If you are asking when you should start seeds indoors, watch this video and you’ll always know when is the perfect time to begin germinating seeds for raising healthy transplants and getting them out into your garden at the ideal time.
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So you want to know when to start your seeds indoors watch this video and find Out well hello backyard vegetable gardeners welcome to the backyard vegetable gardening Channel today is February the 12th 2024 and I sure hope you’re having a great day well it’s been made apparent to me by looking at social media that there sure are a lot of people who are asking the question when
Should I start my seeds indoors so today that’s what we’re going to be talking about and when it comes to starting your seeds indoors it’s really not as complicated as a lot of people think it may be the problem is they might be new to gardening and nobody’s ever explained
To them the science behind it and when I say science I know a lot of people are going to tune out but the truth is it’s simple science and we’re going to talk about just a few things today that’s going to help you know when to start
Your seeds and when it comes to starting our seeds indoors there’s really only two things that we really got to know upfront to make the determination of when we should get them started number one am I wanting to grow a cool season crop or a warm season crop that’s going
To make a big difference the second thing that we got to know is our average first and last frost date that’s going to be the most important thing you need to know so I’m going to try my best to make just a short video to explain how
To know when to start your seeds because really and truly it don’t take a lengthy explanation so remember the first thing we got to know is whether we’re growing a cool season crop or a warm season crop now some examples of cool seasoned crops are your broccoli your cabbage all your
Brascas lettuce radishes even in your carrot your warm seasoned crops your Tomatoes your peppers your cucumbers anything like that those are going to be your warm seasoned crops one of the reasons that that’s so important to know is that if you try to grow lettuce In
The Heat Of Summer you’re going to find out you’re not going to get good lettuce it’s going to quickly go to flour we call that Bolton and the leaves are going to get bter you’re not going to like it same way with your broccoli heads you’re going to spend that time
Getting that broccoli plant good and Tall the next thing you know you’re going to see a little head emerging and it gets anywhere above 70 75° I don’t care how dense that head is it’s going to go to flower and you’re not going to be able to harvest nothing so you want
To make sure that you get those planted as soon as you can to avoid that heat and one of things you can do uh to extend that is like uh when you start nearing um the end of the spring season you put you some shade cloth over top of
Your broccoli and that’ll help in your lettuce too and and you might might can get with your lettuce some slow bolt varieties and that’ll help you sorry folks had to cut out on you had a eyelash getting my eye and I just couldn’t manage to get that thing taken
Care of so we had to stop filming but what I was saying was that when you get those cool season crops planted uh and the temperature starts getting anywhere close to 70 you’re probably going to want to cover them with some shade cloth or something like that it’ll greatly
Help but once that air temperature starts getting above 70 75° some of these plants just don’t like it now your warm season crops boy they love it they especially when it gets toward the 80° Mark they really do like it but what you’ll notice is when it gets above
90° uh a lot of the plants start suffering you’ll start dropping your blooms and the leaves will start turning brown and you just can’t help it so now that we know about our cool season crops and our warm season crops and how important that is to start in your seeds
We need to know about our first and our last average Frost dates one of the easiest ways that you can find out your first and last frost date is by going to almanac.com uh go in the weather Tab and we’ve got a little short that’ll show you exactly
How to do this and look for frost dates and there’ll be a little box put your ZIP code hit the little button and it’ll show you your average first and last frost date and it’ll even tell you how many days that you have in your growing
Season greatly help you so with that out of the way we got to start talking about these plants all right we’re going to start seeds indoors we’re going to grow them we’re going to keep them inside for several weeks maybe a couple months uh for me I’m going to start some warm
Season plants here in just a few weeks and they’re going to be inside about eight some of them 10 weeks I’ve got to have somewhere to keep those plants you start out in trays that you’re going to germinate you’re going to sell these little bitty plants well next thing you
Know you’re going to have tomato plants that are 8 10 12 in tall and your pepper plants same way peppers are going to grow a little slower than your Tomatoes but still so you’re going to have these plants that are going to be almost foot
Tall and 6 or 8 inches around what you going to do with all them they take up a lot more space than these little seed starting trays that we got you got to be aware of that the last thing you want to do is to grow a bunch of plants in your
Indoors and then have nowhere to put them uh the second problem that you might run into if you start them too early is that you’re going to have to pot them up now for a lot of people this is general practice I don’t much care to
Spend a lot of time potting things up I’m going to put them in an oversized tray or cup and that’s where they’re going to stay the whole time they’re here I don’t like spending a lot of time I’m a busy fellow and many of you you got full-time jobs you’ve got other
Things you do the kids Family Church community you don’t want to spend no more time on stuff than you just have to so if you start them too early the plants are going to get big the root systems going to develop too large and
If you don’t pot them up that is to take them out of that little bitty Cil or cup and plant them into a bigger one they’re going to get they’re going to become root bound that might even stun them uh might even hurt them so bad that they
Never fully recover from it they could die but the chances of that probably pretty slim more than likely what’s going to happen is you’re going to stunt your plant and that means when you get them out in the garden they’re going to take a little longer to revive
Themselves get healthy and start growing like they should so that’s a couple things that I’m just going to warn you about up front now I really don’t like to miss my seed starting date by too awful much but if you’re off a few weeks it’s probably not going to hurt you but
If you do have to be off a few weeks you want to be a little later rather than sooner to prevent those problems see if I start them a little later than they should I can always give them a little fertilizer and make them a little bit
Bigger a little quicker um when they’re too too large and I don’t have knowwhere to put them or they outgrow the root the root system outgrows the container then I got to start doing extra work that added work just makes my life a little more complicated a little more hectic a
Little more stressful and I try to keep those things out of my life as much as I can and I’m sure you do too so with that being said the most important thing to know is your average first and last frost dates see we don’t want to put our
Plants out in the garden after we’ve spent so much time and so giving them so much care indoors just to have them killed off by the frost now your cooler season crops they might can handle a light frost some of them are very Hardy and they can handle a good amount of
Frost without dying it might burn their leaves back or something but it’s not going to kill them and you try that with a cucumber or a Pepper or a tomato and you’ll find out real quick um that plant didn’t like that didn’t appreciate it and it’s going to die then you got to
Start all over now if it happens early enough you got plenty of time you just throw your some out there in a good warm ground wait you you know 6 8 10 weeks you’ll see your plants start doing good but you still got to wait all those days
To maturity and kind of defeated the purpose of starting them indoors cuz that’s what we’re doing we’re trying to get big healthy plants so we can get them out there because that’s when we start counting our days to harvest and you know that’s one thing I think I
Should mention when you look at your seed packet it’s going to tell you days to maturity it’s going to say days to harvest and it’s not going to tell you if that’s from the day you planted you started your seed or the day you transplanted that plant out in the
Ground Just A good rule of thumb if it doesn’t say uh from days to harvest from seed germination then you might as well assume it’s from when you transplanted out in the ground and that’s just a little tip little bonus there so what I’m going to do is I’m going to give you
An example uh just a few scenarios what you might can expect and this is when I’m going to start looking at my little notes Here the first example we’re going to use is broccoli I’m going to lift my head up so I’m not peeking my microphone uh my average last frost date ranges
Between April 19th and 27th so I can say the last week of April and uh it’s a cool season crop it can be transplanted two weeks before that date and I need to start growing it indoors four to 6 weeks before the trans the day I want to
Transplant so typically I’m going to start my seeds six to 8 weeks before that frost date pretty simple ain’t it same thing would go with the peppers the tomatoes any of those nightshade family crops except for potatoes potatoes are nightshade so with our Tomatoes same thing applies my last frost is going to
Come April 19th to April 27th I can plant them in I can transplant them out in my garden two weeks after that date and I need to start them inside six to eight weeks before that now you could probably uh do a couple more weeks if
You wanted to if you had the room I don’t have the room so I need to start my seeds around March 88th inside you can see it’s the 12th so I’ve got about a month before I really should start those seeds with all that being said
That’s how you start that’s how you know when to start your seeds now one thing I’m going to mention is it’s very apparent on the internet that there’s a great deal of confusion about a growing zone or a plant hardiness Zone as it’s really called it’s a USDA plant
Hardiness Zone and what that means is how cold it typically gets in for a particular region has nothing to do when we start our seeds it has everything to do with which plants can survive the harshness of the winter in our area so if you live where I live in zone 7B I’m
Not going to try to keep any Citrus outside but if I was in zones 9 or 10 I’d very I’d very well have me a row of some Citrus for me in zone 7B my Citrus has to come indoors during the winter uh and that’s perfectly fine you know this
The first year we’re actually trying that so far so good the plants are doing good they’re healthy um going to start taking them outside soon as the day get just a little warmer if when the days start averaging in the middle 60s I’m going to start putting them out there so
That’s how we know when to start our seeds safely indoors so if you’ve learned something or found this content enjoyable please hit that like button consider subscribing to the channel and if you’ve got some friends out there that are curious about when to start their seeds why you share it with them
On other social media folks and you can also follow us on Facebook and Instagram and you’ll find out that I’ll share some stuff there that I can’t really share on YouTube platform and as always we sure are glad to be with you hope you’re having a great day see you on the next
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