Simpler Living
By Fiona Wagner • Bankrate.com

One of the many pleasures for gardeners is that spring comes early. Even though my zone five vegetable plot on our farm in eastern Ontario is still covered in a blanket of snow, I've been gardening -- in seed catalogues and on paper -- since January. And while it's only March, I'm already pulling out the potting soil. It's time to start my seedlings.

While buying young plants at a garden centre, nursery or grocery store offers a quick and easy way to start a vegetable garden -- dig hole, remove pot, plant seedling, repeat -- buying multiple plants can get expensive. You're also limited in selection. Even at the best garden centres, you're likely only to find a handful of tomato varieties, a few different coloured peppers and one kind of radish. But when you start your garden with seeds, a marvelous world of variety opens up.

As Barbara Kingsolver writes in her book "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral," in which she documents her family's year of eating food bought or grown locally, "Bronze Arrowhead lettuces, Speckled Trout romaine, red kale -- this is the rainbow of my April garden. ... It's the reason I start our vegetables from seed, rather than planting out whatever the local nursery has to offer: variety, the splendor of vegetables."

The seed catalogue I ordered from this year offered over 70 varieties of tomatoes, almost 30 kinds of beans and 20 types of lettuce. The challenge was the abundance of choice, not the dearth of it.

When buying seeds instead of seedlings, not only can you find heirloom plants with poetic names and remarkable histories, but you can customize your selections according to the growing conditions of your particular plot of earth: factors like soil type, days to maturity or heat and drought tolerance. And whether you're canning, storing, freezing, baking or, my favourite, eating fresh, there are varieties best suited for your post-harvest intentions.

For all the practical reasons for starting seeds indoors, there's also the sheer delight of doing so. In a time when most North Americans have never been so far removed from the origins of their food, nurturing your own vegetable progeny makes this relationship personal.

When you consider that a seed is actually a tiny plant embryo packaged with enough food to break from the seed and grow its first true leaves, each stage of growth culminating in an edible masterpiece of nature becomes that much more wondrous.

Getting started
While starting plants from seeds is relatively straightforward, there are a few guidelines to follow if you want decent results.

1. Know your planting dates. Seeds have different dates to maturity, so while onions, peppers and eggplants should be started 10 to 12 weeks before your region's last frost date, cucumbers, squash and melons only require four to five weeks of growth before going out in the garden. Working backward from last year's frost date, note the planting dates on the seed package and mark them on the calendar. I've found that missing a sowing date by more than two weeks once left me playing catch-up for the rest of the season.

2. Distinguish between indoor and outdoor planted seeds. While many plants need a head start on the season, cold weather vegetables such as spinach, carrots, peas and lettuce can be sown outside as soon as the ground can be worked, five to seven weeks before the last frost date.

3. Set your seeds in containers suitable to their needs. While I have a motley collection of containers -- store-bought seed trays, homemade wooden flats, recycled plastic pots and even toilet paper rolls with one end folded in -- I always match the container to the seedling's sensitivity to transplanting. Some seeds, such as peppers, can be sown in the same pot that will take them into the garden, while tomato seeds can be cast broadly into a tray before being transplanted into a larger pot. Cucumbers are very sensitive to transplanting and should be planted in a peat pot or pellet that can be planted directly. Use a sterile soil medium and keep it well drained. Plant seeds at a depth from one to three times their diameter.

4. Let there be light -- artificial light, that is. While a south-facing window can provide some of your seedlings' light requirements, most crops will require artificial light. While it's possible to buy lighted plant stands, these can be expensive and no more functional than a homemade one. This year, we used scrap wood to build a three-tiered plant stand that holds six fluorescent light ballasts bought at a police auction. While not really a reputable source of growing equipment, we figured it was a reliable one. The pros -- the grow-op pros, that is -- certainly knew how to grow the greenery.

Starting seeds takes practice. I should know, as last year I lost all of my tomatoes to damping off, a fungus that pinched off the seedlings at their base when they were about two inches tall.

But mistakes in the garden offer an opportunity to learn something new for the next growing season. And that's another one of gardening's many pleasures -- there's always next season.

Fiona Wagner is a freelance writer living in Hastings County, Ont.