Yesterday I told a charming and entirely not boring story about how I came around to starting many of my own seedlings for the garden.

Today I’m going to show you how to start your own seeds. Begin heirloom tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and more from seed, all from the comfort of your home or garage. This post will cover how to select a growing medium and containers to start your seeds in, how to plant the seeds, how to ensure your young seedlings get enough light, and how to care for your seedlings once they’ve sprouted.

1. containers

You can begin seeds in almost anything. People use egg cartons, yogurt containers, reused greenhouse containers.

I’m partial to the greenhouse containers and those nifty “72 plant” greenhouse kits sold in any major store. The kits come with growing medium, usually in the form of dried peat pellets in each cell, a waterproof tray, and a passive continuous watering system. The watering system could just be the cells sitting in water in the tray or in the form of an absorbent pad that the cells sit on, while the pad dips over the sides into the water and wicks it up.

If you aren’t starting that many seeds (though you’ll be surprised how many you do start, once you start getting into it), the 8-cell peat pots are great as well. The bonus to starting in peat is that you don’t need to get the seedling out to plant — just plant it pot and all. The downside to peat pots, I’ve found, is that they sometimes begin to disintegrate long before you plan to put it in the ground, making moving the peat cells careful work.

A nifty kit my aunt gave me has a heater you place the containers on. It’s a flat, plastic pad that, when plugged in, holds a steady temperature around 70 degrees. It’s certainly not necessary, but if you’re sprouting seeds in a chilly or drafty area, it can be a great help. I can attest from personal experience that using this heating element, which kept the soil at a steady warm temperature, resulted in quick, reliable sprouting.

2. growing medium

Don’t use potting soil. It’s too spongy and doesn’t hold moisture well enough to nurture along young seedlings.

Do use specially-labeled growing mix. This comes in bags, pellets, or my favorite incarnation:

The peat brick.

Moisten your growing medium as instructed on its packaging, and fill the cells of your containers with it, if necessary. Many seed-starting kits come with peat pellets in each cell already, making the process extra simple.

3. lighting

A sunny window is not the best place to grow seedlings. Sun can’t hurt, but it’s nowhere near enough light for young plants. If you do not provide supplemental light, your seedlings will become tall and “leggy,” as they push themselves to grow tall quickly to reach for more light. They’ll also be sad. Don’t let your plants be sad.

Set up one or two sets of standard fluorescent tube lights, and hang them directly over your seed trays. Don’t bother turning them on until seeds germinate; they don’t care about light when they’re underground. Once sprouted, however, adjust the lights to be only a few inches away from the seedlings, and keep the lights on 18 hours a day. You can use a timer to automate the lights. I use the “Okay, I woke up, turn the lights on” and “Okay, I’m going to bed, turn the lights off” method, but that’s because the seeds are in my bedroom.

Regular fluorescent bulbs are just fine. No need for special “daylight spectrum” bulbs.

4. planting your seeds

Now it’s time to get those seeds into the dirt!

Use the tip of a pencil to tame tiny seeds. Press the pencil tip into the moistened growing medium, and then press gently against a seed. The seed will adhere to the pencil tip, and you can press it into the soil. It’s much easier to plant this way than trying to use our giant fingers!

Don’t plant seeds too deeply. As a rule of thumb, the smaller the seed, the shallower it wants to be in the ground. Tiny seeds like basil and tarragon should be virtually atop the soil, with perhaps the lightest dressing over them. You don’t want to make the sprouting seedling have to work to hard to get to the light.

Put at least 2 seeds in each cell, and thin once they have sprouted.

Once you’ve planted your seeds, cover the tray(s) with the lid provided, if using a kit, or cover with plastic wrap. A moist, warm environment is catnip for seeds. Once the seeds have sprouted, remove all coverings: now they need to breathe.

5. caring for your seedlings

Now it’s the waiting game.

• Keep the fluorescent lights 2-4 inches from the growing seedlings. They need LOTS of light. Don’t pull the light too far away.

• Keep the growing medium moist. I prefer passive watering systems that allow the soil to wick water from below, as described above, but if you must water from overhead, use a mister or fine sprayer. Don’t dump water on the seedlings. You wouldn’t enjoy having buckets of water dumped on you!

• Thin as necessary, particularly if newly sprouted seedlings were too tiny to be able to pull out one by one.

• It’s so easy to over-fertilize that I don’t recommend fertilizing young seedlings at all.

• Touch your seedlings and talk to them. Okay, talking is optional, but aren’t they just so cute that they beg to be talked to? Touching them, and/or setting a fan nearby at low speed to blow across them, helps to strengthen them in preparation for the outdoors.

These are the tips I’ve picked up from experience. I hope you find them helpful and that everyone who reads this begins some plants of their own from seed!

Three years ago, I discovered an amazing heirloom tomato variety entirely by accident, one that I’ve grown both with great success — that first year — and terrible failure— last year, which was too cold for tomato growing.

I had gone to a litte no-name greenhouse just outside of town. We call it Werner’s but to be brutally honest, I’m not even sure that’s its name or the name of the people who own. it. To get there, you turn from the state highway into a tree-choked, winding, rutted dirt drive, and follow that claustrophobic ribbon about 1/8 of a mile until it dead ends at the greenhouse complex.

There, the land opens up a bit to reveal a rustic wood shed with a few large U-tube greenhouses next to it. Once inside, there’s also a greenhouse attached to the shed, which is a display/checkout area. It’s in this greenhouse behind the shed that I was first truly exposed to heirloom tomatoes. The walls were lined with vegetable and herb plants, and the center tables held dozens of varieties or more of tomato plants alone.

Overwhelmed, I asked the helpful owner for assistance. I wanted some plum/paste, and could she recommend a good eating tomato? She led me to Amish paste, which I’m going to tell you right now was a disappointment, but more about that in a later post, but she also led me to pink brandywine, also known as Sudduth’s brandywine.

That summer was nearly perfect for tomatoes. I put the brandywines and Amish pastes and a few other varieties in the ground and watched them grow. And grow they did, to nearly six feet tall, thanks to their round cages made of concrete reinforcing wire. And let me tell you —

Those pink brandywines were the best tomatoes I’d ever tasted. Gigantic — two pounds if they were an ounce — and fleshy and with a rich, complex flavor. It’s difficult to describe the flavor any better because the memory has lightened and dissipated. I no longer recall detail, just that it was the taste of a perfect, straight up tomato.

The next year I went back to Werner’s for more pink brandywines.

They were out.

No other greenhouse in the area grew as many heirloom varieties as Wener’s. Most grew none. We were SOL.

I realized I couldn’t count on greenhouses to start the plants that I wanted them to. My growing tastes had changed. I wanted obscure heirlooms, plants grown for taste and not markets, tomatoes that were huge and bulgy that got cracked shoulders on their misshapen fruits, all flaws that were instantly forgiven at the first, mind-blowing bite from them.

why to start your own seeds

It’s all about control, baby.

grow unique and rare varieties

Your local greenhouse probably doesn’t start Opalka plum tomatoes or Thai basil. But you can.

less reliance on greenhouses

Maybe your greenhouse does start Opalka plums and Thai basil. That doesn’t guarantee it’ll be in stock when you get there.

control the health of your plants

Greenhouses are plant lovers like you and me. However, you don’t know whether they are dumping all sorts of fertilizer on their young plants to get them to grow quickly. You don’t know if the greehouse is suffering a breakout of any number of diseases young plants are susceptible to. You can often tell visually how a plant is faring, but starting your own seeds gives ultimate control.

Of course, there’s the danger of a fungus or other nasty infecting your little plants as they grow at home, too, just so you know.

have plants ready on your schedule

Grow microgreens in January or a bushy pot of basil in the fall. It’s your choice.

All you need is some light, containers with growing medium, and moisture, and you’re on your way to starting your own seedlings from scratch. Tomorrow’s installment will explain in step-by-step detail how.

Once you’ve got a rough plan of what you’re going to put into your garden this year, the next step is to purchase your seeds. The vegetable seed catalog market has always had loads of companies vying for your business, and with the surging popularity of local foods and gardening, the choice of where to buy seeds from can be overwhelming. Should you order from the catalog crowing about giant pumpkins? The one with mega-producing hybrids? The one with carefully-selected heirlooms?

I’m not a fan of the giant pumpkin catalogs, nor of the ones that emphasize super-hybrids. I’ve worked in Photoshop for years and produced a few catalogs (not for seeds) and it really annoys me how those types of catalogs oversaturate their images. In those catalogs, watermelons are always deep magenta, tomatoes always fire-engine red, pumpkins glow fluorescent orange, and peas are bright kelly green.

You know what I think when I see that garbage? Don’t play a player. Not only do I know what these vegetables are really supposed to look like, I know that these catalog producers are addicted to either the saturation slider, the selective color dialog, or both. It offends me. Don’t play a player, catalog dudes.

catalog critera

Look for catalogs that:

• Don’t play a player. Go ahead and bump up the color in your images a bit, but don’t make my eyes bleed, and in the process make the vegetables look fake.

• Offer heirloom varieties.

• Offer organic seed. Organic isn’t a dealbreaker for me, but for some people it is.

• Offer normal fruits and vegetables. Don’t sell “world record-breaking pumpkins” or beans with gigantic, summer-long yields that are also tasteless.

• Offer a reasonable number of varieties that just plain taste good. You can roughly discern this from descriptions.

• Tell us where your seeds come from. Preferably with the story of your company and photos of your headquarters.

Glancing through a catalog will give you a good feel for it very quickly.

recommended seed catalogs

Seed Savers Exchange

Seed Savers Exchange (SSE) is my favorite seed catalog, and the only one I order from right now. They’re a non-profit organization dedicated to saving heirloom seeds. In fact, you can become a member for $40 and gain access not only to the catalog, but to a members-only yearbook offering thousands of vegetable varieties from SSE members nationwide.

I can find every variety I’m looking for in the SSE catalog, from pink brandywine and Opalka plum tomatoes (best beefsteak and best paste tomatoes around, IMO), to lacinato kale, to herbs like tarragon.

I’m really pleased with SSE’s variety of seed offerings, and impressed with their service and dedication to seed saving. Highly recommended.

Note: SSE does not sell your name to other seed or garden catalogs. This was huge for me. I was so pleased when I ordered from them and didn’t wind up with a mailbox full of real-world catalog spam.

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

I received the Baker Creek catalog last year. It was almost on par with SSE, and has a great story in how it all began with 17-year-old Jere Gettle, a gardener from age 4, issuing a 12-page seed catalog in 1998. Baker Creek also offers loads of heirlooms and has a positive gardening philosophy. The reason I didn’t order from them was, I was already in love with SSE.

Seeds of Change

Boy, Seeds of Change’s catalog looks familiar but I can’t recall whether I’ve actually looked through one. They, like SSE and Baker, have a philosophy of propagating and preserving heirloom seed strains, so they’re okay in my book. As with Baker, I’d order from Seeds of Change if I weren’t already ordering from SSE.

The above seed sources are mail order. They all sell seeds online as well.

Have a favorite vegetable seed source I’ve missed? Have you tried seeds from any of the above three sources? I’d love to hear your stories.

What’s going in your garden this year? If you don’t know yet, it’s time to put the remote down and get cracking. Super Bowl’s over. The Olympics are over. Time to moon over garden sketches and seed catalogs.

I know it’s almost a little late, but that’s why I’m doing this. So all you slackers like me can get into the garden just as quickly and efficiently as those horrible well-organized types who planned their garden in December and bought their seeds in January.

In this post, I’m going to tell you how to plan your garden and decide what to plant. And! There are future plans, oh yes. In the next days, we’ll be talking about what to plant from seed and what to buy as plants. We’ll talk about seed shopping. We’ll talk about seed starting. It’s a whole series thing.

One hint on the seed starting. Those salads you buy in the clear plastic containers? Keep those containers. You might be using them.

But! First things first. You don’t know what plants to buy/start if you don’t have a plan. Here’s what to do.

measure your space

Some of us have adorable little postage stamp spaces to garden in. Others of us have huge rectangles. And then there’s me, who wound up with a giant crooked triangle. Thanks, Dad. (No, really. He tills it for me. Thankyouthankyouthankyou.)

If you don’t know the dimensions you have to work with, get a tape measure or yardstick, get outside, and measure it. When you get back in — that was brisk, wasn’t it? — sketch out the outline of your garden in proportion. Use graph paper if you have it.

Or if you’re me, you drop a graph in Illustrator and anal-retentively draw your garden out in there with different colors and precise measurements. This is from two years ago, midway through planning. I’ve drawn lines to represent how long the rows would be.

I knew this because I’d measured what we’d put in that year, and added or subtracted for next year’s plan based on how much I wanted in the future.

what do you want to eat?

If you’ve planted a garden before, you have a good idea. If not, it’s all good. Make a wish list. Begin just off the top of your head: what do you like to eat most? What tastes way better from the garden than from the supermarket? What do you dream of planting?

Now break it down by category, just to focus your thoughts a bit more.

You want tomatoes, eh? Which general varieties? Do you want beefsteaks for hearty sandwiches, cherrys for snacking, plums for canning?

Say you dream of luscious melons. Do you have the room to grow them? How many? Muskmelon, watermelon, or more unique varieties?

Herbs. What do you want to cook with? Basil, dill, parsley, cilantro, rosemary? Marjoram, tarragon? It’s up to you.

how much do you want?

Deciding how much to plant is important too. Zucchini is a wonderful yet prolific squash. People really do come home in summer to find bags of zucchini left on their porch, left in secret by furtive gardeners who planted too much zucchini. Protip: two zucchini plants will feed a whole family and then some.

Canning and preserving figures into these calculations. If you want to can salsa, you may want several plum tomato plants as well as a few hot and sweet peppers. Grow some onions and cilantro, and you can make your own brand of salsa entirely from the garden.

In most northern climates, cool-weather vegetables such as lettuce, peas, beets, and radishes may be planted twice: once in early spring, and again in late summer for a fall harvest.

In sum: Think of what you plan to do with the vegetables and herbs you grow, and build your garden plan around that.

post your tips

Do you think this was helpful at all? I don’t know if I’m being helpful or pedantic, or just rambling. What tips do you have for planning the layout of your garden and deciding what to plant?