The real magic of a vegetable garden happens when you put a seed in the ground, and it turns into a plant. That's the way food has been grown for thousands of years. But in our more hurried, I want it now world, planting a garden has become more and more about putting starts- plants somebody else has grown in a greenhouse- into your backyard plot.
There's nothing wrong with using seedlings to get a jump on the season for some crops. Tomatoes and peppers need a longer growing season than we have in order to produce a good harvest. But corn, lettuce, peas, beans, and most of the produce we can grow here in Oregon not only do fine planted from seed, they do better.
Planting from seed will save you a lot of green- I mean cash. You get 200 lettuce seeds in a packet for a dollar twenty-nine, or six plants for three dollars. Planting from seed will help your plants do better because they won't sprout until conditions are right, and they won't have to deal with transplant shock.
I have put broccoli plants, and broccoli seeds in the ground at the same time, and had a bigger harvest from the seed sown plants than from the nursery starts.
But the biggest benefit of tearing open a package, and planting your garden by putting seeds in the ground is the amazing realization that a dust sized spec can turn into a carrot, a cabbage, or a whole hill of squash. Despite 50 years of gardening, I am still impressed by how fast a corn seed can get to be 10 feet tall.
Getting good germination does require a little extra care. Carrots need to be kept moist for 10 days. Onions look like grass when they sprout- don't weed them out of you garden. And lettuce will come up better if you firm the soil over the seeds rather than leave it soft..
Perhaps the hardest part of planting from seed is overplanting- and then thinning. The seeds seem so insignificant when you are sprinkling them into a row. But when the lettuce sprouts- three plants to the inch, most of the plants need to be removed, or transplanted... Six inches between heads of lettuce will give them more space, and you more food.
You will suffer failures. Crows will pluck up the corn, slugs will mow down the bean sprouts, and squash will rot in the cold wet ground if you put them in too early.
But the thrill of watching the first leaves pop out of the ground, turn into a healthy beet, and end up on you table makes the waiting worth while, and the harvest all the sweeter.
