Keeping Seeds Warm

As I mentioned in a previous post, it’s important to keep your germinating seeds (for plants sown indoors early) at the right temperature to optimize your germination rate. The ideal range for the majority of vegetable plants in 75-85 degrees.  If you are a good person who cares for the world you live in (and you are, right?), you have no excuse to keep your house a 85 degrees in the winter just for a few flats of vegetable seedlings. This would be dumb, k? K.

Still, the plants would appreciate the tosty-ness, so there’s a few different ways of achieving this-

1. Heat mats-

   Although they work great, I view these as impractical because of the cost. I’ll have several flats of seeds germinating at a time, so at $20ish dollars per mat, having a mat per flat (that rhymes!) would cost too much. You can control the temperature by thermostat, which is nice, but not a necessity. Being an electric heat source, it’s not the most efficient or sustainable either.

2. Make a “Seed Oven”

    There’s likely a real name or something for this, but I don’t know it, so I guess we’ll let “seed oven” suffice for now. The basic idea is a box with a heat source that you can place your seed tray in. Here’s mine, it a little, well….makeshift, being thrown together by scraps of whatever recyclablerific item I could locate…Here’s the basic idea

   I used the bottom-most plastic shelf on my rack of gro-lights, which is basically a set of plastic shelves from Lowes or someplace. The top is covered with plywood, and a thick-ish blanket graces the front. I bolted some pieces of wood across the side post for extra shelf support, and I used some sheet metal from the barn to cover the bottom shelf…

 

….and at the bottom sits a concrete block (for fire hazard protection or whatever) with a red-painted lightbulb in a simple fixture wired in place to hold it up.

  The idea is the lightbulb warms the bottom shelf, which warms the whole box, which in turn warms the soil your seeds are in. It’s around 82F in there now.

 A setup like this is ideal if your seed flats are numerous and in an unheated building like a potting shed or something. It’s still an electric source of heat, so not the most efficient, but it’s cheap and it works. You can change the temperature by using different wattages of incandescent bulbs.

 -HOWEVER-

  The easiest and best seed warming implement for most of you guys might very well be the top of your…

   3. Refridgerator! It stays pretty warm up there, depending on the temperature of your house. Stick a thermometer on top and see what you get.

 A bit cold for my purposes, but for early spring, when the world warms a bit, it might be better. There’s also the issue of having to clean potting soil of your fridge rather frequently.

 

  Keep in mind some vegetable seeds like it colder. Like Celery and a few others. But most seem to do best at that 70-85 F range. Here’s an awesome resource that lists minimum, maximum and otpimun temperatures for vegetable plants- http://www.seedman.com/veggerm.htm