Twirling seed racks at a local garden center — or pondering choices in catalogs or on websites — is a fun way to get into seed starting. The gorgeous pictures on packets, coupled with the promise of new life inside, can be extremely seductive. Every possibility seems more attractive than the last. Even though packets only cost a few dollars each, it’s easy to quickly run up a tab. It simply makes sense to set parameters about what you want to grow before you stock up.
One step that greatly increases your chances of success is to take a hard look at your yard to see the exposure and other conditions plants growing there will be facing. Use this information to make a list of plants that grow best in the conditions naturally found in your yard — sun, shade; poor soil or rich, for example. To identify possibilities, use the lists in this book, ask gardening friends, and search the Internet. Starting with a list of suitable plants greatly improves your chances of success, because you only have to help plants along, not fight the site at the same time. See Get to Know Your Garden on page 10 for tips on what to look for when evaluating your site. Here are some other considerations to help focus your choices.
It’s important to be more specific than “nice vegetables” or “pretty flowers” here. Start by asking yourself what vegetables you really like to eat. If you have kids, what do they like to eat? Filling your garden with food you love, rather than crops you think you should grow, just makes sense. Why work hard to grow something that no one in the family is really excited about eating? Once you’ve identified a few crops to try, consider looking past the obvious choices. Experiment with purple peppers or yellow, star-shaped summer squash. They aren’t any harder to grow than the ordinary kinds you find on every farm stand in summer. Another option is to concentrate on vegetables that are expensive or that you can never get enough of — grape tomatoes and sugar snap peas, for example.
If you want to grow flowers, narrow your choices in much the same way. Perhaps flowers for cut or dried bouquets top your list, or blooms that are fragrant or attract butterflies to the garden. Some seed catalogs and websites offer popular annuals packaged by color, so you can plant all pink or yellow zinnias, for example, to ensure that blooms blend with other plants in your garden.
If you’ve never sown seeds before, or if previous attempts didn’t turn out well, embrace your beginner status. Concentrate on easy-to-grow crops for both indoor starting and out. Sticking with just a few selections also makes learning easier and increases success. Fill in with purchased plants, and add more plants from seed as you gain experience.
Fast and cool. Fast-growing, cool-weather crops are among the easiest ones to grow. The following can be sown right in the garden where they are to grow. Plant small batches of seeds in spring and more batches in late summer to harvest in fall.
Crops for summer. Many of the heat-loving summer crops that are easy to grow take a bit longer than the cool-season crops above. Best bets include:
Herbs from seed. Parsley, dill, chervil, and cilantro (coriander) are all easy herbs that can be sown in spring, out in the garden where the plants are to grow. Basil, which prefers warm temperatures, can also be sown outdoors but is often started indoors to give plants a head start. Parsley plants can also benefit from a head start indoors, but they resent being transplanted, so sow them in paper or peat pots. (See Pots for Fussy Seedlings on page 42.) Many perennial herbs are best propagated by division or cuttings because they don’t come true from seed, meaning seedlings may not resemble their parent plant. Chives are probably the easiest perennial herbs to grow from seed, but thyme, sage, and lavender can also be started this way.
Start each season with fresh seed packaged for the current year. Leftover seed may be inexpensive, and half-empty packets from a friend may be free, but unless stored properly the seeds may no longer be capable of germinating. If you do start with seed saved from a previous season, make sure it was stored properly (cool and dry), and do a germination test before gambling on it. See Any Life Left? on page 22 for more information.
Even if you don’t have an ideal, 8-hour, full-sun site for vegetables, don’t despair. The crops below all grow just fine with a half day of sun. Ones marked with a + will grow in full shade, but they grow best when they receive good light, so pick the brightest spot you have available.