The Yellow Farmhouse Garden

During the seed starting class, some participants confided in me that they had tried seed starting in the past but were frustrated by the lack of success.

My suggestion is to start out with the easier seeds in order to gain experience and confidence before moving on to the more exotic seeds.

Some easiest  vegetable seeds are the cabbage family, which in addition to cabbage, includes broccoli, cauliflower and brussels sprouts.

Onions, head lettuce, tomatoes and peppers are also considered easy to start.

You can gain some valuable experience starting flowers such as alyssum, cosmos, marigold and zinnia. This may seem like a short list, but there are a wide variety of shapes colors and sizes of these varieties available now days.

I would also venture to say that nearly all seed varieties  available from a hardware or department store would fall into the category of easy to start. This is because the seed companies also want you to have a good gardening experience, so they offer the seeds which are most likely to grow in the hands of a beginner.

Different varieties of seeds need to be started at different times so we’ll cover that in the next blog.

Bob

This past Saturday Judy and I taught a two hour class at the University of Michigan‘s Matthaei Botanical Gardens on the topic of starting seeds at home. We covered a lot of information during the class but two hours wasn’t nearly enough time considering the subject of seeds and seeding would be covered in one or two semesters if you were to attend an agricultural college.

Our participant’s experience covered a wide gamut from those who never attempted it to those with a fair amount of success.

About half of the class was interested in growing  flowers while the other half vegetables.  Although the primary discussion was about starting annual plants, we did touch on perennials briefly.

We spent the first hour in a classroom going over many of the basics.  During the second hour we moved into the greenhouse and actually sowed seeds and transplanted seedlings.  A couple of the participants weren’t really prepared to get their hands into the dirt but happily joined in anyway.

Since the class was such a success, we plan on holding it again next year.

If you are interested in starting your own plants from seed, follow along here at All Things Green for most of the information we presented in the class.

In the next post we’ll  get into some things to consider before you begin sowing your seeds.

Bob