Talking Green: Starting at the beginning. Part 3

Hello again,
Wow the week flew by! This past week I had my birthday and I had a lot of coupons for free meals so I went out alot and didn't manage get on here. I would just like to apologize for that.
After you have your trays and growing medium picked out, you will need to think about seeds. Today I would like to talk about that a bit. What seeds do you plant, how many, how far apart, how deep to plant them etc.
What Seeds should I plant?
If you are just starting out, it is good to pick seeds that are easy to grow and not too finnicky. Generally it will say on the package if it is easy to grow but if it doesn't there are some ways to pick them out. I have found that the larger the seed, the easier it is to grow. So seeds like sunflowers and Nasturtiums, 4 O'clocks, and sweet peas are pretty simple and easy to grow. Unless you do like I did one year and plant them directly in the dirt but not deep enough and then the birds came and ate them. lol After awhile I started to wonder why they were not sprouting so I dug around in the dirt.... there were no seeds left. lol So to avoid that I start them indoors first and give the birds a bird feeder with seeds I don't mind them eating. lol The size of seeds varies greatly though and they go from the very big ones like sunflower seeds to the incredibly tiny ones like Lobelia. One question my sister had for me about the tiny seeds is how many to plant and whether it was important to control where they fell. Tiny seeds like Lobelia are so small that it is next to impossible to control where they land unless you are incredibly careful and patient. If you are like me, then you don't want to spend hours trying to plant seeds so I reccomend sprinkling some on the dirt and it's good to plant a few extra because not all seeds germinate. Then later when they sprout you can do something called pricking out that I will cover in a later post. One other rule of thumb I follow is the larger the seed, the fewer you plant per cell. A cell is basically one container or one part of the tray you plant seeds in. In the greenhouse kits, I like to buy the 72 cell kits and for each of those cells I tend to plant between 5-10 tiny seeds. For large seeds I tend to plant just one per cell.
How deep do I plant the seeds?
Something else you need to think about when planting seeds is how deep to plant them. Generally I look at the size of the seed and place it about the same depth down under the dirt. What I mean is that if a seed is 1mm wide, I will place about 1mm of dirt over top. Yet not all seeds should be covered with dirt. There are some seeds that require light to germinate and need to be placed on top of the dirt. I learned this the hard way years ago the first time I attempted snapdragon seeds. I could not figure out why they would not grow! lol So I googled snap dragon seeds and discovered they don't grow if they are covered with dirt. oops. If seeds require this, it should say on the back of the seed packet. I don't know all the seeds that need this but 2 I know for sure are alyssum and snapdragons. Most should be covered though.
How far apart should I plant the seeds?
The nice thing about buying seeds is that there is usually most of the info you need on the back of the packet in terms of depth to plant and how far apart. So if you are new at this, it is good to look at that. Each seed is different and it is hard to list on here how far apart each one should be planted so I reccomend looking at the packet. If you have any questions-feel free to contact me!
When do I plant the seeds?
Lastly I would like to cover when to plant the seeds. This can be very tricky if you live somewhere where you get snow and frost because it is hard to predict when it will be gone. If there is ever a crystal ball to know when the last frost will be-I will be first in line to get one! lol Yet it isn't impossible either to figure out. Something to keep in mind is that the bigger the seed is, the faster it will sprout and grow so it needs less time to grow. The faster seeds grow also means if you start late then it isn't too big of a deal because you can usually just plant them right outside. Sunflower seeds can be started even a week or two before you put them outside. If you are planting really tiny seeds like lobellia, these take quite awhile to sprout and grow and generally need 8-10weeks before the last frost. It is a good idea to check what zone you live in because this helps to know when it stops freezing. Here in Alberta, I plan to have them ready by mid May or beginning of June because it seriously freezes up to that point some years. lol We are zone 2 though and live in the country which are important to factor in the equation as well.
I hope I have covered a bit of what to do with the seeds and helped a little bit. I would like to set up something where people can email me questions and I will answer them once a week so that I can help people as much as possible. Also if there is anything people are interested in me covering then you can let me know and I can cover that specific topic. :) I really want to help people become successful in the garden! Happy Gardening!!!