Temperature and Seed Germination

I am one of those people who like to see results as quickly as possible.  I guess I have gotten used to our modern world where everything is now now now!  We hate to wait.  This is especially true for me and my garden stuffs.  I want it to be as fabulous as possible and I want that fabulousness to be right away.  Sometimes it can be frustrating starting your garden from seed because it takes so much longer for it to get that full and thriving look.  The gratification is not as instant as putting in plants that are already developed.

If you are planting from seed and you want the fastest results possible, then I suggest that you pay attention to the temperatures that you sow your seeds.  Different plants have optimum temperatures that allows for faster germination as well as a greater likelihood for emergence.  I found the following chart at this website and I have found it quite useful when starting my seeds.

For each plant, the first number represents the percentage of seeds that successfully emerged.  So, looking at the first vegetable, asparagus, you can see that at 32 & 41 degrees, no plants emerged.  At 50 degrees 61% of the plants emerged.  The second number in parentheses represents the number of days it took the seeds to emerge.  So at 50 degrees it took 53 days for the plants to pop up.  Way too long, if you ask me.  For each plant one of the numbers in parentheses is red.  This represents the optimum temperature in terms of speed of emergence as well as the highest success rate of emergence.  Make sense?  So if I wanted to grow asparagus, my best bet for having quickly sprouting plants would be to keep them around 77 degrees, and about ten days later...pop!  I should be seeing some little plants poking their heads up.  I find this useful especially when putting my seeds in their jiffy seed starters.  I try to keep seeds with like temperatures together to so I can monitor how warm or cool they are.  So far, it's been working.  My plants that took the longest to sprout were my peppers.  Compared to how quickly everything else was popping up, waiting over a week for those little guys felt like forever.  But now my seeds have all sprouted and it is just a matter of time before I transition them into their forever homes - the garden boxes.

Starting from Seed

In the past, whenever I have planted my garden, I have always gone the easy route and bought seedlings from Home Depot or my local nursery.  However, the prices always seemed to quickly add up and soon I was having to justify to my husband (and myself) why I spent a month's worth of grocery money on plants that weren't even producing yet.  Last year was the first time I put some serious effort into having a majority of my garden planted from seed.  Not only would this help save on costs, but I found it also gave me more satisfaction.  Kind of like the difference you feel between making a cake from scratch or from the box.  Both taste good and will serve the purpose, but you just feel so much more accomplished when you put a little more oomph into it.  Plus, people are far more impressed when you say, "Yeah, I made that from scratch."  Not that I would ever be fishing for compliments or anything.

Anyhow, seeds.  One of the reasons why I shied away from them in the past was that they were wildly unsuccessful for me.  If I planted them straight in the ground then the birds would come by and eat many of them, and if I tried to start them indoors, I would just get frustrated with all the dirt spilling and my containers disintegrating and I would go out and buy plants anyway.  That is, until I discovered this beauty:

It is a mini greenhouse for starting off seeds.  While I am sure a real gardener could do just fine without this, let me list for you the reasons why I love it.

1) It is cheap - I buy mine for about $5 at Wal-Mart - cheaper than peat pots and seed starter mix.
2) It is complete - just add seeds.  I don't have to fuss with dirt or mix.  All I do is add water to the peat pellets, watch them while they puff up (which is more fun than you might think) and then press my seeds inside.
3) It is not messy - I pop the lid on and I can easily carry and move my 72 future plants without worrying about pots tipping or water leaking.
4) It takes the guesswork out of watering - the greenhouse lid holds in moisture so once the initial watering is done, you don't have to add anymore. 
5) It protects my seeds - the lid keeps birds and pests away from my seeds/seedlings so I don't have to.

This year I am starting my garden entirely by seed and I have three of these things sprouting away.  If you are planning on doing a smaller garden, they also offer smaller sizes as well so you aren't overwhelmed with plants.

It is so fun to watch your greenhouse go from this:

To this almost overnight (at least it feels that way to me).

How about you?  What are you secrets for starting seeds?