I set up some seed trays this spring to get the full experience of trying to grow my own plants from seed. I’ve learned a few things over the past few weeks:

• Seeds need moist soil to germinate, and won’t budge in dry soil.
• Seeds can really take their sweet time to germinate.
• Compost is fine for germination, I just need to crumble it up. Turns out I didn’t need to use special “growing medium” to sprout plants, and that way I got to stay organic
• Seedlings are sensitive to heat and putting the tray with the cover on in the sun can be a bad idea for those lil tender plants.
• Water under the seedlings so other seeds don’t wash away, and the seedlings learn to grow roots down as far as possible.
• When certain seeds sprout, if they get leggy, they’ll most likely fall over and die, so:
• Grow lights need to be BRIGHT. They need to be strong, like sunlight, so seedlings get the message to expand their leaves rather than their stalks. Daylight is 98,000 lumens per square meter (approx. a yard). Some websites say around 7K-10K total lumens is ideal for starting plants. Do NOT buy fluorescent, they contain mercury; use LED bulbs and simple contractor lamps with clamps for the best price. I made the mistake of only using two 950-lumen bulbs and I got a lot of leggy seedlings that fell over and died in a matter of days.
• A grow light timer is a great investment.
• Label seed rows using masking tape and markers, rather than trying to keep track of spreadsheets. Using this method helps me avoid accidentally skipping rows.
• By the last frost of the spring, nurseries will already have plants that are 6-8 inches tall and well-developed, so I really need to start much earlier, at the beginning of March, to make it to that state of readiness.

Lessons from starting plants from seed by mehron is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International