Starting Seeds on the Cheap

With such a long winter here in Massachusetts, I have to start my plants indoors if I expect to have a head start once the ground warms. I've done a few things already.  I set a few old storm windows on top of the thawed grow boxes to help heat the ground below. This serves a few purposes; it warms the soil so I can get lettuce and cold weather plants in earlier but in some boxes, I want to super heat them to kill off any weed seeds before I fertilize or add my compost.

Notice a bit of snow still outside.. Other boxes are still under 6 inches of snow drifts.

So I'm trying to save as much money and not go overboard on spending. One thing I strive for this year is to go completely organic. I have a big box of organic fertilizer to add to the soil once I get ready to mix things up.

 Meanwhile, indoors, I have started over 30 seedlings in a dollar store cake box. I decided to try tomatoes and peppers and three broccoli plants filled up the container. I started them in peat pots. First wet them thoroughly, then drain off excess water once the pots expand. I  sunk each seed just under the surface and covered them up

Once the pots expand, go ahead and insert your seeds.

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Make sure you know what you planted where. I used half popsicle sticks but found they were hard to insert. I'll save the rest for outdoors and use some cut up hard plastic from something in the recycle bin.

In order for them to sprout, they need moisture and warmth. To provide warmth, I simply set the container on my cable box, which was nice and warm. In three days, all three broccoli seeds sprouted but none of the tomatoes or peppers have. So I took the three starts and put them right under one of my grow lights,  3W LED lamps I got from eBay. It is all red and blue lights and since it runs cool, it won't burn the plants.

One problem I noticed right away was that I should have put them under the light in the morning when I noticed them just breaking through, because by evening, they jumped to over an inch each, looking for light. I ended up ordering some heat mats from eBay and those were under $40 including shipping

Here they are under the first LED grow light. My heat mats came in so I'll transfer them to the mats and under my 4 ft. florescent grow lights. It's a standard shop light with one grow light and one cool white to balance things out.  I read that it will work just fine.

Another day and several more seeds popped, only tomatoes. I think peppers take a bit longer, so we'll see. I marked the sticks 1T, 2T, 1P, 2P etc. to keep track of what variety I plated in each. See the picture above to see that I marked each packet. These are now under florescent lights on one of my heat mats.

These heat mats certainly aren't anything fancy, but for $18.99 each shipped, they work as advertised.  The size fits a standard seedling tray. The thermometer on top registers exactly 80 degrees while the house is closer to 60.
I'll keep moving plants out of the cake dome as needed and monitor each variety.