The Rusted Garden Blog — Seed Starting

The Rusted Garden Seed and Garden Shop I will be doing at 2022 video series called Seed Starting 101. This series will teach you how to start seeds indoors, with the goal of having inexpensive transplants for your gardens. Transplants can easily cost $3-$5 a plant when purchased at stores.  Growing your own transplants, taking in all the start up costs, will cost you about .25 cents a plant or less. The lights, seed starting supplies, and seeds will last for years, further bringing down the cost of growing your own garden transplants. You can find seeds and seed starting...

The basic budget friendly lights needed to start growing your own garden vegetable transplants indoors. Don't pay $100's for lights. A $20 shop light is just as effective.

Growing tomato transplants isn't really difficult once you have the basics down. It just takes some time to learn. However, growing large plants in 6 weeks, that are ready to be planted into a garden, can be challenging. The key is container size. Lighting, watering, and fertilizing will impact plant growth but cell or container size is often over looked. Generally speaking, a transplant's size is constrained by the growing space of the roots. The stronger and larger the root system, the more quickly the plant can grow in size. A lot has been written about lighting, watering, and fertilizing....

The number one mistake made, when starting seeds indoors, is not sterilizing the seed starting mix. Peat based starting mixes are notorious for having fungus gnat eggs in them. They can survive temperature extremes and sit dormant for a very long time in the mixes. Once you add water to the starting mix and expose them to the grow lights and warm temperatures, they hatch. The larva feed on the roots of your seed starts and grow into adult flying gnats. The fungus gnats lay more eggs and the cycle continues, eventually causing the huge problem of seedling loss. The...

Starting garden plants indoors is rewarding on so many levels. It gives you something to do during the cold months and opens the door to  transplants of 1000s of varieties of plants you would never find at nurseries or your big box stores.  Not only that, it will save you a lot of money.  Even with the initial start up costs of buying lights, shelves and starting supplies, you save money. You can get a good 10 years out of lights now-a-days. The money you save starting you own plants will pay for itself in the first year. Instead of...