Starting plants from seed indoors is a great way to save some money, get better plants, and ensure a better harvest, but it takes a lot more effort than just buying starters from your local nursery. Given the extra effort is it really worth it? Does growing plants from seed actually save you money? Can you get better plants than your local greenhouse would provide? Let’s take a look!
Does Starting Seeds At Home Actually Save You Money?
Starting your seeds at home can be a great way to save a lot of money on your garden, especially if your garden is a large homestead garden growing food for your family. This is of course not as true the first year that you do this though. Many people think that seeds are a cheaper way to get started per plant, but that first year you need to buy additional equipment to get things going. A starter at a green house might run you a couple of dollars (depending on where you live it could be quite expensive), but your first year growing form seed you need to buy seeds, trays, grow lights, dirt, and a lot of miscellaneous supplies you might not have.
Given all these extra items, depending on how many plants you are going to grow, your unit cost per plant can easily shoot way up on year one. The upside is that the following year you’ve already paid for these supplies and you can reuse most of them. Even better if you save seeds from your previous years crops, then you easily cut your costs even further.
So while you can save a lot of money starting plants from seed, the savings gets better with larger gardens and longer time periods. If you’re not sure you’re going to stick with gardening for more than a year, invest in a modest amount of starters instead as you can have a better chance at success if you’re new.
Is Starting Seeds Indoors Worth It?
When you say “worth it” you can mean a lot of things, but often people are talking about cost or outcome. We’ve already discussed the cost difference with seeds vs starters, but not the quality difference. When starting with seeds you often have a lot of chances to get something right. We don’t plant all the starters we grow indoors. We only select the strongest and best looking plants. The rest get given away to friends and neighbors.
The real advantage here for picking only the best of our starters grown from seed is that we can consistently plant crops that are a bit stronger, better able survive, and most likely to guarantee a yield than some of the weaker plants we might have in the bunch. This doesn’t always work out, but more often than not we have better plants because we got to choose the best starters.
Now, greenhouses and nurseries are doing the same thing. They don’t always sell their weak or oddly shaped starters. That being said, it ups the cost of the starters they do sell so you can certainly have a good selection to pick from, but it will cost you. On top of that you’re sort of competing with other buyers to get the best plants and put them in your garden first. While this might seem like a wash, given the minimal amount of additional effort starters are once you’re used to growing them at home, we’d definitely say that they’re worth that effort.
Is Starting Seeds At Home A Lot Of Work?
Starting seeds at home might seem like a big chore to some people. True there is a lot of planning and setup, but if you’re gardening every year it becomes a habit and you don’t really think about “take care of the plants” as a chore even. Ultimately how you feel about the work of setting up seed trays, creating labels, and caring for seedlings is more about your preference than it is about being hard work.
The actual work is fairly easy, but it has a lot of steps, requires some daily monitoring, and takes up a bit of space. In a small urban garden it would be much harder to grow a lot of starters given the cramped living condition (trust us, we’ve tried it), but if you have ample space then it’s not much of an inconvenience.
In our honest opinion, the work is worth is, so it doesn’t really feel like a lot of work for us, but your mileage may vary.
Can You Grow Better Plants Than your Local Greenhouse?
This one’s a bit of a toss up. There were a lot of greenhouses around where I grew up as a kid, and a lot of them were bad. There plants were bad, so growing plants at home from seed was better. Now that’s not always the case and certainly isn’t the case where we live now. I would have a hard time growing a single plant that is better than everything on offer at the nurseries around us. However, this is a numbers game. The more starters you grow the better you get at growing them and the better the odds are you will get some real winners.
On top of this, you’re almost never going to get the best plants at the greenhouse. You just won’t be their when they’re put out and someone else will snatch them up. Given this perspective I would say our best starters turn out better than the average plant at a greenhouse. Given that we grow backups and only plant our best starters, we end up with better plants overall.
Now, if this is your first time growing starters at home, then no, they won’t be better than your local green house. You won’t get your setup perfect, you’ll forget to turn on or off your lights, and you might under or over water your seedlings. Given all this learning you need to do, you just can’t win against a professional who has been growing plants for years.
This isn’t a bad thing though, you need to experience the process to get better at it and if you can’t put your mind into learning how to get better at gardening, you’re not going to have a good time when it comes to harvest.
Should I Grow My Own Starters From Seed?
For most people who are going to garden year after year we would say yes. You should get used to the process. Growing things from seed, starters or otherwise, is not too terribly complicated, but there are somethings you’ll learn by doing it. Certain seeds need certain soil depths, water conditions, and temperatures to germinate. You’re certainly not going to memorize all this information, but you will pick up a feel for the general categories of seeds you’ll grow. Different seedlings need different light levels when getting started and you need to know which are which so you can fill a try with similar light requirement plants. This all comes from doing the process and learning is the most important part.
Long term, in addition to the learning experience, you also will find that you’ll save money and the work will feel easier each time you do it. Overall we believe that growing starters indoors is a part of the gardening process and should be something you do if you want to continue to farm on your own homestead.
Happy Homesteading!