Earlier in the year, I wrote an enthusiastic blog with many a happy reason to start your garden plants indoors. It wasn’t a month later that I came up with the inspiration of this blog: the not-so-bright-side of starting seeds indoors. While there are plenty of reasons to start seeds indoors, I admit that I have found as many reasons Not to bother starting them indoors.
Grow Lights: Are They Worth the Initial Cost?
First, there’s that word “bright.” One of the first considerations for starting seeds indoors is whether you have enough light inside for them to grow. My plants have grown on a south-facing windowsill pretty well, but I don’t have many such windows, and the ones I have, have narrow windowsills. The plants that I grew in the kitchen under my florescent under-the-counter lights turned out decently. They were a little more gangly, that is, long and spindly, but most of them adjusted to outdoor life well-enough. Problem is, we like to use our kitchen counters to prepare food, not grow it. If you don’t have enough light indoors, you have reason to reconsider starting the seeds indoors.
You’ll have to determine the answer to that question yourself. When I discovered that a good, small grow light would cost $60 or more, I opted for a less conventional option. Most grow lights on the market are long, narrow lights. I used the round, metal lightshade which we had bought for our baby chicks with a grow light bulb to help my seedlings. The cost for me was $10 since I already had the lightshade. I rotated my two flats of seedlings so that each would have some brighter light time right under the lamp. I don’t think that my seedlings were the sturdiest or healthiest of seedlings, but many survived to become a full head of cabbage. You certainly couldn’t fit many seedlings under one such round lamp. It’s an option, though.
Children, (Pets) and Seedlings: A few reasons why your plants may not survive the transition from indoors to outdoors.
I have a precious picture of my baby to go with this heading. I’ll give you some backstory first. Once the weather gets warm enough, i.e. the 60s in the day, I start setting some seed flats out on our back porch. You should know that I started about eight flats of seeds indoors this year, hence the different scenarios. The little seedlings sit on our back porch, with some contrivance to provide filtered shade throughout the day. Intense sunlight could easily burn out the plants and dry up the pods. While they are protected from the heat of the sun, they are Not protected from curious little children.
And, After She Slept, She Wept
One day, I was praying on the back porch, my seedlings in a flat off to the side and my 10 month baby crawling around the floor. Soon I began to doze off just, awake only enough to have a sense where the baby was and what he was doing at each moment. I was too comfortable to jump up when he approached my neatly labeled, newly planted tomatoes, peppers and eggplants. In a few instants’ time, I had an unlabeled pile of dirt and seeds on my porch. Sigh. I shoveled the mix into some shallow seed flats and about a third of the seeds managed to emerge, despite the earthquake. While I couldn’t find a picture of the baby rummaging through my plants or the messy results, I did find another picture reminiscent of the grow light question.
More Two-legged Dangers
I didn’t realize until I began typing how interconnected all my setbacks were. You remember the grow light I repurposed from our baby chicks? Well, the fluffy, cute chicks grew into sleek, iridescent chickens. And, now I remember why I couldn’t remember exactly what plants were in the picture above. Many of them died. Victims of the chickens. There were two episodes which claimed those plants’ lives. The first one occurred shortly after I had planted some of my sweet baby cabbages in my fenced garden. Our chickens somehow infiltrated the garden and reeked havoc. I was furious. A few days later, I foolishly left my broccoli seedlings on the ground right before the chickens’ pen. Forgetting the plants, I let the chickens out for their evening forage in the yard. Thirty minutes later, I found this:
The Moral of the Story
Have you ever read The First Four Years by Laura Ingalls Wilder? In it Laura chronicles her first four years of marriage alongside her husband who was a farmer. She had been hesitant to accept the life of a farmer’s wife after her adventurous childhood with a father who had a strong pioneering spirit. Her family had moved West many times seeking to conquer the wilderness and escape the press of civilization. Four years of farming alongside her husband brought many turns of fortune as their farm met the ever-changing seas of weather, circumstance and pestilence. Laura concluded that farming can be every bit as adventurous as pioneering the Wild West.
Hope Ain’t Gone West
Take heart, ye faint of heart. Whether you buy your seed; whether your seedlings succeed or fail; whether you buy ‘nurslings’: whether the cold or heat wither your crop: Hopefully your attempts at gardening will be joyful and fun. My advice is to try it all: starting your own seeds–either started indoors or directly in the ground–and buying some plants from the store. Some of both will surely fail. Hopefully, you’ll save some money along the way; hopefully, you’ll enjoy many flowers and fruits. And even a few uproarious stories.
