Welcome to Day 7 of the 30 Day Challenge: How to Start a Vegetable Garden. Yesterday, we discussed selecting your seeds and I also shared some of the things I learned from my first set of seeds I planted this year. If you missed Day 6, it is published here on StreetArticles under the title How To Start A Vegetable Garden - 30 Day Challenge - All About Seeds.

Today I want to share HOW I planted my seeds, the inefficient way I planted them, and some mistakes I made once they became seedlings.

Ignorance is Not Always Bliss

One beautifully warm March afternoon, I took my family to the Dollar Store to purchase some containers for our garden. We were pleasantly surprised to learn that they were also selling seeds for 4 packages for $1! Needless to say, we got a little excited and ambitiously purchased at least 40 different types of plants. Add in some seed starter soil and some seed starter pods and we were ready for planting!

After spending hours learning about raised bed gardens and rain water containment units, I was a little overwhelmed by the thought of researching how to start 40 different types of plants from seed.

A few days went by of beautiful spring weather and I got the itch...I had to get some of those seeds in the dirt!

So, I threw caution to the wind and started planting. I decided to start with tomatoes, lettuce, spinach, yellow squash, zucchini, broccoli and cauliflower all in little seed starter pods.

Having never planted seeds for a garden before, the first thing I did was pour the seed starter soil into the tiny little pods. Then I added water and mixed. And mixed. And mixed to get that very dry dirt damp. It was a very slow process that took a lot of my patience. Of course, my daughter loved doing it, which helped a lot.

Next, I made little holes in the soil and placed 2 or 3 seeds in each hole. Then I buried the seeds, spritzed the top of the soil with water, placed the cover on the seed starter kit and eagerly waited for my plants to grow.

What I Learned

A few weeks went by and I saw that only about 25% of my lettuce, broccoli, and cauliflower germinated, none of my spinach germinated, and roughly 50% of my tomatoes germinated .

My first thought was I did something terribly wrong and started doing the research I should have done in the first place. I learned two very important things from this research:

• Until a seed becomes a seedling, it does not need sunlight or food (fertilizer). What it needs is a warm, moist atmosphere to germinate. Since it is still a seed, it must be watered gently from the top of the container. A water bottle does this best since it applies water with a fine mist that does not disturb the seeds.
• Once the seed becomes a seedling and starts to pop out of the soil, the plant needs a minimum of 12 hours of sunlight each day (this can be from a grow light), and it must be watered from the bottom in order to encourage strong roots to grow.

My seedlings received natural sunlight through the window, but only about 6 hours per day. I was also still watering the plants with the water bottle as I thought I had read somewhere that it was good for seedlings as well. As a result, some of my tiny seedlings met their demise.

In my research, I also learned of a more efficient way to get those seeds into the soil. That will be tomorrow's article where I will have two different tips on how to do this.

30 Day Challenge

For those of you who are following along with the challenge, how are you doing? Have you started your seeds yet? What are you growing this year? If you have any questions, please post them here or on my blog and I will do my best to help you. See you tomorrow!