My Nightly Seed Starting Routine & How I Store All My Seeds

The 1 hour routine I do every night during seed starting season condensed into a 5 minute tip-filled video. This is how to make sure you have healthy plants that can fend for themselves once they're out in the world.

Planting a seed is simple. Ask any parent and they'll tell you planting your seed is the easy part; keeping that thing you grew alive until it moves out of the house to live on its own is the challenge. Once it does move out, chances are you'll still have to feed it.

When you start your seeds everything is pretty easy. Stick seeds in a hole and do a fist pump when they sprout. Within a couple of weeks, it gets more complex with plants at different stages, more seeds to start, plants to be potted up, and some to be hardened off to plant outside.

Every night I say my centipede prayer and then descend into the basement for one hour of planting and checking on the seedlings. If you do this nightly check, when the time comes to plant them out, you'll still have happy plants.

Quality Seed Time

Quality seed time, real one-on-one stuff, is how you keep your plant alive. Every year, no matter how devoted, something always ends up circling the drain and dying before you get it planted outside.

Two years ago it was ALL of my luffa plants. I let them dry out. They all died.

Luffa are the last thing I plant out & when they're still in my basement, I'm furiously trying to get the garden cleaned up and everything else I grew planted.

So I forgot/abandoned them.

One year I lost an entire flat of tomatoes, every year I have issues with damping off on my beets, and never get my onions planted early enough. It happens to me, you and experienced gardeners everywhere.

You can decrease your chance at disaster by just committing to doing a nightly check on them.

My seedling checkup takes an hour if I do a thorough job and plant new seeds as well. As I mentioned about a week ago in my post highlighting new new seed starting setup this new arrangement of shelves, lights and seeds exactly where I need them is the best I've ever had.

How I Store Seeds

I use these photograph storage cases to organize and store all of my seeds. It is not as beautiful as when I stored my seeds in wood boxes and glass vials but it's more practical.

All of my seeds are in these cases on a shelf to the left of my seed starting station so they're easy to grab and (more importantly) easy to put away when I'm done.

You can label all the individual photo cases with seed varieties and for even more practicality, arrange them NOT alphabetically, but by the date you need to sow them.

Each case has 16 individual boxes, and I have 4 of these cases. At the beginning of the season I just have to open my first case and can see immediately what I need to start, with everything in order of planting indoors.

I used my handy, old school, spin the alphabet, I use it for everything, Dymo label maker in this case.

My 1 Hour Nightly Seedling Routine

I have compressed the full hour into 5 minutes through the magic of speeding up the footage.

Throughout the 5 minutes are tips that I wouldn't necessarily think to tell you about in a regular post.

The tips are spur of the moment things I'm doing that I think are valuable bits of information for you, as a gardener, to have.

By doing this every night I'm increasing my chance at success in the garden later. Taking care of your seedlings will make them as healthy as possible, and healthy plants are strong, disease and drought resistant plants.

The better you treat your seedlings now, the better they'll treat you later on.

Some plants go under such stress if you let them dry out even once they can take weeks to recover and get back to their normal growth routine.

The Seed Starting Tips

• A lot of condensation on humidity domes usually means it's too wet in there. Leave the lid askew to dry out a bit overnight.
• Inspect for sprouting, water levels, damping off. Move anything that's ready to go from the humidity dome to under lights. Make sure bossy plants like dahlias and nasturtium aren't shading smaller plants. The big plants will eventually overtake and choke out smaller plants beneath their canopy.
• Dahlias should eye up before planting them. To help them eye up, after taking them out of storage place them in a warm, bright area. I put mine on a heating pad to encourage eyeing up.
• Shrivelled, critical condition tubers get dropped into a bucket of water overnight to help plump up.
• Sweet peas seed are prone to rot easily. I don't soak them overnight because of this and keep a careful eye on their moisture levels before sprouting. (keep an eye on that humidity dome)
• Careful about transferring disease or pests from one plant to another. Wash your hands, or use a quick spray with 1:10 bleach to water.
• Keep a watering can for fertilized solution with the cups and ratio of fertilizer you most often use written on the side. Use it for wetting your seed starting medium before planting in it.
• Planting medium should be wet but not too wet. Grab some soil in the palm of your hand and squeeze. It should take a tight fist to force a few drops of water out. That is the correct level of water for starting seeds.
• Write all your labels before you start planting. Insert them into the row before you seed.
• Drop seeds on soil for entire row. Once the row is seeded, cover the seeds up.

If nothing else, commit to laying eyes on your seedlings once a day.
Every. Single. Day.
Do not miss it even once.

The seeds I was starting in the video (some of the Floret Zinnia and Celosia collection) are below.

If you're interested in the strawberries I ordered you can see that here. And if you're now thinking you'd like to grow strawberries, you should read my strawberry growing guide right now, because you need to get those strawberries planted soon.

Finally ... did any of you notice the name of the flower I'm growing this year in one of the photos above?

I've grown it before (years ago) & I'm happy to say that this year I'm growing it again.