Indoor Starting

In this post I will talk about indoor planting.

You use indoor planting early on, before spring has started, to give the plants a growing head start for the season. The reason these plants manage to survive in the cold... is because they are not in the cold at all! Some plants like peas are hardy enough to be planted outside early, but others like tomatoes and squash are not hardy and must start indoors to get a head start. 

First, I will talk about what I put the seeds in. I had many options for what to plant them in.

1. My dad had saved many toilet paper rolls. If the rolls were placed tightly and vertically in a box, then it would be easy to fill them with dirt without them flopping over. Then when we transplanted them outdoors, hopefully the cardboard would be so rotten from watering we could tear it away and put the clump of mud in the dirt. We could always try placing the whole vessel, container and plant, in the ground where it would decompose; hopefully quickly. I did not like this idea very much. I actually do not know completely why, for now it seems like a sensible or even better idea than what I actually chose. I suppose one thing was I thought the roots would be blocked from spreading by the enclosure. However, my dad said this would force the roots of the shoot to grow vertically, rather than horizontally. This is good for it allows closer planting, and plants can access water which is deeper in the soil. 
2. Another idea was using large, shallow pans like my class in school was using for their transplants. (I will talk about this more, later). My dad and I did not want to do this for it was not deep enough for the roots, or so we thought.
3. I had the idea of just a large box filled with dirt, for I had thought that many people used this method. The problem was that it would be harder to transplant and that it would be unnecessarily bigger than we needed for each plant, plus it would require too much dirt and too many boxes. 
4. Then how about plastic or glass jars? Glass jars would be bad since there would be no drainage of excess water. Both of them would make transplanting difficult. We also  thought, once again, that this was too big and too much dirt for seedlings. 
5. Finally, there was an idea of peat pots. Peat pots are small rectangular containers made from peat moss sold for the reason of planting. They have drainage holes (though some were covered by a small film of peat and I had to gouge them open with scissors) and are made of peat moss so that they can decompose in your bed. This way, come transplant time, you will never have to remove the seedlings and clumps of dirt from the container. I am a little skeptical on how efficiently they decompose, for I found that a few months after planting that many were still intact and hardly rotten and decomposing. I will talk about the other problems in a future blog. Anyhow, I chose this idea, for I thought that, though the containers were small, that it was a big enough vessel for a seedling, and that it's decomposition process would help during the transplant process. Also, I thought that, since these were made specifically for gardening, that they were the best or most usual indoor garden planting style. 

      To get the dirt we went to a nearby spot where the township supplied compost for it's residents. Look around, there might be spots like this near you. We brought it back and filled each vessel about 1/2 or 1/4 inch from the top. This was so that, if we watered, the seeds would not rise and flood over the edge. Here is a picture of these peat pots filled with soil.      

        Most of my indoor plants were soaked/germinated seeds since this gave them an even longer head start. For the smaller seeds I either directly planted them, or I used that paper towel- egg shell container method I spoke of before, to place them in the vessels. Instead of planting the whole egg shell container in,  I just placed the paper towel in with the seeds. At first I started to pick up these seeds by hand, but my dad said that you could use a small rod (a pencil or twig) to pick up the seeds since the water on the seeds would stick to the rod. He also showed how to separate the small seeds by ripping the paper towel in the middle. We planted the seeds in sections, and took careful note of where each plant was. The diagram looked similar to the germinating one. Also similar with the germination was the fact that seedlings, like seeds, could look very similar. There are certain planting depths for each type of seed, but remember: not too deep that the roots won't have room to grow and not too shallow that the seed will float to the surface or get washed away . Usually, the larger seeds are planted deeper but smaller seeds are planted shallower. Always plant more than you need for some plants will not grow. Also try not to plant two plants per one peat pot. Only for coriander and other such plants which are actually two plants per one seed. If another plant grows, it is not bad. Choose the strongest one and pull out the weaker one later. 

     Next was placement. Place the planted seeds in a spot where they will not be disrupted by you or your pets. They must also be in a place which receives sunlight. Instead of sunlight, you can always use grow lights (artificial lighting which acts like the sun indoors). Now, it can be quite hard to find a spot like this. What I did was I put my seeds in a garage at night to protect from the wind and harsh weather, but placed them outside each day so that they would receive sunlight. I pulled the peat pots on pizza boxes; I did not pick them up. Doing so, would disturb the seeds and create a chance of me accidentally dropping it. Pulling the plants outside also made watering them easier. For any harsh weather (like snow) during the day I kept my seeds in the garage. Rain, however, was a different story. I left them outside to use the rain. 

      At first, these containers were not good at containing water. Perhaps the holes drained them out. Perhaps the container acted like a wick rather than a sponge. Anyhow, at first when I watered the peat pots the water thoroughly soaked them.When you water, remember, do not use a high powered hose since a jet of water would push up all the mud and disturb the roots. I messed up a bit with this. Though it will take a while, use a watering can with a head, and sprinkle water on the plants. Due to the fact that the hose water was not always an ideal temperature, we would put the hose water in the watering can ahead of time to reach room temperature. I needed about 4 to 5 watering cans of water.
      The peat pots dried very quickly, and towards the very end of this indoor planting (probably because I did not transplant for a long time) the water started to slide off without sinking into the soil. It was the strangest thing. The only way to describe it is like when you put a drop of water on wax paper. This, though, only happened at the end. The watering issue was mainly just the containers not holding the liquid. I would water them every day when I came back from school. Perhaps I should have watered them in the morning since that is the best time (in the afternoon the water could shock the plants, in the night diseases and moisture loving pests come). I, however, chose the afternoon and tried to water diligently.  Still, that was barely enough. My dad decided that a way to contain more water was to put the containers into a few boxes and plastic boxes. They held water. This was a great improvement to the pizza boxes we had the peat pots on, since the pizza boxes were not ideal for keeping in water in their broken state. Of course, the problem of too much water arrived, since, although some boxes had holes, others did not. Because of this, some plants got too wet and the boxes had to emptied regularly. We were very fortunate to have quite a lot of rain, so between the boxes and this precipitation, the plants got plenty of water. Sadly, I did not have the foresight to take a picture of these boxes.

     In later posts I will talk about transplanting, watering, and outdoor planting. This should for the coming gardening season. Later, as I promised, I will talk about the nature visitors of the garden and the Bald Eagles.