Weekend Gardening: Starting Seeds Indoors
March 15, 2009 by Andrea
Filed under Gardening, Grow Your Own
Over the last few weeks we have started seeds for our summer garden. We’re right on the border for Hardiness Zones 6 and 7, so I follow the rules for Zone 6. Because we often still have very cold temperatures in early May, our safe outdoor planting date is around the third week in May, and depending on the type of plant we start seeds as early as the beginning of March. I separate our seeds into three groups: 1) start indoors (early March to early April), 2) plant direct in spring when the soil is workable (third week in March), and 3) plant direct after danger of frost has passed (third week in May).
In the last two weeks, we have started celery, leeks, sweet peppers, chile peppers (jalapeno, ancho, serrano, anaheim, poblano), tomatoes (San Marzano, roma, grape, Brandywine, Jubilee yellow), eggplant (Black Beauty and lavender), marjoram, cilantro, stevia, and lemongrass, and in a few weeks I’ll start the basils (Genovese, lemon dani). Several of these can also direct seed when the weather is warm enough, but I always start some early in the hope that we will have something to put in the ground and have an early harvest. It doesn’t always work and last year not a single bell pepper sprouted so we had to buy plants, but most years we have seedlings ready to plant in May. Read more
