Rob's Rants

Almost two weeks ago I started my seeds for this year’s garden. I just updated the table in that post with the dates for the potatoes I just planted along with some sprout dates, etc.

I also thought I’d record a bit about how I started the seeds this year.

One glance at the table will show you that Johnny’s Selected Seeds is my primary source for vegetable, herb, and flower seeds. For the record, I have no affiliation with them, receive no free stuff, and don’t even get a discount. But when I find a local company that has a great inventory, excellent service, and a lot of knowledge they are willing to share, I am happy to promote them. In the sever or so years I’ve been ordering from them they have never messed up an order. And all of their seeds are top quality and I swear I get nearly a 100% germination rate on everything I plant.

Now, about how I start my seeds.

I start everything on a table in my basement under a single, double-tube fluorescent grow light, and on top of warming mats. Most of this equipment came from my parents’ house after my Dad gave up gardening a decade ago so I have no idea where much of it came from. I suspect Gardener’s Supply, but I can’t be sure. The light frame holds two flats with a little room in between. The flats are suspended over the heat mats by about one inch.

In the flats I usually use peat pots for the seeds, but this year I switched to Cow Pots, which I first saw on an episode of Dirty Jobs in the Discovery Channel. Again, these are made locally to me in Connecticut, and they promise to solve a problem I’ve always had.

Peat pots promise to degrade when planted, but they simply never do. Honestly, I’ve planted them with seedlings in them, had a mediocre garden, then pulled up the plants at the end of the season only to find a nearly intact pot still attached. In fact, I have little pieces of peat pots that I’ve torn up and thrown onto the garden and they still come up in identifiable pieces two and even three years after I’ve dropped them there. So, for the last few years I’ve started my plants either directly in flats or in peat pots which I tear off the seedlings and compost separately. Cow Pots claim to degrade much better and not bind the plant roots. This is good. I intend to put them to the test.

But my first experiences with them have been positive. I suggest you check out their web site and give them a try.

For soil, I’m not too fussy. I usually grab a couple of bags of whatever Lowe’s has on sale at the beginning of the season. I fill the pots, plant the seeds, and let the go for a week or two. I will often plant four to six seeds per small pot and then thin down to one or two after a couple of weeks. Keep them watered and everything should be fine.

My Grow Light Setup

I do keep my grow light adjusted to just a few inches above the seedlings so they don’t get too leggy, and it is on a times so it’s on for 18 hours and off for 6. Then I just keep the flats watered.

After about a month (which would be around May 10th) I move the flats outside to a stand-up cold frame/mini greenhouse that holds about 4 full flats. I’ll give them a couple of weeks there to adjust to the natural sunlight and temperatures. Then it’s into the soil.

This system has served me well for many years. After that first round of plants makes it into the soil I will often start my second round of late summer plants like watermelon and pumpkins, as well as a second round of things like lettuce and basil. These I will often start in the outdoor cold frame, but occasionally inside if we’re having a very cool summer.

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, last summer’s weather was absolutely awful for gardeners in New England. After a slow growing season from unseasonably cool and cloudy weather, a Late Blight epidemic simply swamped most of the tomato and potato crop.

I was happy to see that my favorite seed supplier, Johnny’s Selected Seeds posted an article on their blog specifically dealing with this subject.

Among their recommendations is one I wish more people would heed:

Grow or purchase tomato seedlings that are healthy — do not purchase or plant any seedlings that have disease symptoms.

I can not stress this enough. There is speculation that the Late Blight epidemic was fostered by contaminated tomato seedlings distributed through stores like WalMart, Home Depot and Lowes. As a New York Times article on the subject said:

Professor Fry, who is genetically tracking the blight, said the outbreak spread in part from the hundreds of thousands of tomato plants bought by home gardeners at Wal-Mart, Lowe’s, Home Depot and Kmart stores starting in April. The wholesale gardening company Bonnie Plants, based in Alabama, had supplied most of the seedlings and recalled all remaining plants starting on June 26.

Ultimately, the tomatoes I so carefully grew from seedlings in my basement, from seeds of varieties I specially selected, were wiped out by people who just bought some diseased crap from whatever store they happened to be shopping in. Please — if you’re too lazy to start your own vegetables from seed, at least buy your plants from some reputable local nursery (Mahoney’s Garden Centers in Massachusetts always have a great variety of vegetables that they grow themselves in varieties selected to specifically to grow well in Massachusetts).

After last year, I tried to pick up any fruit that was laying around and I burned it. Then I burned the vines that had dried over winter. I will be planting a variety of plum tomato called Juliet which has always been fairly disease resistant in the past, along with an heirloom variety called Brandywine. And I have my copper-based fungicide ready to go, because I’m sure my neighbors weren’t as careful to burn all their exposed plants like I was so I know there is a reservoir of Late Blight waiting to pounce. We can only hope that it’s a dry, sunny summer.

Additionally, I have used a drip irrigation system for the last 5 years to prevent leaving my plants with wet leaves more than the natural rain does. So as long as we have a regular rainfall schedule this summer, I should be in good shape.

Good luck to all gardeners out there.