Indoors or Out. Start Growing your Veggies

There are 2 different ways to start growing your veggies from seed- inside or outside. How and where you plant is, of course, dependent on what you are planting and where you live. I live in zone 5b in Upstate NY. Central NY to be exact. We have hot summers and very cold snowy winters. Our growing season isn’t long so when we can, we like to start our veggie plants inside to give us the max growing time. Then we harden them off to prepare them for being outside. Then we transplant them into the garden. Some veggies do need to be direst sown, or planted directly into the garden. They grown fast enough and thrive that way.

Direct sowing your seeds is much easier. You plant, water, wait and harvest. Its really pretty foolproof as long as you have fresh air, sunshine, decent soil and water. It does however leave your plants a bit more susceptible to pests and the germination rate isn’t as high.

Starting seeds indoors will give your seeds a strong start but you have to be careful with humidity or you could develop mold, your plants can get “leggy” meaning taller rather than fuller and they may not handle the change in climate moving from outside to inside as well. To strengthen them, once they have sprouted you can keep a fan gently blowing on them, like the wind naturally would, to firm up their stems.

Most veggies can be started inside. Root veggies like carrots parsnips, turnips etc do much better being directly sown. So do squashes and cucumbers. My personal rule of thumb is anything that grown on a vine on the ground or anything that grows in the ground gets directly sown.