Planting Seeds Indoors is Child's Play

Planting seeds indoors is child's play ...

when you get to do it with your 4 year old grand-daughter.  My grand-daughter spent the night with us on Saturday, and on Sunday she and I got to work planting flower seeds in preparation for this summer.  We had a good time together.

I purchased a variety of seeds, a large tray of starter peat soil pellets from Jiffy, and some plant markers.  Maggie, my grand-daughter, had fun pouring water all over these pellets so they could get moist and puff up.  We did that before breakfast, and by the time we had eaten our yummy pancakes, the starters were ready for us to plant the seeds.

Let the planting begin ~

Maggie took a pencil and placed a hole in each of the starter peat soil pellets.  I carefully cut open one package of seeds at a time.  We had a total of 72 peat soil pellets to use.  Imagine my surprise when I only had 8 seeds in the first package of seeds.  They are wave petunias, and were the most expensive of the lot.  I guess you only get a few because the wave petunias are still a newer variety of petunias (well not really, I think they have been around for about 10 years).  Anyhow Maggie planted those first and since I told her to place two seeds to a pellet, she didn't even get one whole row out of those.

We moved on to the other seeds which were much more abundant than the petunias.  Maggie and I marveled over all the different shapes and sizes of seeds.  The marigold seeds were long and skinny.  The coleus seeds looked like extremely tiny poppy seeds.  Each flower's seeds are unique.

Of course, Maggie got a little tired of planting seeds before we finished all 72 soil pellets, so grandma finished the job while Maggie munched on some popcorn left over from Saturday night.  It was still surprisingly fresh tasting.

Plants in their temporary home

The whole tray went downstairs to my family room to place in our big window there that faces west and gets lots of sun.  A plastic dome lid went over all to keep the moisture in. Now it is up to me to keep up with this every day.

Planting seeds is so much fun that my husband and I plan to start some green beans and sugar snap peas indoors as well.  Do you ever start seeds indoors?  Leave a comment with your tips and experience.