The Garden Year, Week Two: The Seedling-Calendar
The second week of January opens and, for some reason, I feel like I’m already behind.
Why aren’t my tomato seeds already started? Do I even WANT a decent garden this year?
It’s an amusing pivot, considering just a week ago I was congratulating myself for having already ordered all my seeds and started sketching out a few variations of plans for garden layout. I was marching smoothly toward spring with a confident and well-organized strategy.
And then, double-digit January dates hit.
It’s basically spring. Why am I not hard at work??
The narrow path that divides the calm, mindful, existentialism of the garden (“whatever works; let nature help”) with the committed daily work of being a gardener (“have to keep up on the chores!”) is trickiest when the canvas is blank. Wandering through the watery grey doldrums of late winter, craving that bit of sunshine here-and-there (it’s 45 degrees out! Can I plant lettuce?), it exacerbates the need to feel like we’re working toward something - or at least keeping up on our chores.
The danger here is that we pre-plan too much, without forethought of the practical calendar of nature. The well-meaning novice thinks: “tomatoes take a generous amount of time to get started; if I start them now, I’ll have the earliest tomatoes on the block!”
Nature responds: “Ha. You think so, eh?”
In our excitement to get things moving toward our gardens, we need to keep in mind a few things:
Time to seedling maturity
Seedling (indoor) needs
Plant (outdoor) needs
Indoor space/resources
Time to Maturity
Use the listing for your individual seed variety to do some backwards-scheduling. If your garden is usually warmed and ready for planting by the end of May, and your seed-variety recommends that you “start indoors 8 weeks before planting out,” then you’d count back from late May to an estimated plant-indoors-time of late March/early April. Adding an extra week or so isn’t usually a problem; adding two extra months? You’ll end up with scraggly, unhealthy babies, so desperate to get outside that you may be doing them irreparable harm…
Seedling/Plant needs
…such as space and nutrition, for starters. Many seed-starting media have little-to-no nutrition in them. Technically, a seed contains all the nutrition it needs to get going, so fertilizing a seed is usually a waste of money. Therefore seed-starting mixes are usually made to be sterile and neutral to give the seed a clean blank slate to get started. However, it will eventually need some nutrition, so taking too long indoors could result in starving starts. Seedlings often are slightly more resilient in being transplanted when young; as they start to mature, they develop larger roots, tubers, or taproots that are more easily and unforgivably damaged by compaction or transplanting. Waiting too long to get them outside may increase your risks of root damage and transplant shock.
Extrapolating further into the garden, the baby plants you’re starting have varied and specific needs that often can’t be met by an early-start. Tomatoes and beans refuse to grow in cold, wet soil. So, even if you manage to pre-start some big, healthy, happy plants for your “earliest harvest ever”, when you put them out in early May you’ll find them sulky and disease-prone, and risking instant-death from a last-minute cold snap. Your early tomatoes have become zero tomatoes.
Day-length is an important consideration for plant-needs as well - Morning Glories (Ipomoea) were my lesson in this regard. My grandma grew the best morning glories, and would always be sure to start them early indoors, as they take their time in establishing. Every year I’d try to start them earlier and earlier, in the hopes of getting as big and precocious of a show as possible, and every year it was more-or-less the same. They’d putter along until midsummer before they finally decide to put a little effort in and actually throw out some blooms for late July and on.
How can I get these to bloom earlier, dammit??
I tried starting them even earlier indoors, until the seedlings would become a tangled mess of sad, dying tendrils, wound all around my seed-starting table, and still not a bud before the Fourth of July. And then I discovered the concept of “day-length requirements”.
Many plants’ patterns are triggered hormonally not by age, or heat, or nutrition, but simply by day-length. Until the daytime is longer than the nighttime, Morning Glories simply aren’t convinced of a need to bloom. So, no matter how early I started them, nature will always be against the idea of a “May morning-glory”. So, relax, and stop trying to fight nature.
(Note: Day-length needs can be overcome by high-quality artificial lighting, if you’re desperate and have the space/time/money).
Seedlings need light, space to grow, and gentle nutritional support. Plants need warmth, steady sun, and regular (but not overbearing) moisture. Ask yourself if those needs will be met by the schedule of growth you’re planning.
Indoor Space/Resources
So you decide to start those tomatoes early, and promise not to put them out until the soil (not the air) is 60 degrees? Great. Consider that in mid-April, you’re going to have a jungle of foot-high tomato plants on standby. The seedlings will need to be repotted into growing compost, they’ll need regular irrigation, they’ll need support lighting from high-quality artificial lighting, and they’ll need lots of space to continue to grow healthfully. If you have that available, you’re lucky - and I hope to taste one of your June 1st tomatoes! However, like most of us, that’s a pretty big commitment. Just like my early-started (and failed) morning glories that kudzu-style engulfed my growing shelf, and were killed by the untangling process (among other atrocities), plants won’t stop growing just because we’re not ready to plant them. They’ll either need to keep getting bigger, or they’ll start getting sicker. And we’re the ones committing half our living room to the garden-prep.
Cold-frames and soil-warming techniques can help to give you a little boost on the timeline, but they won’t fix poor planning.
Plan Comfortably
I sit down with a calendar and a list of what seeds I’m hoping to grow, and organize directly. I categorize my seeds into four piles:
Sow outdoors early (for cold-tolerant varieties that don’t like or need to be transplanted - poppies, claytonia, coriander, calendula)
Sow outdoors late (for varieties that need warm soil, but don’t like or need to be transplanted - four-o’clocks, beans, sunflowers)
Sow indoors early (for varieties that could use a boost indoors, but are fine going outside while it’s still cold - sweet peas, lettuce, chard)
Sow indoors late (for the heat-lovers that need a generous head-start - tomatoes, chiles, phlox)
These piles constitute a “to-do list”, so I can begin to visualize the general work that will need to be done. I’ll review each pile for minor variations - for instance, I start my squashes indoors usually, but they’re a much faster grower than a chile pepper. Even though they’re both heat-lovers that will go out into the garden at the same time in early June, I’ll start the chiles in March (8-10 weeks), but the squash in May (3-4 weeks).
Write these all in your calendar with a generalized “week-long plan” - i.e. “The Week of April 1: plant warm crop seeds”
Then be happy and patient. You’re doing the right work that needs to be done now, and spring will be here before you know it.