Every plant in your garden has to come from somewhere, and for most home vegetable gardeners, that “somewhere” is either a seed in a packet or a transplant tray in a garden center. For the ambitious and curious few, there’s a third way to populate a backyard vegetable patch growing your own transplants at home.
A home nursery gives you the option to explore varieties that are not available from garden centers, and gives you total control over how and when your baby plants are grown.. Home transplant production is not, however, for the faint of heart.
A slapdash propagation space is almost guaranteed to result in stressed crops and a stressed gardener. But with the right approach and some attention to detail, an in-home propagation area can be easy to set up and highly productive. In fact, you can grow hundreds of transplants in a few square feet. A small propagation area with one or two grow lights should provide more than enough room to grow all the transplants needed for a home garden.
When setting up your propagation space, remember that you’re growing plants in an artificial environment. This makes them even more reliant on your care to thrive. You may be able to leave your outdoor garden to its own devices for days at a time, but a home vegetable nursery absolutely requires daily care.
In addition to your dutiful attentiveness, here are the seven key components of a successful home nursery setup:
Image courtesy of our book “Grow More Food”
Light: In a typical home, sufficient natural light is rarely available for vegetable seedlings. Even if you have a large south-facing window, your plants will be much more successful with supplemental lighting. Light-stressed plants develop thin, weak, “leggy” stems and are more
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