Have you ever tried growing your own transplants for your home garden? This might be something that is worth trying this year. It can be quite a rewarding practice, growing your own transplants, but this practices is also not without challenges. Here are a few benefits and challenges that you might want to consider if deciding to grow some plants for the home garden.
Benefits of Growing Your Own Transplants
These are three good reasons to try growing your own transplants for the home garden:- Plants will be available when you need them. By growing your own transplants you don't have to compete with other home gardeners at the garden center to get the plants and cultivars (varieties) that you want. If you want to extend the garden season, or plant in stages later in the season, you know that you will have plants available when you are able to grow your own.
- Greater diversity when it comes to available cultivars. Most garden centers only offer cultivars that sell very well. Seldomly will home gardeners find newly developed cultivars that have some of the newest disease resistance and production traits. " The sky is the limit" when it comes to cultivar availability when you grow your own transplants. If the seed company has a cultivar available, you can grow it.
- Get into gardening earlier in the season. Even though it is almost March, some vegetables for the home garden can be seeded now. If you are a garden enthusiast, growing your own transplants is a way to get into gardening much earlier in the year.
Challenges to Growing Your Own Transplants
Of course, growing your own transplants is not without challenges. Here are a few challenges to consider before growing your own transplants for the home garden:- Lower quality transplants. More than likely, most home gardeners are not going to have a modern day greenhouse at home. Most will have to grow their own transplants inside the home. With work and many life obligations, there is often less time to focus on growing high quality transplants at home than what a greenhouse or nursery grower would be putting into their plants. Unfortunately, this often means that transplants grown at home will be of lower quality that what is typically found from a local garden plant supplier.
- Required minimum seed order quantities. Most seed companies sell seeds in quantities of 250+ seed package sizes. Most home gardeners need way fewer seeds than what comes in the seed packet. Even if a seed company markets seeds in smaller quantities, you may find that the seeds cost more than the price at which plants can be purchased from a local greenhouse. So make sure to weigh the cost of the seed versus other benefits such as cultivar availability, favorable traits, etc. Germination rates do tend to decrease with the age of seed, but most the shelf life of most seeds can be extended when stored from one year to the next if stored properly in a freezer.
- Higher cost in general. Because home gardeners are rarely growing transplants in bulk, the cost of supplies are usually much higher than what greenhouse producers pay. For example, it cost much more to purchase 1 bag of potting soil at a retail garden center than it does for a greenhouse operator to purchase a pallet of garden soil. Such is the case with containers, fertilizer, seeds, and many other material costs. When all is considered, it may cost much more for home gardeners to grow their own transplants when compared to the cost of purchasing them from the local garden center.
