Welcome to Day 8 of the 30 Day Challenge: How to Start a Vegetable Garden. Yesterday I shared some of the mistakes I made when planting my seeds. There is definitely a learning curve with gardening, which is why I decided to go 100% in and give it a try. We always learn more by doing than by reading.

Today, I want to share with you the two methods I learned of to plant seeds quicker and easier. One is for you to use when you are starting your seeds in pods, the other is for starting your seeds in the ground.

Starting Seeds in Pods

In Day 7's article How To Start A Vegetable Garden - 30 Day Challenge - My Seed Sprouting Mistakes, I mentioned that I took my seed starter soil and put it into my seed starting kit dry. Then I added water, but it was so dry I needed to stir the soil and add water multiple times to make it damp and ready to accept the seeds.

This was a very slow and tedious process.

A better way to do this is to pour your dry seed starter soil into a bucket. Add water and stir until all of the soil is damp. Then, use this soil to fill your pods in your seed starting kit.

Once all of the pods are filled, put 2 or 3 seeds on top of the soil.

Then take a few pinches of damp soil from your bucket and sprinkle it over the seeds making sure to cover them lightly. This method provides lots of room for the seed to grow since the soil is not packed down on top of it.

When I did this step a few weeks ago, I made a hole in the soil, dropped the seed in and covered it back up. I noticed that the holes I was making was frequently deeper than the depth suggested on the packet for proper germination of the seed. I also realized that the soil was a little more compact than the seeds needed when I used this method.

This method is so much faster and easier than the way I did it before. I tested it out on some bigger pots I planted carrots and marigolds in (not together) and it worked much better.

Starting Seeds in the Ground

I recently came across a pin on Pinterest which discussed how to make seed tapes. The idea is to take a paper towel or single ply toilet paper, cut it into strips, use a flour / water paste to "glue" seeds every few inches and place the entire seed tape into the ground to grow perfectly spaced plants.

The lady who posted this, she goes by dotnik on Hubpages, said her inspiration for this idea came from the desire to stop "killing" seedlings during the thinning process. She was seeking a more efficient way to obtain the spacing she needed for her plants without wasted seeds or removing perfectly good plants.

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!