How to Start Seeds Indoors

Hi, I’m David Epstein today in Growing Wisdom. We’re going to talk about starting seeds inside before you put them outside. You want to have great soil. You of course want to choose the seeds and plant them at the right time. You want to have a good container to put them in, plenty of warmth and enough water to germinate the seeds.

If you have all those ingredients, the seeds will germinate well and you’d be able to successfully plant them outside in just a few weeks. You want to plants the seeds inside the correct number of weeks before they’re going to go outside. For example, early things like lettuce can be start to three or four weeks before they go outside, something like tomatoes, five or six weeks before they go outside. If you’re not sure, the back of the packs will usually tell you how many weeks before you plant them outside to start them inside.

Today, we’re going to start with planting some tomatoes. I’m going to start my tomatoes inside of one of these containers here. This is a seed starting kit or you can recycle some things around the house. This is an old sushi container, you could start let the seeds or something very small inside the container like this. You could also use an egg container. Egg containers are made of material that naturally absorb water, its also going to break down so I can cut this up and plant them outside later on so egg container works really well also.

No matter what you use as a container, a heating mat is great ways to augment the amount of heat that you’re plants are going to get. A heating mat simply races the ambient temperature around the root area closest to the bottom of the container by about 10 to 20 degrees so it really helps with germination. If your home is called or you’re conserving energy, it may not be warm enough inside without the heating mat for the seed to successfully germinate.

The other thing we like to augment besides heat is light. There are a lot of grow light products that are available. Just be sure whatever product you use, the light is directly over your seeds so that plants go straight up and aren’t leaning left or right. You don’t want your soil real wet. If it’s real wet, the seeds will dies from the stem.

If you’re starting a lot of seeds, it’s important to label them because I guarantee you, your going to forget what you’re going. And also it’s a good idea to put the dates on the labels so you know how long it’s taking things to germinate. If things haven’t germinated into two or three weeks, there’s probably a problem with the seeds and finally where to place this.

I’d like to place it near a sunny window with my heating mat underneath, my light on top of it and hopefully in just a few days, we’re going to see some seeds sprouting. As the seedlings get bigger, its time to move them outside. Again, check the back of the pocket. Be sure that all danger and frost is past for the warm weather crops and don’t put those called weather crops out too soon or they may get a snowfall.

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