Setting up shop (or, "If I build it, will they... sprout?")

I now know that there are six important factors to producing happy, healthy plants. Seeds, water, air, a growing medium, temperature and light are all required elements to get these little buggers to grow. It would seem however that each required element has a level of detail that may not be obvious at first glance. For the gory details, pray, read on.
To begin, I purchased two seedling starting kits  that contain most of what's required.  Several companies make such kits. More or less, they see to all be trying to do the same thing.  If you are interested, I picked this one  from Burpee.   

Seeds

I found a plethora of vendors only too happy to sell seeds that are "guaranteed" to germinate. Sounds comforting, doesn't it.  After digging around with Mr. Google, I settled on a couple of seed sellers with which to get started. There are no recommendations here (at least not yet).  These guys just won the coin toss for the first round.

• Burpee Garden Products 
• Ferry-Morris Seed Co. 
• Park Seed Co. 

For my first attempt, I decided to start with a couple of varieties of Snapdragons:

• Ladies First, Mixed Colors from Ferry-Morris
• Rocket Mixed from Park

Water

Next, is water.  Apparently, seedlings need lots of water and do not tolerate getting dehydrated -at all.  Sounds simple enough until you read that regular tap water may not be the best for seedlings.  Distilled water or at least unchlorinated, unfluoridated plain old "two hydrogen and one oxygen atom" water is what's needed here.

Air

Then comes air. Yes, we have that.  I have recently learned that seeds are not completely dormant and in fact still require oxygen even in their "not much going on here" state.  In fact when planting seeds, soil is not the recommended medium into which to first place the little guys.  It turns out that soil can compact around the seeds so tightly that they cannot get any air with which to carry on respiration.  Also, new roots are have an easier time if they are not trying to mine their way through dense soil on their never ending search for moisture.

Growing medium

On to a growing medium (notice I did not say soil).  So, soil is not so good at this stage.  OK, then what?  Well, it turns out, what is needed here is a way to suspend the seeds in a material that will allow the water and air to get to them and support the roots as well as the plant stem as they develop.  If you purchase one of those seedling growing kits (as I did), you find out the growing medium is something like coconut fibers.  Who'd a thunk it.  If you want to make your own growing medium, there are lots of recipes but most involve materials that will help create space for the roots, retain water and provide some nutritive value.  I'll be saving that discussion for another post.  The kit I bought had these nifty pellets that expand when watered and create a sort of a lattice in which to suspend the seeds while they germinate.

Temperature control

The temperature of the soil and so the planted seeds is important for germination. When one is thinking about starting plants and especially in doors in February, maintaining a consistent seed temperature during seed germination requires some planning.   There are lots of articles on the Internet about optimum temperature for seeds to germinate and grow.  One of the more straightforward is from North Carolina State University http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/hil/hil-8703.html   I found a heating mat and thermostat from an outfit called Hydrofarm on Amazon.com. The idea is that the thermostat have a temperature probe that gets stuck in the growing medium. The power plug for the heating mat is also connected to the thermostat so a feedback loop is formed where the thermostat turns the heat mat on and off to keep the growing medium at a preset temperature. Very cool and I didn't cause a short circuit, start a fire or anything - imagine that!

Light

The last piece of the puzzle is light. This too seems simple until you find out that most seedlings require about 16 hours of light per day. Sorry but even if I had a greenhouse with full sun all day long, there is no such thing as that much daylight at my latitude in February. 

I had to create a way to get the required amount of light on the plants by some other means. The obvious answer is to get some plant lights.  However, shelling out for special plant lights is not necessary. It turns out that common fluorescent tubes will do just fine.  The lights need to start out a few inches away from the seedlings and adjust upward as they grow.  Most importantly, since I am "borrowing" our guest bedroom to to set up this entire adventure, the whole rig needs to be something that can be broken down and stored when not in use.  Using a little ingenuity and a couple of trips to the home store and I came up with a functional, adjustable light bed! Check it out!

Note: In this post, I've included several links to other web pages and some of them are commercial sites.  I did this so that those who may be interested in the details, can get more information.  I'm not advocating the associated vendors other than I plunked down some of my hard cash to purchase their stuff.  Whether that was a good idea remains to be seen.  If you are not interested, don't click on the links.