I have a love/hate relationship with gardening the past few years. I have been a big gardener in the past, but not every year. But to spare you the nasty details, I thought I would just jump to the meat of this post: how starting your own seeds is so much cheaper and really easy to do! I may or may not garden this year. Not decided yet. Anyway….

One part of gardening that I have discovered in the past was how easy it is to grow my own seedlings. If you have ever gone to a nursery you know how expensive gardening can be! Tomato plants, flowers, herbs….they are usually around $5 a pop. It can add up if you buy all of your plants. The last few years I wanted to save some money gardening. So I planted many things from seed. Pictured here are tomatoes, peppers, basil, eggplant, and marigolds. I planted my seeds in small containers (that they could grow into) and kept them in a warm sunny place in my house (which happened to be my master bedroom.)

I took this photo of my seedlings in May of 2008, and they had been growing for about 5 weeks or so before that. As you can see from my full grown garden photo below (from 2008), these seedlings took off once I put them in my garden….and my harvest was bountiful! All from seeds I planted myself. I saved around $50 doing this. I already had most of the seeds from the year before, so I didn’t have to buy many seeds. I am starting my own seeds this year too. I am trying some new seeds this year: cauliflower and melons.

I highly recommend the book, All New Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew. Check it out from your library first before you buy it. I am glad I purchased it however, because if you are going to garden this way, you need it as a reference. I am always looking up information in there. Because of time and space, I won’t go into more detail here about SFG, but there are many places online to look up the information, as well as the book. Square Foot Gardening is the perfect solution for people like me with a small backyard or who want to garden the easy way! I have been gardening this was since 2007.

Last year I tried something new and used clear plastic totes for mini greenhouses, similar to this. That worked great too!

Give garden starts a try this year!