Starting Tomato and Sweet Pepper Seeds

In years gone by, I have always purchased my tomato and green pepper plants from one of large box stores and they always have been hybrid plants. For the first time, this year I have decided to take the plunge and start my tomato and sweet peppers plants from seeds. While I have always been happy with the results, still I wanted to grow food that I could save the seed from and replant the next year.
So , this is the first year also, that I will be growing heirloom plants. Since I have never done this before, I am very nervous about it...and a tad paranoid....because I have heard that heirloom plants are not as pest and disease resistant, as hybrids. This will be interesting for sure!!! If you see something that I am doing, or not doing, please either PM me or leave a comment to this post. I am very opened to being educated and would welcome any and all advice. 

 

Getting Started:

First you need to determine when you should plant your tomato and sweet pepper seeds. There are several sites online that can help you figure that out, or you can contact a local master gardener and they can help you. Usually though, it is about 6-8 weeks before the average last frost date for your area.

Gather up your material:

There are many ways of doing this, but this is how I did it. The materials that I used was:

• potting soil
• small cardboard box trays (used to keep cups from spilling over and to make it easier to move when I clean)
• Aluminum foil (used to line the cardboard box trays to keep water from damaging the wood surface that the trays would be sitting on.)
• Paper cups
• Permanent magic marker (to mark the paper cups so I know what was planted and when)
• Scissors
• Seeds
• Water (not shown)
• Newspaper (not shown...used under the potting soil bag to reduce clean up work)
• Plastic sandwich bag (not shown)

How I Planted the Seeds:

I labeled each cup with what I intended to plant in it along with the planting date. 

 

I filled each cup ¾ full with the potting soil.

Slipping the plastic bag over my hand, I placed some seeds onto the plastic. Since small seeds are so small, they are hard to handle. I saw this neat tip on a YouTube video “Easy Method to Handle Small Seeds”and thought I would give it a try this year. It worked great!!! I simply slid the amount of seeds that I wanted to plant into the cup to the edge of the plastic and then into the cup. The seeds slid very easily into the cup without all of the other seeds spilling where I didn't want them. Much thanks and appreciation to Rick Larson  for sharing this great tip.

I then covered the seeds in each cup with about ¼ inch of potting soil. Make sure to read the back of your packet of seed to see what it says for depth. Usually though, it is twice as much depth as the diameter of the seed. 

Then I watered each cup. (Sorry about the picture being blurry.)

 

I placed the paper cups onto the foil covered trays and placed in a south facing window. And now I wait....

Thanks for reading and visiting my blog. :-) 

EDITED TO ADD: 3/19/2013 <LOL>18 days ago I planted about 10 gazillion tomato and sweet pepper seeds inside the house so I could get a head start on my veggie garden. Today, ONE of the tomato plants **finally** sprouted. Whooo Hoooo We're farming now. hahahaha :-D

EDITED TO ADD: (3/26/2013) All the seeds have now sprouted except for two. I think that the problem was the lack of sunlight. We have had cloudy days for just about every day for the past month. Once we put the planted seeds under a grow light, they sprouted within a couple of days. :-)