Warm Season Seed Starting - It's Time!

It's time good gardeners - gather your materials for warm season indoor seeding. Not to worry if you're just not able to start seeds indoors this year - there will be plenty of transplants to choose from at your favorite garden center. They are already stocked with cool season vegetable bulbs (onions), tubers/roots (horseradish, rhubarb) and many ornamental blooming bulbs like dahlias, gladiolas and begonias.

Right now is the time to seed the majority of plants and vegetables that prefer to grow in warm temperatures after the final spring frost-which is anyone's guess. I use May 20 or the end of May. Nights below fifty-five degrees are also risky for warm loving transplants, so keep all these variables in mind when you start seeds indoors.

Simply read the seed packet for weeks to grow to transplant size based on the final freeze date plus refer to my planting and seeding chart below. Most tomatoes are ready for hardening off outside before going in the ground after six or eight weeks. If left to grow longer indoors they may get leggy in growth habit which makes them less easy to plant.

LINK to annual ornamental seeding/planting chart.

LINK to herb and cool season seeding/planting chart.

Here's the warm season vegetable seeding/planting chart. Please pardon the spacing errors, I just updated to a newer version of Word and the document went squirrelly when converted to a pdf, guess I need to go back to Microsoft school for help.