This year I started my own garden plants, and it was actually pretty fun (mostly). I will be doing it from here on out, using what I learned this season.
Why start your own garden plants?
Many prepping experts agree that performing well in a survival situation is more about what you know than the stuff you have.
Here at 3BY, we are all about the idea of skill development, and with that in mind I started a new project this spring to learn how to start my own plants.
Normally, we go to our excellent local greenhouse and buy a lot of our garden plants (the ones that have to be started inside in our zone) ready to go into the ground. It works very well since our greenhouse is local, reliable and very inexpensive.
However, since we preach self reliance, we feel that it’s important to actually practice self-reliance, so we pick certain new skills to learn every year. This year? One of my skills to learn was starting plants.
Here’s a podcast to accompany this article:
UPDATED: What these garden plants looked like in June 2018 (look past the zuke plant in the front)
The Story:
Spice and I went to the local garden center to pick up starting materials. We looked at all of the stuff, and decided to cheat a bit by purchasing a tray with starter pellets. I purchased a couple of “Jiffy Professional Plant Starter” kits (at spring prices), and it ran me about $12 for the materials to start 32 plants, which is actually significantly more expensive than our greenhouse. However, the plastic trays/greenhouse kits use starter pellets.
Additional pellets are sold separately for $4 per 16, and generally some are available during “summer closeout”, I’ve seen them at 75 percent off before so this would reduce the cost of starting garden plants to just a little over 6 cents a plant. THAT’s more like it.
The system is easier than dirt to use (sorry not sorry about the pun).
Basically, you pour water into the boxes, wait for the pellets to swell, then plant seeds according to the directions on the individual seed’s recommended guidelines. I planted two types of tomatoes (8 each) and two types of peppers (8 each) on March 1.
After that, put the top on, set it in indirect light indoors and let nature do it’s thing.
I put my plants on one of our 55 gallon water barrels in a storage room with a window in the back of our house:
Pro Tip: Use hot water, it makes them rise faster!
So, how did we do? Half good, half bad. The tomatoes all came up.
Not one of either pepper came up. Why?
Temperature.
Where I was starting my garden plants isn’t heated, but it’s inside the house so it never gets really cold. We zone heat and cool our house for efficiency’s sake, and that area was just too cold for the peppers at night.
I suspect that if we added a heating pad (they make them for seed starting) that the peppers would have been fine, but like all experiments I wanted to see what would happen if I just did the minimum necessary to start the project.
The good news? I replanted the peppers three weeks later (it’s warmer back there) and they are sprouting just fine now.
Now we are in the “hardening” stage where we have subjected the little plants to the influences of a fan, to get them to build their stalks stronger, and give them more direct light. Soon, we will start to move them outdoors during the day to harden them even further (it’s still pretty raw here in North Missouri) but that is still a couple of weeks off.
All in all, it would have been cheaper this year to buy the plants pre-grown but I wouldn’t have learned anything from doing that. It would be cheaper to just prepare planting soil instead of using the “kits”. Having said that, the kits are quite convenient and a good place to start the learning process, and if I can find them on 75 percent closeout, they are an inexpensive prep (it’s dirt, it will last basically forever in storage if kept dry).
Spice’s tips:
If you want grow your own seedling garden plants but also to go low budget, you can do this project for dead cheap. Get some cardboard egg cartons. Fill each cup with potting soil and set the lot in a baking pan or plastic tray (as they’ll leak when watered). You could also use really good topsoil, but (having tried it) I don’t recommend it; the tiny cost difference isn’t worth it.
If you don’t have pesticides, various insects can completely wipe out some crops (I’m looking at you, summer squashes!). To improve your chances, you can start those indoors, keep them inside while the early outdoor plantings are taking their chances, flowering but also potentially getting infested, then put the plants out nearly mid-summer for a later harvest.
If you have heirloom varieties of plants instead of hybrids, you can save seed from this year’s plants and up your game by planting your own seed next year.
