Earliest Seed Starting for Home Garden

I shouldn’t plant tomatoes now, but I should plant these in January.

Most of the plants that I tend to plant, I tend to plant too early. For instance, I have tried to plant tomato plants in January and it was not pretty. However, I have since learned that there are seeds that I can plant now that will give me a chance to scratch the itch of getting started with my next season’s garden now in January.

Here are a few of them that I am planting this month. These plants I can plant early and get a jump on the season by planting 8-12 weeks before planting out. And I can plant them outdoors about two weeks before the last frost date.

Onions The first item on my list is onions. We use a lot of onions at our house so I planted them earlier this week. We could buy onions as plants or sets, and we have done this many times in the past. However, this year, I have chosen to plant my onions as seeds. It’s economical. I get over three hundred seeds for about three dollars or about a penny per seed. It also offers me a way of knowing that the onions that I am growing are the right ones for my garden.

Because I like to plant heirlooms, I bought my seeds from a nearby seed catalog store that caters to heirloom seeds.

This week I started the onions by planting them a quarter of an inch deep in damp soil to which I added kelp meal to add nutritional value. The container that I use has 72 seeding pots into which I plant several seeds a quarter of an inch deep. I plan to leave four plants per pot. I watered them lightly and covered them with a plastic lid so that the seeds would stay moist until they germinated.

I intend to remove excess seedlings once they have germinated. The reason I leave four plants per container is that I learned several years ago that I can plant four plants in a pot and as they grow they will grow out in four different directions and this will save me from having to plant them one at a time and can just plant the whole pot without disturbing the onions.

Celery This year I am planting celery for the first time. Like onions, they are slow to develop, and I hope to be able to harvest them before the summer heat affects them. The variety that I am growing is also heat tolerant and doesn’t need to be blanched.

Because I don’t need as many celery plants as I do onions, I will plant about a dozen in a flowerpot. I doubt that I will be able to use enough celery to warrant planting more than that in the spring. I might, however, plant a second, perhaps larger crop of celery for a fall crop. I plant the seeds one-eighth an inch deep, water in, and cover the same as I did with the onions.

Winter Lettuce I received a free package of winter lettuce this year, so I have decided that I will start some early indoors and then plant some outdoors when conditions are right and then may plant them again in the autumn so I can grow lettuce well into the winter months. I will also be planting other greens later, but for now, I will start a few of these hardy lettuce seeds.

To grow this lettuce, I will plant it in a flower pot, one-quarter inch deep, and include about ten seeds. I will again water the seeds and cover them with plastic until the plants germinate.

Frost-hardy herbs Next, I intend to plant frost-hardy herbs for my herb garden. Because they each take a different length of time to germinate, I am also planting each herb in its own pot. In this group of herbs, I include Calendula, Lemon Balm, a mint mixture, German Chamomile, Yarrow, and Bee Balm. For each one of these, I will plant a single variety in a flowerpot. All the herb seeds will be surface planted except for the calendula which will be planted a quarter of an inch deep. Again, I will cover the pots with plastic to help conserve moisture.

There you have it, the plants that I can plant from seed as early as January. The best part about all this is not only will you be able to get a crop to harvest earlier in the season and pay less than you would if you had to buy the plants, but you will also be able to get these plants out of the grow room or greenhouse and into the garden so that you will have room later to plant your tomatoes and other sun-loving plants.

For more information about gardening, check out my book Simply Vegetable Gardening!