Anyone can grow something, especially from seeds. All you [basically] need is soil, water and sunlight. Drop a seed into the soil, water, and let it warm in the sun. Within seven or so days, you'll see it emerge and turn into a beautiful plant over the next three months.
That's where it gets tricky. Within those three months, each plant wants something different. Full sun or shade, a lot of water or very little.
It goes from Science to an art form very quickly. But gardening is trial and error. What works for one plant may not be the best for another, and one side of the yard can be very different than the other. Over time you learn the sun pattern as well as where the rain falls.
This post is about starting your seeds. Simple and easy.
So what do we need? Well soil for starters. Using potting soil is easy, comes in a bag and it may or may not have fertilizer and other cool features to get your seeds going. But remeber - potting soil can dry out very quickly and may not hold the moisture you'll need later on down the road for when it starts producing fruit or flowers. But actual dirt can hold that water, and it may not have the nutrients for your plants either. Again trial and error.
Let's just start with potting soil for now, until our plants get that 2nd set of leaves and is ready for transplanting. So now we have to decide what to plant them in. Well pots are a good start. Depending on what you are planting some seeds are smaller than a grain of sand to large pumpkin seeds. I've noticed most vegetable plants have large seeds and flowers are very tiny.
Here's a cool tip - you can plant seeds in *almost* anything. No really. I've seen shoes, buckets, and Diane even sewed up lettuce 'pots' that we could tie to the chain link fence! Today I'm using these plastic tops from the solid ink we use here at school.
I've poked holes in them, one top has nine holes, the other has just one.
Nine hole lid goes into the other. The theory is that as water flows through it, it'll collect and drip in the bottom tray. If too much water is collected on the bottom - water will flow out of the one hole. Otherwise, the collected water will evaporate upwards to the seedlings keeping the soil moist.
Here you can see the two together. When I get home, I'll post pictures of them with soil and what they look like at the end of the day. It'll be interesting to see if they are totally dried out or not.
Here are the trays filled with potting soil, nothing yet on the seeds I planted a few days ago. :)
