Seed Starting Satisfaction

Why not make a mess in your kitchen for some late winter joy?

I have been growing garden vegetables from seed since well before I had space for a proper garden.

In my early 20s, this involved getting starts going for a community garden plot in Madison, WI. The bureaucracy was punishing but the space was glorious.

Onto my first years in Chicago — every back deck patio tomato ended up fried during summer work trips until I learned about self-watering planters. One night after biking home late from some youthful misadventure, I startled a racoon raiding the produce section. We made a gentle-creature’s agreement to dance clockwise around each other, and then it nervously pissed on the sheet I had draped over the railing to air dry before scampering down the stairs.

Then there was a series of north side community garden plots and more back deck attempts in the hard-scrabble spaces no one has another use for — along the rail road, in a shallow bed over an asphalt parking lot, perched atop a railing. You get the idea.

And now, I have a giant and limitless garden at the farm, with deep and proper soil. It makes me so, so happy.

Starting each November, I pretend that I don’t have enough seeds leftover from the last year. Mathematically, this is a tremendous lie since a home gardener uses roughly 3% of the seeds per year that arrive in each seed packet. Next I pour over 6-12 of my favorite seed catalogues. Finally I go on a purchasing bender around the New Year. Because it’s just seeds, wildly exuberant spending binges are still only likely to be in the mid double digits.

Through February and March, those itty bitty seeds get carefully planted and tended to and then assaulted by Mr. Chips. In April and May, my dad and I trade notes about who has a surplus of what.

The ultimate version of this family exchange took place in 2019. He had onions. I’d never tried starting them from seed yet. I had a 2001 Subaru with cranky ball joints that wasn’t quite up for the trip from northeastern Wisconsin to Chicago. In the end, I became the first person ever to rent car from the Milwaukee Airport with the precious cargo of ~200 hearty onion seeds. That flat of onions and a small duffle were my only luggage, and took their place on the counter next to the paperwork.