The Learnings from a Plant Sale

While I have been having plant sales for years, it’s only recently that I began raising seedlings for sale. Prior to that, I potted up perennials that needed dividing or had reseeded where I didn’t want them to grow, so it was a much simpler process. In the past, I would gather pots and potting soil, go through the garden a section at a time starting around January, and I would weed, divide, pot up, repair irrigation, and mulch. As I completed the garden section by section I would accumulate pots of plants scattered around and leave behind a neater, ready-for-spring section of the garden. The plants would be given away or sold to friends, relatives or neighbors who gardened.

Last year, I started planting seeds to include in the plant sale as seedlings. While I have always sown seeds in my own garden, I hadn’t sown them in pots except for when I worked with my kid’s elementary school classes. It takes A LOT OF POTS and A LOT OF SOIL to do this. This year I started with 13 stacks of 4” pots and about 6 stacks of gallon pots. I ran out halfway through and had to call on gardening friends for more. I also had an entire shelf of 6-pack pots stashed from years of buying seedlings, and I used nearly all of them. So the first learning, have a lot of pots on hand if you’re going to do this on a large scale.

In addition to being retired and having more time to plant, we recently renovated the sunporch at our house so that gave me a place to plant seeds. I use it for crafts, cracking nuts on rainy days, and other messy activities that I don’t want to do indoors, like a baby plant nursery! This year it really got a workout. I added shelves and another table to the two I already had in there, and really went to town planting vegetables and flowers. A lot of the work I was doing this year was during rainy days, so it was especially nice to be able to work in a sheltered area.

I am learning a ton about gardening now that I have time to focus on it in retirement. One of the things I was never very good at was determining WHEN to plant seeds. I usually bought seedlings when they were available in the nursery, figuring THEY were experts and wouldn’t be selling plants unless it was the right season to plant them. That’s all well and good, but when you’re planting seeds you need to get more informed. I found several resources that were invaluable. First, I got organized by tabulating the seed packets of the seeds I planned to plant. I used the “# of weeks before frost” on the packet, whether it could be transplanted or not, and a last frost date for our area of April 15th.

Below are my notes from my garden journal last year.

This year I got even fancier and created a spreadsheet.

Then, as I was reviewing my notes, I found this great resource! The people at “igrow Sonoma” have done all the work for us! The chart on the back is especially helpful since it also tells which seeds need to be direct-sown vs. can be transplanted. I now own a laminator, so this chart was the first thing I laminated!

Armed with this information, my own seeds and some that I got at a seed exchange run by Petaluma Bounty, I bought potting soil and started planting.

If you’re looking for a brief overview, I read this blog earlier this year, and found it very inspirational and easy to follow. The amount of pop-up ads is pretty annoying, but otherwise I think this is a good resource. Now that I go back and re-read this, I realize I didn’t incorporate most of her advice, I guess I should have reread it earlier! I definitely want to try grow lights next year to avoid legginess, and might invest in a fan and heater, too. It’s all a learning experience!

A word on potting soil, I highly recommend finding a good source of inexpensive, good-quality soil. I have read about how you can make your own, but haven’t gotten that far yet. So far I have purchased bags of soil or last year, I purchased it in bulk from Grab-n-Grow. I am lucky enough to have a neighbor with a “dump trailer”, which makes it much easier to unload it once it arrives at your house. The soil companies will deliver, but it’s very expensive. I was happy with the quality and pricing with this process, but not wanting to burden my neighbor (who also delivered mulch and compost), this year I bought it in bags. This was the most expensive part of the process, since the pots and seeds were essentially free, so it will be worth some time to find a cheaper source in the future.

I have invested in the special “seedling soil” shown at right. It’s extremely light, and works well, especially for seeds that are very small. However, I don’t think it’s worth the expense for bigger seeds and I found that it dried out quickly, so if I use it in the future I will develop a process to repot seedlings once they have germinated and grown big enough.

One of the books I read last year talked a lot about soil health, so I was motivated to learn more and experiment. The book is “How to Grow More Vegetables than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine” by John Jeavons. Here are the things I tested in addition to potting soil:

• Goat manure/organic straw obtained from my friend Saill

• Compost purchased in bulk from Grab-n-Grow

• Horse manure from Mary Beth

• Watering with “worm water” (either drained through my worm beds or rain water shaken with fresh worm castings)

While the jury is still out on some of these experiments (e.g. I am testing goat manure ½ and ½ with store bought compost in some raised beds), I think that it helped some seedlings have richer soil to add the goat manure in a bottom later to my flats, and it definitely helped the peas that I watered with worm water (their first watering, just prior to planting seeds, after that I watered with plain water).

The seedlings on the left were watered with worm water, vs. the ones on the right were watered with plain water.

The goat manure underneath the soil in the flats seemed to work well with broccoli, but didn’t seem to help tomatoes. I am definitely seeing more worm activity in the section of beds I amended with straw and manure. I will continue to do more experimentation to see which crops benefit from these techniques.

I learned that I could use the black nursery flats to plant in, and to avoid spilling lots of dirt I lined the bottom with brown grocery sacks. Since I have been double-bagging them for Una Vida, and Una Vida can’t use the bags without handles, I had a supply of those to use up. The nice thing is after the seedlings are transplanted, I could compost the remaining soil and bags in one fell swoop. And in cases where I left the plants in a flat so long that the roots penetrated the brown bag, I could plant them all together knowing the bag would soon decompose.

I also experimented with using cardboard flats to plant in. This seemed to work well, even unlined, because this was before I was watering with worm water so the soil was being misted, which didn’t soak through to the cardboard. My friend gets canned dog food in cardboard flats, and they are taller than your average cardboard. Since the book mentioned above recommends 3” height for flats, that was an advantage. While in most cases I transplanted seedlings before they “hit bottom”, I did notice the pumpkins, which took longer to germinate, had roots growing sideways because they had run into the bottom of the nursery flat lined with a brown bag.

The book highly recommends planting in flats before transplanting out to pots (takes less space and water). I did this for the first few crops (broccoli and tomatoes) and later for pumpkins and flowers. It worked well to sprout the seeds in flats, then transplant them to 6 packs or 4” pots.

I learned that YOU GET A LOT OF SEEDLINGS THIS WAY. My first flat of broccoli generated 4 full flats of six packs of broccoli, and tomatoes were likely even more. The only downside was that sometimes the seeds were sown too close together, and I wasn’t sure which variety was which. Another learning, pay attention to which variety is planted where at all times! For a number of reasons, I ended up with “mystery” varieties of tomatoes and cosmos, which is less than ideal.

I also learned that the crops you can grow to sell depends on the timing of the sale and the weather. My cool-weather crops of peas, sweet peas, arugula, kale, and broccoli all germinated well, were transplanted into six packs, and looked good enough to sell.

My warmer weather crops like pumpkins, flowers and tomatoes didn’t germinate early enough so were quite small when we tried to sell them.

Many plant sale customers are looking for warm weather seedlings, mostly tomatoes but also various types of squash and basil. I think to do that properly I’d need to mimic greenhouse conditions, or borrow a greenhouse to grow in. Or have the plant sale later in the spring. Our tomatoes were healthy, but a bit small. I had planted them in plenty of time, but the lack of warmth and light led to pretty small starts in the early April timing of our sale.

I learned that seedlings need to be repotted as they grow. I started seeds in flats or the smaller six packs, and plant thickly. It is recommended that you cut back all but the strongest seedling,

but again my “don’t want to waste anything” mentality kicks in so I try to divide the seedlings that grow too thickly. This worked well in some cases (broccoli, tomatoes) but not so well in others.

I discovered that peas and sweet peas’ roots wrap around each other, making it tough to divide them. I routinely “sprout” pea seeds first in a wet paper towel in a Ziploc before planting them in soil, so I need to only plant one pea seed per pocket next time.

I was pleased with how well the baby broccoli seedlings were rooted when I transplanted them for the first time. After reading about the importance of strong roots in my John Jeavons book, I tried hard not to disturb the roots as I transplanted seeds. You can see here how the tiny broccoli seedling was already forming roots after only a few weeks.

And I appreciated how the deeper six pack pockets allowed for more root growth when I finally transplanted the broccoli to the ground less than 2 weeks later.

For the first time I had so many flower seeds that I decided to try planting them indoors. While they germinated well, I don’t really consider the crop a success. The cosmos were transplanted to six packs and most survived hardening, but they looked so spindly I don’t think it was an attractive offering at the plant sale.

The zinnia, poppies, and rudbekia all germinated well, but didn’t do well when transplanted. Next time I’ll either allow more time, or plant them directly in the ground.

The process I used for hardening worked pretty well. I had the cool weather crops far enough along that by the time I ran out of space on the sunporch, I set up a table on the covered wraparound porch and put them out there. Between the wind, rain, and cold I think they got pretty well “hardened” for a good month before the sale. For the other starts, I put them out for longer and longer times for 7-10 days before the sale. The only thing that didn’t get sufficiently “hardened” was the pumpkins, because they literally germinated the week before the sale, and the spinach, which I only had two six packs of and didn’t intend to sell but then someone asked about it. Not bad considering the number of seedlings I had going!

One of the ideas I stole from Mary Beth was to plant six different varieties in six packs, so that people get one of each. She did that for tomatoes, which I think is brilliant because you really don’t want six of the same tomato plants. I tried it for sunflowers, but two of mine didn’t germinate well, so I “filled in” with the varieties which did germinate well, which kind of ruined the “six different types” idea. I’ll try it with tomatoes next year for sure!

The other thing that I will do different next year is make sure I keep track of what varieties are planted where. This year, I tracked it fine initially, but either plants grew too close together in flats, or I lost track as I transplanted them. For instance, I transplanted tomatoes to 4” pots, and put one label in one pot for the whole flat. But if I had less than a full flat, I would start filling in with other types, adding a label for “this pot on down”. But as seedlings died off and got consolidated, this system didn’t work well. I should figure out a good way to label seedlings, this year I bought plastic labels and used a sharpie pen, which worked better than popsicle sticks (too narrow and don’t take ink well when wet).

Some other learning that I had along the way:

It worked pretty well to try empty produce containers as “mini greenhouses”. I tried this fairly late in the process, but I think it could have been a more successful way to germinate more difficult crops.

It did not work well to try to “rush” the pea seed germination process by warming the bags. Typically, I put the pea seeds in a wet paper towel and then in a Ziploc, labeling the variety on the bag. Since I was running short on time before the sale, I thought “well, a heat mat is supposed to speed germination, maybe I can keep the seeds warm to achieve the same thing here” and used the top of my stove, which is slightly warm from the pilot light. Big disaster! It did not seem to speed up the process, and what I did get was “slimy” seeds, which happens if I leave them too long without freshening the water or the air in the bag.

Another learning for growing food to donate, I have found it useful to grow crops that “cut and come again” so that you have a continual supply to share. So far, the crops that worked best for me were broccoli and arugula, but I’m hoping to add peas, radishes, carrots, and lettuce to that list for next year.

My biggest learning was this – good friends make anything more fun! I got to know my neighbor Melissa even better by inviting her up to help divide seedlings, she even brought wine and cookies! My new friend Catherine came by to help transport plants and ended up buying raspberry plants for her 4 year old son. She also shared iris and did a fantastic job with the flower crowns. I feel like I’ve found a new kindred spirit. So the Deviled Eggery is achieving multiple goals, including “building community” around a love of growing food.