Ladies and Gentlemen — Start your seeds!

When it comes to planting vegetables, gardeners have at least four options. First, there’s the time-honored method of planting seeds directly in the ground. Second is to buy seedlings and transplant them into the garden. Third is to start seeds indoors, several weeks before the optimum outdoor planting time for each vegetable type. The fourth is a combination of two or all of these options.

It’s obvious that there’s no one right way, and many gardeners do a hybrid of planting possibilities. A person’s approach may even change from year to year as time and inclination change.

If you’re not much of an advance planner, options 1 and 2 are the best: Wait until planting time, and then put in seeds, plants or both. But if you just can’t wait for the gardening season to arrive, and if you enjoy the excitement of experimentation, starting seeds indoors is a great option. It doesn’t actually take that much to get started. Mostly, you need a few basic materials and a calendar. And now is a good time to begin planning.

Let’s talk calendar first, since the timing is important. The idea of starting seeds indoors is mostly to get a jump on the growing season for veggies like tomatoes, eggplants and peppers that need a longer summer than what we’ve got here. However, there’s such a thing as starting too early. Unless you have some kind of indoor light system, those robust little infant plants will grow into gangly, leggy adolescents.

Just like teenagers who can empty a refrigerator in a single snack, once seedlings are a couple of weeks old, they need a ton of “nutrition,” in the form of sunlight. If you start too early, you’ll have a bunch of teenage plants on your hands that need more light than you can probably provide without dedicated lighting.

Here’s a list of the vegetables that benefit the most from getting a head start inside and the number of weeks ahead of the frost date to sow the seeds. I usually go by a last possible frost date of May 15, though some charts show April 30. Even though we’ve seen warm weather come earlier and earlier lately, it doesn’t seem to have changed the

last frost date. Eggplant 8 weeks Peppers 8 weeks Tomatoes 5-6 weeks Cucumbers 4-5 weeks Melons 4 weeks maximum

The reason for starting these particular plants early is that they require a long growing period to produce fruits. For instance, beefsteak tomatoes require about 85 days. This is why Burpee created their Early Girl (50 days to harvest) and Early Boy (66 days to harvest) hybrids: people living in areas with short summers can still enjoy homegrown tomatoes.

For containers, there are a so many options: plastic, peat, “cow pots,” coir pellets, and do-it-yourself newspaper pots. There are also some great seed-starting systems available, and it’s easy to go overboard. But you can use almost anything that will hold soil, e.g., empty 6-oz. yogurt containers, or quart or half-gallon milk/juice cartons (the kind with a screw-on cap). Make holes in the bottom of both of these, for drainage.

Good potting soil is essential. Garden soil is usually too heavy, and carries with it the potential for “damping off,” which is deadly to new seedlings.

An ample, south-facing windowsill may provide enough light and warmth. Warmth is most important for germination. Consider putting your seed trays on top of your refrigerator or in another warm spot.

While you’re waiting for your seeds to sprout and for the middle-ofMay target date for planting outside, read up on “hardening off.” That’s the process of gradually acclimating tender indoor plants to the rigors of being outside. This includes getting them used to sunlight and wind.

Note: If you’d like instructions on making newspaper seed-starting pots, send me an email.

PHOTO BY PAM BAXTER Tomato seedlings.