Starting Seeds Indoors

It's mid-April, which means that gardeners intending to grow tender veggies in New Hampshire's harsh climate are starting their seeds indoors. I'm a geek for tomatoes and basil, so I tend to start them early and in large quantities. With basil I stick to genovese and sweet basil varieties, planning to use most of it for pesto. With tomatoes I'm fondest of heirloom varieties, which I haven't found difficult to grow and which yield the most wonderful tastes of just about anything out of the garden. Cherokee Purple and Rose de Berne are two of my favorites, and this year I'm also trying a few new varieties from the Fedco catalog, including one named after the athlete and activist Paul Robeson. The ultimate favorite every year, however, are the Sungolds-- a hybrid variety, you just can't say enough good things about them, and I can't grow too many of them. Those that aren't eaten straight off the vine or put in salads wind up in an all-Sungold tomato sauce that I've made four years running, and which has a delicious, complex sweetness not often found in tomato sauces.

Over the last few years I've acquired a few bits of paraphernalia that have made indoor seed starting infinitely easier; one is a growing rack (originally used for orchids) complete with grow lights that hang from chains, allowing me to vary the distance between plant and light. The grow lights are useful even without the rack, and are available at big box stores and hardware stores-- the bottom picture shows the grow light unhooked from its rack and resting on some boxes and books on the ground, allowing it to get nice and close to the baby seedlings. Placing the light too far from the seedlings causes them to get leggy as they reach for the light-- I made this mistake the first year that I started seedlings under lights. Leggy seedlings can take a long time (i.e., until July or August) to become as sturdy as their more carefully raised brethren, so it's worth taking the extra time to make sure the light is as close as possible to the emerging plants when they first get going.

Another incredibly useful tool that I've picked up is a heat mat-- I actually have two of these, and they've been well worth the investment. The smaller mat (which fits one flat-- the middle picture shows the heat mat and a standard sized plastic flat) cost around $40 when I purchased it at a high-end garden center; the larger mat (which comfortably fits four flats) cost about $95. Both well worth the money, as they gently warm the roots of the plants and jump start their growth. I tend to keep the heat in the winter quite low, around 58 or 60 deg F, so having these pads to keep the air and soil around the seeds warm has been very useful. They're very sturdy, and I've had no trouble with mine.

I tend to leave the heat pads plugged in all day and night during the first few weeks of growth; the lights, however, are plugged into a power strip and hooked into a timer. They come on at around 7am and stay on until roughly 10pm; because the lights are standard fluorescent bulbs (no need to buy the "special plant spectrum" lights-- it's a marketing ploy--just pick up standard full spectrum tubes), they use very little energy, so your bills shouldn't go up much. I calculated at one point that our electricity bill only went up about $5/month when the lights were plugged in, and because they're only used for about three months out of the year, that seemed reasonable.

The plants won't be ready to go outside until June 1 (our frost-free date), but it's exciting to watch them grow in the meantime. I've got about 120 tomato starts, and another 100 or so basil starts, so many of these will wind up being gifts to friends, but I love the anticipation of watching summer spring up all around me-- even when snow and sleet are still occasional visitors to our region.