Starting seeds indoors

Although we planned to purchase tomato and pepper transplants from our farmers, I couldn't resist buying some seeds and giving it a try myself! Since we already had to start celery seeds, it didn't seem like that much more work and it would also be MUCH cheaper, and we could choose exactly what we wanted. So far, we're happy with that decision!


To start seeds, we bought this seed-starting mix. It is really light and the smell made our dog go crazy! Whenever I would start a new batch of seeds, she'd coming running over with her nose in the air. To me it smelled like an old barn. Seed starting mix is important because it has the right mix of nutrients, it is disease free (making strong seedlings) and free of other seeds (reducing competition for the delicate little buggers).


I followed the instructions on the back of the package. Basically, I mixed equal parts of the seed starting mix and HOT water.


I collected egg cartons to start seeds. Poke a hole in the bottom for drainage and so you can water them the wicking way - very important! I forgot to do this on one batch and it was obvious!


I put a couple of heaping tablespoons of the mixture in each cell. You can see how wet the mixture was by how it is already soaking the egg carton!


These are the celery seeds - there are 1000 seeds in that tiny little out-of-focus blob! I carefully took 4-5 seeds at a time and put them in each cell on top of the soil mixture.


Then, I just sprinkled some dry seed starting mixture on top, covered the whole thing with plastic to help keep them warm, and placed them in indirect sun in the corner of our sunroom. Celery seeds are supposed to be planted very shallow. So far, the celery is doing really well - the germination rates were excellent (in the upper 90%!) and uniform. Before germination, I made sure there was plenty of water by keeping the plate full (they wick water up from below, which is good because it doesn't disturb the gentle seeds or seedlings. Watering from the top would also change the soil temperature too drastically, shocking the seeds or seedlings), using very warm water each time I gave them a drink. I would also lift up the plastic to give them some fresh air - even so, some sort of wispy mold grew on top of the soil. So far, that has not caused any problems other than looking gross:) After they germinated (which took about a week in total), I removed the plastic (and the wispy mold disappeared shortly after) and moved them to direct sunlight. They needed about twice as much water after that. I thinned them out slowly once they had their first true leaf.

I'll continue to update on celery's progress! The seeds were started in mid-February, 12 weeks before I expected to be able to plant them outdoors.