How to grow plants from seeds

Starting herbs and vegetables from seeds can be a long arduous journey, especially for garden amateurs. It is however, exciting to see seeds sprout and you can’t help but feel a bit of pride to see your plants flourish.

You’ll find many how-to articles on the net about how to go about starting seeds.  One method that is simple and low-cost, is to start seeds in cardboard egg cartons. Heck, there’s even a company that makes egg-carton seed starter kits – just add water!

This is a great activity for young kids – for toddlers, it’ll be a mixed bag, as their attention span will be short, and they will be interested in flipping the egg cartons over – I can attest to this interest personally – they are extremely interested, I promise you.  I also recommend that this activity be conducted outside where flipped-over egg cartons of soil will not be an issue.

Here’s the simple 1-2-3 step to egg carton seed planting

Step 1:

Layout your seeds and egg cartons, take some time to read about the seeds you’ll be planting; it’s ok, if you don’t understand all the details listed on the packet.  Write down your seed names on popsicle sticks.

Step 2:

Fill your egg cartons with garden soil, and drop in 1-3 seeds into the center of each egg cup.

Step 3: 

Set out the planted cartons near a window sill on top of aluminum foil to capture any water drainage, and moisten the soil well (you can water with a drinking glass, but I used a spray bottle in the photo above).  Label your cartons.  Water daily and wait.  Other blogs advocate covering cartons with plastic wrap to create a greenhouse effect, but then you have to remove the wrap occasionally to aerate- I am too lazy to bother.

Next Steps:

Your seeds may take and your seeds may not.  If they do, hooray!  Wait until they have a number of leaves on them and look perky and healthy before you transplant them.  If they don’t, ho-hum… If you have some extra space in your garden, transplant them anyway, and see what happens, you may be pleasantly surprised!  If they still don’t appear, double ho-hum, say goodbye and make a wish for the next planting.