomatoes and sweet potatoes for the team there.

Here's a link to the website she creates and updates daily...

http://classicahomes.com/

This thread is a little old, and cold, but it's a snow day here so I had time for catching up.

I plant my tomatoes and peppers in the "Jiffy 7" peat pellets. I have the plastic trays and lids from several years ago, and I buy refill pellets every year. I soak the pellets with hot water, then pour off any extra after about an hour. I keep the seeds covered with the lid until most have sprouted, leaving a pencil under one corner of the top, to allow a little fresh air. The seeds are sprouted on a heat mat that is sized for two standard nursery trays, under a set of two florescent fixtures on a PVC pipe frame.

When the seedlings are big enough to transplant, I move to 3.5-inch "disposable" plastic pots that I've been using for a couple of years. They are the perfect size to fit 18 plants per tray. I like the pellets since they make it very easy to handle and transplant the seedlings with little or no shock. I do remove the net mesh from the pellets when I transplant. If there are two seedlings in one pellet I often cut the pellet in half, between the seedlings, and plant each seedling in it's own pot.

Those trays go onto a wire rack that has florescent lights mounted with chains, to easily adjust the height. For those shelves, I have 3 fixtures (6 bulbs) per shelf. Depending on how many plants I have, The flats can go lengthwise under the lights (2 per shelf) or across the shelf ( 4 per shelf). If the plant flats are perpendicular to the lights, the outside row of plants get slightly less light--but seem to do okay.

The photo below shows the light stand with the 3-5-inch pots, and an inset of the juffy-7 peat pellets. I use colored toothpicks with stripes to code for each type of seedling. I mark the code (green-3 for example) on each seed packet.

David

I don't know if any of you would be interested but this website has a great little tool which makes the seed bed out of the potting materials. http://www.soilcube.com/

Interesting idea, bigdaddyT. How did you find out about it? Have you tried it?

There are some other threads around Daves talking about the soil cubes. There's a website, soilblocks.com that provides information. There's also information at Johhnyseeds.com. You can find quite a bit if you Google 'soil block maker'.

I have order one but not tried it yet. Heard the inventor speak on thesurvivalpodcast and went to his website. It looked interesting and so I am gonna give it a try.

dreaves - that's a nice set-up. My shelves are wooden, and I need to add more shop lights.

David,
That IS a nice setup. Are those the huge shelves from Sam's/Costco?

SUH-WEET!

I've been looking at buying a soil-block maker too! What a coincidence that I wander back over here, and y'all are talking about it! For when I pot-up, seemed they might hold up better than newspaper pots...

I found out about them by seeing them in catalogs, but at hundreds of $$ they seemed too expensive...
Now I find one that makes 4 at a time for only around $40! I found the best explanation of them here:
http://urbanhomestead.org/journal/2010/06/29/summer-soil-blocking/

Still on the fence about whether or not to buy one, but I need to make the decision soon!
Also, got my seed starting setup, set up this past weekend. Will post pictures once the celery (only thing I can plant now) starts to sprout!
~Kristen

Hey Kindlekat... thanks for posting the link about 'soil blocks' very interesting. I like the idea of 'no plastic' containers... hmmnnn.... need to think about this idea.

I've made the newspaper pots (until my dog ate the pot maker (sigh) but to be honest they were squishy and fell apart easily and were hard to keep together when they got wet. The bottoms kept falling out. The soil block sounds interesting. But what keeps the blocks from crumbling when they get wet? I picture the blocks all falling apart and falling into each other and just becoming a tray of dirt, not blocks. Let me know how they work out.

I'm also interested in the soil blocks. I wonder if you could make them in balls instead of blocks & insert the seed inside the ball. Then when you are ready for them to sprout, just water it. I have heard of these balls, but they usually were made up of flower seeds.

Hi behillman. I didn't make seed balls, but I did make a "blob" by just packing a Solo cup with my seed starter mix (moistened quite a bit) and dumping it out into a tray -- like making sand castles as kids. I made a few and planted some Swiss chard seeds. They seem to work okay, so far. Here's a photo.

http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/fp.php?pid=8390393

muttlover, you do have to water carefully. I just put a trickle of water on the top if it seemed dry but mostly just put some water in the bottom of the tray, but not so much that they would just sit in water for too long. One blob did threaten to topple once but I just patted it back and it's been okay. My only problem is that I planted a couple of seeds in each, rather than just one. Now I have to decide whether to just clip the extra seedling or try to do the repotting thing - which kind of defeats one of the purposes of using seed blocks, which was/is to eliminate transplant shock.

LiseP,
This season, I successfully separated 208 tomato seedlings with NO transplant shock, or damping off...

Linda, you're my hero!

Uh-uh...you're MY hero!

So, how much are you planting on this gorgeous weekend? We've got a great 10-day forecast ahead, too. I'll be sifting pine bark all night long...

I just set out another dozen beet transplants, and emptied one of the compost bins. Looks as though I'll be picking daffodils this weekend. I smell spring in the air. YAY!

Well I have to work 8-5 tomorrow and I'm not sure how much time Mark will have to work out in the garden patch getting it ready, so we may not get much accomplished.

Finally got celery started! (The only thing I can start for now).

So, I wanted to show you my set-up / containers since so many of you influenced what I ended up with. Yay seed starting!

Aaaaand one more. These are the 2oz solo cups with a hole drilled in them, sitting in a cake pan from the dollar store so they will self-water. Also, there is a plastic lid that goes on top to keep moisture in during germination, but it wasnt on when I took the picture.

congratulations, Kat!

Good job!!

Kindlekat - I think you will find this will work well for you, it's very similar to the set-up I've been using for several years. The cups look larger than 2oz though.

I gave up using aluminum trays because they tended to get holes in them.

Looks good, Kindlekat! It is so rewarding to see those little green sprouts poking their noses out!