• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer
Home Garden Joy
  • Home
  • Blog
  • Start Here
    • Seed Starting
    • Composting Basics
    • Vegetable Gardening
    • Growing Fruit
    • Growing Herbs
  • Recipes
    • Canning and Food Preservation
    • Vegetarian Meals
    • Salad Recipes
    • Soup Recipes
    • Dinner Recipes
    • Dessert Recipes
  • Books & Classes
    • Classes
    • Books
    • Books for Christian Herbalists
  • About
    • Advertise
    • Awards and Accolades
    • Privacy Policy

Seed Starting Basics – Seed Catalogs

January 5, 2012 by Jeanne

Spring is the time to learn – or review – seed starting basics. It’s a great way to get into gardening. Growing your own plants from seeds opens up so many possibilities for a great garden.

Seed Starting Basics

Last night was our first night of the Master Gardener class here in Virginia, and as I sat at the table and waited for class to begin, someone walked in with a huge box of seed catalogs.  I have easily as many catalogs, if not more, than what was in her box.  At last count there are a dozen catalogs on my coffee table, a few in the magazine rack, and even more in the recycling bin in the garage. And that’s not counting the bulb catalogs which begin arriving in August!

Seed Starting Basics – Catalogs

Seed catalogs are so commonplace in my house that I did a double take as I heard someone in the room last night say, “I didn’t know there were so many catalogs.”  I started thinking about how I learned about seed catalogs and I realized that we always had seed catalogs in my home growing up. The arrival of the Parks and Burpee catalogs heralded the start of gardening season. It was like opening day in baseball – you just knew spring was around the corner when those two catalogs appeared. My dad would dog ear the pages and take the catalog into the bathtub at night to peruse. Sometimes he would fall asleep in the tub, and I’d find a wrinkled, ripply catalog drying out on the furnace in the basement after its quick dunk in the tub the previous evening.

But what if you didn’t grow up reading seed catalogs? What if the whole idea of planting a garden fascinates you, and you love the idea of growing your own food, but it’s all new?

garden seed starting basics

Seed starting basics begin with seeds and seed catalogs. Nowadays, that also encompasses shopping for seeds online.  You can pretty much find anything you desire to grow online – anything. I have seen houseplant seeds for sale such as African violet seeds (I tried them and couldn’t get a single seed to germinate) to the commonplace, such as sunflowers, tomatoes and lettuce.

You can also find seed packages at your local garden center and home and garden stores such as Lowe’s and Home Depot.  They usually start to appear on the shelves by mid to late January.  That doesn’t mean that is the right time to plant them, by the way. Like Christmas decorations on the shelves in September, it’s just the merchant’s way of enticing you to buy them early and often.

garden vegetable seeds

The way to tell when you should plant your seed packages is to flip them over and look on the back. Most companies provide detailed planting instructions right there on the back of the package.  Many provide a map with colorful bands across it. Take a look at the map of the United States, find your state and approximate location, and look at the color key.  That tells you the gardening zone where you live. Zone refers to the USDA Hardiness Zone and it gives you an approximately guide to planting various things outdoors.  If you use your ‘frost free’ date in the spring (the last average date of frost for your area) and count backwards the approximate number of days and weeks recommended to germinate and properly start your seeds indoors, that’s about the time you should begin planting your seeds inside.

Not everything grows well from seeds. Some seeds are quite easy to start. Other plants need started sets (roots), bulbs, tubers or corms (root parts) to grow.

If you’re interested in ordering seeds by mail, start with the major sites such as Park Seed (www.parkseed.com), Burpee (www.burpee.com) and a few others.  Browse first by area of interest – vegetables, herbs, annual flowers, perennial flowers.  Take note of what conditions you have outside. Sun or partial shade?  That guides your choices to some extent. Most vegetables require full sun, defined as six or more hours per day, in order to do well.  You have more choices when it comes to flowers, for there are many beautiful flowers that do well in partial shade and even full shade.

Start this week to browse the seed catalogs online.  But don’t buy anything yet unless you’re absolutely sure it’s what you want.  As the weeks progress, you may see something in the store that’s more enticing or learn about a new variety from a friend. Now’s the time for planning!

Jeanne
Jeanne

Jeanne Grunert is a certified Virginia Master Gardener and the author of several gardening books. Her garden articles, photographs, and interviews have been featured in The Herb Companion, Virginia Gardener, and Cultivate, the magazine of the National Farm Bureau. She is the founder of The Christian Herbalists group and a popular local lecturer on culinary herbs and herbs for health, raised bed gardening, and horticulture therapy.

Tweet
Share
Pin
Share
0 Shares

Filed Under: Seed Starting

Previous Post: « The Tenacity of Broccoli
Next Post: Buy Fresh, Buy Local Chapter Forming for Southside Virginia »

Primary Sidebar

Let’s Connect!

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Pinterest
  • RSS
  • YouTube

Featured

logo of the american horticulture society

Home Garden Joy was featured by the American Horticultural Society on #plantchat.

My Books on Amazon

cover of plan and build a raised bed garden

Visit my author page on Amazon to find all of my fiction and gardening books.

Herbal Academy Teachers

Footer

a single strawberry hanging over the edge of a wooden raised bed

Growing Strawberry Plants

Growing strawberry plants is one of my favorite gardening adventures. Once they get growing, strawberry plants produce abundant strawberry fruit. Outwit the birds, and you’ve got your own personal fruit supply for several weeks, or you can make a strawberry jam recipe that tastes like a burst of summer. Growing Strawberry Plants To grow healthy…

Read More

water droplets in sunbeams over a raised bed vegetable garden

How to Start a Vegetable Garden from Scratch

If you are looking for information on how to start a vegetable garden from scratch, you may find yourself lost in a sea of advice. I’ll make it easy for your start a backyard vegetable garden by breaking down the steps into four simple categories: Location, Soil, Size, Timing. Where Should You Plant Your Vegetables?…

Read More

a browned overcooked coconut bar on a blue flowered plate

Recipe Fail – Coconut Bars

Each weekend, I dig out my favorite cookbook – the Fannie Farmer Cookbook, 13th Edition. I flip through the pages, skimming the recipes, checking to see if I have the ingredients to make those that catch my eye. And then, I make the recipe, usually late Sunday afternoon after all the chores are done. It’s…

Read More

peach tree cuttings in a pot on a windowsill

Propagating Peach Trees from Softwood Cuttings

We decided that propagating peach trees from softwood cuttings was the way to go when we couldn’t find the variety we wanted at the store this past week. The best eating peach we’ve ever grown here at Seven Oaks Farm is “Red Haven.” It was recommended by our neighbor, a man whose family has farmed…

Read More

Copyright © 2022 Home Garden Joy on the Foodie Pro Theme