Last year when I was just getting started with seedlings on indoor plant shelves I made a lot of mistakes. I'm sure I'm not done making them, but I'm trying to avoid repeating the same ones. Other than the cat eating the tops off the new baby plants, I had problems with all these issues:
- Over watering (soaked roots to death)
- Under watering (letting things dry out = dead)
- Leggy seedlings (which just fell over dead either from over-watering or under-watering)
- Wrong lighting!
- Very poor air circulation
- Fungus gnats
- Transplanting too late
The
over watering was horrid. I really took care of the seeds & seedlings, took way too much care of them. Basically, I watered them to death. After a few sessions of emptying out little seed starter size cups of dirt, and seeing how far the roots of little seeds really do go down, I learned that the dirt at the top of the pots doesn't need to be wet, there's plenty of moisture down in the dirt, where the roots are.
Then I over-corrected and stopped watering them in the morning & at night, (yeah, I was that bad), and so I started only watering them every other day. (sighs) Please note: Baby lettuce will die if it dries out. So will every other baby seedling plant. Here's some good basic information I keep handy:
http://www.vegetablegardener.com/item/10508/watering-your-seedlings
Once I got decent little 2" plants growing, I was happy. Then I found out tall little seedlings aren't actually healthy, they just haven't fallen over & died yet.
Leggy is bad! It's usually caused by... bad lighting. The little guys are stretching up to the light, fighting to survive, and I was unaware. Having the right lighting & distances between the seedlings and the light is vital. I'll probably mess this up again, but this time when I built shelves, I made them adjustable :) I'll have to make another post about that.
My little indoor plants were getting very poor air circulation. It was an effort to save them, basically I protected them to death. The house cat was sneaking onto the plant shelves & eating the tops off the growing veggies. I was so frustrated with the cat (once I figured out is was the cat snacking & not some invisible bug eating plants) that I stuck all the plants into a very small area in a very small room with the door shut. The window in that room is rarely opened. The plants were suffering. They're supposed to get breezes, fresh air, not stuffy still room air.
The evil fungus gnats I nearly forgot to mention. They love moist dirt. They kill baby plants. They are pure evil and put me through hell for 2 weeks. I absolutely suggest learning about them here.
http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/insect/05584.html.
Last but not least, by the time I made it through the first learning curves, I had way too many seedlings for the very limited pots that I did have. The weather was not cooperating enough to transplant directly into the garden, and I started a quest to find as many free pots on
craigslist.org as possible. Apparently so did everyone else in the county, so I had to get very creative with making temporary "pots". From yogurt containers, to plastic food containers, milk jugs, plastic lined cardboard, and plastic drinking cups. It was frustrating as heck trying to save the plants that actually made it so far, while waiting for the cold weather outside to go away already!