Savvy Seed Care
(Page 5 of 6)
December 2006/January 2007
By Barbara Pleasant
Gather up your seeds and get organized by using a storage box big enough to house your entire collection. Then consider these ideas and interior features:
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- Install partitions, or use separate small boxes for various groups of seeds.
- Sort packets into categories, and keep like seeds together with rubber bands.
- Make color-coded paper packets from envelopes; here, green is used for veggies, yellow for flowers and lavender for herbs.
- Embroidery hoops outfitted with cloth netting make seed cleaning fast and easy.
- Store bulky seeds in small glass jars or pill bottles (baby food jars work great).
- Packets of silica gel can serve as desiccants.
- Make a written inventory of what you have, then stash your records in an envelope attached to the lid.
When to Skip Seeds and Buy Transplants
Some say it started with celery in the late 1970s. As the cost of hybrid seed increased, commercial growers in California found they could save time, money and water by transplanting seedlings rather than sowing seeds. Meanwhile, small-scale greenhouse growers in Ohio and Pennsylvania tapped into an exploding consumer demand for ready-to-plant flower seedlings, and Canadian government agencies mobilized to get their fledgling greenhouse industry off the ground.
It worked. By the 1990s, gardeners everywhere embraced the instant results they could get with bedding plants, and vegetables began to earn shelf space alongside petunias and begonias. Twenty years ago, you could buy tomatoes, peppers, cabbage and onions as seedlings, but industry experts assumed gardeners would not spend a dollar for a zucchini plant when they could get 20 times as many plants by sowing a packet of seeds. They were wrong. The majority of today’s gardeners don’t think twice about loading their trunks with container-grown cucumbers or cantaloupes, and there is even some horticultural research to support the plants-not-seeds approach.
Certainly there are risks involved. Transplanting can injure or traumatize roots, and plants that throw down delicate taproots as soon as they sprout (carrots and dill, for example) are difficult to handle as seedlings. With eager-beaver seedlings such as beans, squash and corn, messing with seedlings is worthwhile only if you’re growing a tightly managed intensive garden. It just makes sense to bypass containers, potting mix, grow lights and damping off worries by waiting for the right time to sow fast-growing peas, beans and beets, and difficult transplanters, such as dill and carrots, right in the garden.
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