It’s not too late to get started with some seedlings, but it’s close. Depending on where you live, and the climate, you can now sow many seeds right into the ground. In other places, it’s good to lengthen your growing season by starting your plants inside. All you need is some seeds, containers, soil, light, and warmer temperatures. We have a grow light in the basement set to mimic daylight hours, but you can put yours in a good, sunny window if you’ve got one. Protected from the elements, but warm and with enough light. In many places, it’s a good idea to get tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and other longer maturing plants started inside.
In Portland, even though we’re at (or may have passed) our final frost for the year, the recommendation for this month is still to sow colder weather varieties like lettuce, spinach, arugula, (and other salad green type things), cabbage, broccoli, brussel sprouts, peas, etc outside. This works great, because many of those things mature quickly and ready to be replanted (or removed depending on your space and priorities) by the time your tomatoes, peppers, and other late-summer producers are ready to go in.
If you haven’t started your late-summer plants yet, you should definitely get moving. These plants need a while to germinate and grow to an appropriate transplant height. There is a fantastic book about gardening in the Northwest called “The Maritime Northwest Garden Guide“. This guide gives a few good soil recipes for starting plants indoors:
Basic Sowing Mix
- 1 part soil or composted sod
- 1 part leaf mold or moss/thatch compost
- 1 part sand, granite grit or pumice
Or, if you do not have these components sitting around, you can make life simpler by making the:
Store-Bought Sowing Mix*
- 1 part sphagnum moss or coconut hulls
- 1 part perlite and vermiculite
- 1/2 part vermicompost (worm castings)
- 1 part sand or pumice(
- (* Add 1/4 cup lime for each 1 cubic foot of potting soil if sphagnum moss is used. Parts of this mix can be purchased at any garden store. Without the worm castings, this mix does not provide enough nutrients for good seedling growth.)
Or, if you have children, and need the simplest thing possible, you can do what we did and buy a good potting soil (we used Black Gold) and mix it 1/2 and 1/2 with perlite (to allow a lightness to the soil needed for small seedlings to emerge). As your plants get bigger you can transplant many of them into a mix that is heavier on soil and lighter on perlite (if not excluding the perlite all together). Or perhaps they’ll already be ready to go straight into the garden.
I decided to try a trick with my tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. Since as larger seedlings they need a much richer soil to remain healthy, I decided to start them in larger 4″ containers that were filled with 100% potting soil in the bottom 3/4 and the mix of soil and perlite only at the top. That way, as my logic goes, as the plant grows, the roots will descend into the more nutrient rich soil, preventing the need for an additional transplant. I’ll let you know how it goes.
The key thing, as Seth and I learned in our gardening efforts in Africa, is to thin your seedlings. I like to sow a few seeds in each pot, because not all of them grow well. But once a winner seems to have emerged, it’s important to pull the others out. If you don’t allow adequate space, you won’t get good growth. Also, it becomes more difficult to thin as the plants get larger and their roots are tangled. Damaging your root systems during transplantation may kill the plant when you’re ready to get it to your garden.
Portland Nursery has a fantastic “Veggie Calendar” you can download that tells us Northwesterners when to plant your various seeds indoors and/or outdoors, as well as when to transplant your seedlings. It also gives you a good guide for spacing when planting. If you don’t live in the Northwest, it is probably a good idea to show the list to your local nursery and ask if there are any changes they would suggest.
