Photo by EraPhernalia Vintage

February may sound like a typical winter month. buy for vegetables gardeners, it’s a month of beginnings. Gardeners that happen to grow food know that this month is prime for starting vegetable seeds indoors in anticipation of winter. If you’ve never started seeds indoors before, why not give it a try this year?

Get Your Seed-Starting Materials Together

Start with purchasing some of your favorite vegetable seeds. You’ll find seeds online, in catalogs, and at your local nursery. For each type of vegetable, there will be tons of varieties to choose from. If this becomes too confusing, look for guidance from a nursery near you or call the Cooperative Extension Office in your county.

You’ll also need containers. Garden centers, nurseries, and hardware stores have all kinds of seed containers, but this is one thing that you don’t need to put your money. It’s your chance to put recycling to work by using cottage cheese or sour cream containers, yogurt cups, egg cartons, paper, plastic, or Styrofoam cups, toilet paper rolls (cut in half), plastic milk or juice containers (top cut off), or those tiny, snack-sized ice cream containers. reused containers should be thoroughly washed and drainage holes should be added.

Photo by Girlingear Studio

While you’re at the garden center, pick up a bag of seed-starter soil. I’m usually a fan of do-it-yourself, but in this case, you really want the soil that has that special something for seeds. In this case it’s peat moss and no true soil. That’s right — the medium preferred for germinating seeds is a soil-less mix. It’s lightweight, offers good drainage, and best of all — wards off the killing fungus that creates “damping off” in seedlings.

No matter how hard I’ve tried to use natural lighting from windows, the plants never fail to end up spindly-looking and floppy. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t try if you have a strong enough natural light source. But I’ve found it works not to skip the strong, over-head lighting. Spend money on this part. An alternative is to “borrow” the shop lights that are hanging over your husband’s motorcycle parts in the garage. Yes, the plain, traditional fluorescent shop lights is all you’ll need to get your seedlings up and growing. Skip the fancy “grow lights”, they aren’t important here.

As far as heat goes, heating mats are wonderful if you want to put the money out for them. Some seeds (such as peppers) need a lot of warmth before they’ll germinate and the mats come in handy in this case. That said, I’ve started seed for many years without them and they’ve done fine as long as the environment temperature was between 60-80 degrees.

Photo by Kator 29