Never grown seeds before? You got this!

It's pretty easy anyone can do it.

Even if you don't have a garden you can grow some seeds and create a little garden in your home. So long as you have one window that gets reasonable sun. Something to put your plants on in the window and water you are good to go.
Well Ok you needs some seeds and some potting mix too. Fortunately neither cost that much. Seeds are extremely cheap when you consider what you can get out of them. A good bag of potting soil and you are on your way.

First you need to have something to plant your seeds in. You can go the fancy route and get seed trays, or the cream on the top individual cell trays. But if you only have a few seeds you want to plant any container you can punch holes in the bottom of for drainage and something to catch the water that comes out the bottom is all you need. Cut off juice containers, yogurt pots anything will do. Check the recycling bet there is something in there you can use. See making planting containers

If you are not sure what kind of soil you should plant your seeds in check out our article on choosing a potting mix.

The hardest part is deciding what plants you want to grow. We are suggesting herbs, not just because we sell herb seeds but because a lot of them are pretty tough plants. Sure they are a vulnerable when they are babies - what baby is not? - but once they get a bit bigger they are pretty independent. Yes they need watering regularly and food now and again but they will get by with less water and nurture than most plants. AND they are useful. They are also pretty nice to look at.

We have a list of suggested herb seeds for house plant use here.

Most commonly there are quite a lot of seeds in the packet you get. You don't need all those at once so only plant a few of each. Put the rest of the packet in the refrigerator, if you have many packets put them in a little box or something and label it so you don't keep wondering what's in there and opening it. Store the seeds there until you need them again. They will keep a lot better than at room temperature.

Next. Read the seed packet! Yeah I know no one reads the instructions but its important. Some seeds need to be spread on the surface, some need planting under a fine coating some need to be deeper and some need to be scarified (scraped and roughed up) first before they will germinate. There are a lot of other possibilities too but lets stick to easy seeds to begin with.
Sometimes seeds will come with an instruction sheet just for that seed. Read that too. All our seed orders come with general growing instructions sheet to get you going on growing your seeds and may come with special sheets for specific seeds. We wont deal with those here lets start with the easy stuff on our herb list.

So you have.
1. Your container which has holes in the bottom for drainage
2. A tray or something to catch whatever liquid comes out the bottom of the seed container and it fits under the desired pot you have chosen.
3. Potting mix of some kind. DO NOT use garden soil. It will be full of weed seed and you will end up trying to figure out which are your seeds and which are weeds.
4. Seeds you want to plant.

Detailed instructions on how to sow seeds are found in our General Growing Instructions which come with every order or there is a more pictorial version here. This article uses cell seed trays as an example simply because that is what we use but just substitute whatever container you are using.

Now place your seeds close to a window on a flat surface level with the bottom of the window or above it. Do not put them below the level of the window they wont get enough light.

Now come and check out your seeds every day, keep the soil moist but not wet, best done with a spray bottle as this wont disturb the soil and wash the seeds out of the mixture. In a week or so you will begin to see tiny green shoots coming up. It may be longer depending on what you are growing.

Now you are on your way. The seedlings will get larger every day, most plants grow pretty fast once they are growing. If you container is fairly small you may want to turn it a quarter turn every day to stop the seedlings straining towards the light, which they will do.
Once they are large enough they can be moved to their own containers. Check out Potting on your seedlings

Now you are on your way to having great house plants or you can plant them outside once the weather is warm enough. Make sure you harden them off correctly before you do.

See. Easy. You Got This!