If you have bare soil, seed some in place any time now. Salad greens are notorious for self-seeding in the fall (if you let your plants flower and set seed, that is) and coming up very early the next spring. Clearly the seed can survive the cold and come up before we expect in the spring. The key here is to plant a small bed now, a small bed in February, and then start planting your successions every couple of weeks in March. The ones planted in late March should take you through May and then it will probably be too hot for most salad greens anyway, so the March plantings should do it. I assume in Zone 7 you can start planting beans and corn and squash in late April, so when you stop planting greens, you can still stick seeds of warmer-weather plants in the ground every couple of weeks. Remember, you can't eat a whole garden full of lettuce when it ripens all at once. And it will if you plant it all at once. Spread it out. Catherine

If you run across a chinese evergreen with fruit, take some of those juicy red berries home! I swiped 3 off of a fairly large plant at a hospital and took them home. Wasn't sure whether to remove the red flesh before planting the large pit--then realized that in nature the flesh might have enriched the soil in which the seed would grow. I buried the fruits in pots of Syngonium, since hey like the same conditions as CE's, and one of the 3 sprouted a couple months ago. It is growing very slowly, but is growing none-th-less.

I always use warmth mats & grow lights when I start from seed. Lettuce, onions, tomatoes, cucumbers, etc. They always do well as long as I don't neglect them once I put them outside. My cat has NO problem dragging a rabbit almost as big as he is to the back door. I feel bad for the rabbit, but my garden is happy!

Tony, The way I figure it, you were originally asking about putting a heater in your plastic thing because you were possibly interested in replicating a greenhouse. The winter sowing people generally use methods that roughly replicate a coldframe (but with the improvement of letting some precipitation cycle through). Coldframes and such are awesome for starting things that need stratification, which I don't think applies to any of the seeds you listed (not sure about the rockwort offhand). And there's nothing wrong with using them for other stuff either--snapdragons, for one, like it cool. On the other hand, heated greenhouses and indoor light setups can give you more of a jump on many things, which may be a benefit when you're sowing many annuals and more tender things. I'm sort of sorry you didn't try out your experiment. I would have been curious to hear how it worked. Some people from the winter sowing forum like to use their method exclusively. I think that in cold places like our state of Illinois, indoor lights and warm greenhouse environments are great tools. I do agree, however, that much of what you're sowing will be fine with either method, though I'm not sure I'd want zinnia seeds experiencing below-freezing soil temps. In case you're still considering it, I'd be a little nervous about the space heater idea just for fire/safety reasons--those tented shelving units have been known to blow over--but I think it's a worthy experiment if you have the time and proximity to keep an eye on it.