6,340 Garden Web Discussions | Growing from Seed
My fixture at Lowes was $39.00!! There was one for $35.00, but it was only T12, and I figured that if I was already spending over $30.00 I might as well go with the more power saving one and won't be told in 5 years that you can't find the bulbs anymore!!
Anyway, it is nice to see someone having so much fun with their fixtures, and perhaps a little more in love with there plants then I am, my family likes to make me out as a real weirdo!! Like the attention I give my plants and the # I grow is really a very strange thing. Oh well. To each his own!
I am bad..I don;t really thin... I pot em up and whomever makes it makes it. but I pot up 2-3 times so they get handled lots.
I gave up on thinning after the cat knocked over 2 trays one I HAD thinned and one TO be thinned.. The one I had thined was a loss.
If a seedling can survive me and the 2 cats and 4 kids it stays.
It was a sad day for me too. I went to turn off my plants in the basement this morning, and discovered a tray knocked over. Either the cat or my son did it (I sent him down to turn on the lights the night before). Anyway, I lost about 10 plants out of 50 in that tray. Very sad.
I totally understand the comment about not thining, a few of them that I lost, I had just pricked out the smaller the day before, perhaps they would have survived!!
Here you go. Check out the FAQ's there on which seeds require any special treatment. Gourd seeds don't - just dry storage.
Dave
Here is a link that might be useful: Seed Saving Forum
pippajg, Gomphocarpus can take 7 days or so to germinate with a little bottom heat. If she is having trouble growing from seeds, it is easy to grow from cuttings or by wintering over a plant indoors or in the greenhouse. It is important to wait until the seed pods are mature before harvesting.
If she thinks the problem is with the viability of the seeds, email me and I will send her some of mine. It is a great Monarch plant.
i have been starting seed for about 5 years, year over year I get a little better. The biggest challenge I have had is not having a proper light set up (at least this year that is partly resolved) and I had a tendancy to get hit hard by winter blues and neglect the plants after a few weeks, resulting in high casualties!!
But, I can share with you some of my experiances using recycled containers.
I really don't like egg cartons for seed starting. I have done it in a past, with poor results compared to small jiffy pots or pellets. They just are not that deep, tend to get soggy if over watered at all, fall apart easily, and can start to mold / mildew much more easily then other growing mediums. Also, dealing with the soil to fill them is very messy, and the carton seems to not hold it in very well. I was always moving them and spilling dirt everywhere.
If you do use egg cartons, I suggest using an antifungal agent. I can only speak from experiance with a product called No Damp, however I have heard that cinamon or Camomile tea work wonders too.
I really recommend using peat pellets though. They are not that expensive, you could try just buying just the refill packs, (no trays, just pellets). It adds about 6- 8 cents per plant but saves you a world of grief! Honestly, I think you would be hard pressed to buy a good seed starting soil for much less...
As for recycling containers. I think it is fine. The only downfall would be it is best to grow on all plants about 1-2 inches away from a fluorescent light. If the containers are not a uniform height this will be difficult to provide.
That said, if you do wish to use them, make sure they have good drainage holes in the bottom, and that you clean them out well. I am a fan of a mild bleach (even 1 part bleach to 9 parts water, or a cap full or two into a sink of water, but let them soak for a bit, the thing with bleach is about contact time compared to how strong it is. A straight bleach does its job in seconds, a very weak bleach solution may be good enough, but it needs time to do its job). But, particularly if you are using a fungicide, I think soap and water is good enough.
weird for some reason I didn't get notification this had been replied to.
I guess I needed to make myself more clear in the 1st post. I was looking for an on/off type timer not a rheostat simply because that was the method I was using at the time. on for a while then off to keep the temp under control. It was working but was not as well as I liked so in the interim here is what I did:
I took the rheostat idea and ran with it. I went to Lowes and got a plug in lamp dimmer. Then I just dialed back the intensity of the lights to 75% (this had my trays all running in the mid-high 80s) so I backed it down to about 50% and now we're sitting in the 75-80 degree range pretty uniformly and I have seedlings galore.
so I'm at about $24 ($32 if you count my shop light) but I have 3 seed trays well heated/lit.
thanks for the input
Shawn
There are several Ageratum that are available as seed. Blue and other colors as well.
Here is a link that might be useful: Johnny's Selected Seeds
sakura, just going near, brushing up against, or even napping in the middle of poppies wouldn't make your cats ill, they would have to actually eat them to become sick and it's highly unlikely your cats would have any interest in eating them.
The list of things in our gardens that could make a pet ill if eaten is long (includes rhododendrons - both leaves and flowers, daffodils, yews, delphinium, iris just to name a very few) but outside the occasional bored chewing puppy, most of our pets have no interest at all in eating large amounts of foliage. I don't think you need to be concerned about poppies in the landscape and your cats.
Thank you everybody for taking your time to answer my question!
It is funny thing, I have daffodils,narcissus, california private, hydrangea, iris, etc in my garden and these plants are supposedly poisonous but my cats never got sick in these over 30 years with these plants in my back yard.
Yes, if my cats eat these plant, they get sick but they never eat these plants.
Every year my yard is full of morning glories and my daughter said seeds of morning glory is poisonous to cat but my cats never got sick.
I don't think I should worry about my cats getting sick of these plants.
Now I can sow poppy seeds without worrying about safety of my cats.
In the past, I've put a folded up newspaper over the ones who needed darkness. Some years I figure that darkness is acheived by being under the soil, so I don't worry. Most of my seedlings have been up for a couple of weeks and under lights. I still wake up in the am and see someone else has germinated over night in the dark and cooler temp.
Good luck!