seed starting

The first thing you need to remember is to think ahead, and bring in the compost before three feet of snow and ice lands on top of it. That was my big discovery two years ago, and like so many big discoveries was a. unpleasant and b. completely obvious - in retrospect. Living in a linear society, it can be difficult to get cyclical. You see, I knew you could start seeds in lightly sifted compost - in fact, I'd seen Rodale Institute tests that showed that some varieties seeds did best in finished compost. So, the year before, I'd gone out in February, dug up some compost, let it defrost, and…
In keeping with the reminder I got that I should back up a little bit, and present my ideas more coherently for those who haven't encountered them before, I thought I would add a post about why someone might want to start seeds, and how to do it, to supplement the posts on winter sowing and the sowing of perennials from seeds. New gardeners generally start out by buying their seedling, and depending on where you are getting them, this can be a problem. The destructive wave of Late Blight that hit the tomato crop across the eastern half of the US was derived from seedlings purchased at big-…