What kinds of indoor space do you have available for seed starting versus your outdoor space? If I'm growing seedlings indoors for weeks, I prefer to use the unconditioned basement rather than conditioned space to grow seedlings. The warmer conditioned spaces encourage the seedlings to grow faster, which is a no-no without LOTS of light, which is difficult to provide. So growing under lights in cooler temps (like an unconditioned basement) typically lead to sturdier transplants than growing warm under lights. Before I got my 480 sq ft hoophouse put in I used a very sturdy low cold frame that I put about fifteen steps out my back door. Mine looks very similar to this: The outdoor mini cold frame was *EXTREMELY* useful in hardening off plants prior to transplanting them out. I also had a small heat mat out there to put the more cold-sensitive plants on top of if it was just too cold. I think that the short cold frames retain heat in the right places a little better than the tall ones with tops that are too high off the ground. My frame is about 4 feet by 8 feet and was totally indispensable until I got my big hoophouse. I think this year I'll get the little cold frame in operation again because it's a shorter trip than making the way to the big hoophouse for setting out and bringing in transplants. I guess what I'm really trying to say is that I like to use a combination of a small indoor growing space (at cool temps and under fluorescent shop lights) and a small outdoor cold frame (with a little heat mat if needed). You will always need to harden off plants prior to transplanting them out permanently, and a well-made polycarbonate cold frame allows you to do so at much lower risk to your plants!

Rezan, there was about 100s of vft seedlings in that container. Many of them have grown out now on days. About the PH on the soil, i never tried sulfur acid. Carnivorous plants live naturally in bogs in the Carolinas. The easiest way to keep your plant's Soil acidic all of the time is to water it with clean water. That's why carnivorous plants die if you water them with regular tap water. Tap water contains Salts, chlorine and other crap that is Harsh on VFTs roots. Use only reverse osmosis water, rain water, purified water without sodium. I get water from those bending machines for 25 cents at the store, easy as that. Never tried the stratification in the freezer for Sarracenia seeds before. Simply wrap the seeds in a moisten paper Towel, then put your seeds inside a ziplock bag, and store them in the fridge for 5 weeks. If you store them in the freezer your seeds will most likely freeze and lose vitality to germinate. It may work for parsley but a Sarracenia is different. patience is required.. The only way to speed up VFT seedlings to grow faster is to grow them in a bright location, so avoid any type of fertilizer; it will burn the plantet's roots and kill them off. My tip for you is: after your VFT seeds germinate, either grow them in a sunny windowsill or under artificial lighting for 16 hours daily. ********************************************************* To paste pictures in the forum. Simply do this: 1)Make an account at www.photobucket.com 2)Upload your pictures in that Site. 3)There will be different Url Links below each picture, Copy the link that says "Tag" 4)Then Simply paste the "Tag" url link here in the Comments. Easy as that :)

Dorothy, My experience with planting in the ground is exactly the same as yours. Not only did they begin to rot without sprouting, but something was eating the peas underground because they would entirely disappear overnight without a trace. You and I do sprout our peas in similar ways and plant out at about the same time even though I am a lot further south and it would seem like I could plant earlier than you, but I can't....and I blame it on my cold microclimate. If I planted much earlier than you, I don't think I'd get a crop any earlier. Amunk1, One thing I love about gardening is that everything we do can be viewed as an experiment. Try something one way, learn from that and then the next time you can try it a different way in order to improve upon the previous effort. My entire garden is just one big experiment every year with many smaller experiments going on within the big experiment. Dorothy and I both have been gardening a long time(and I won't rat out her age or mine by admitting exactly how long) and I guarantee you I do not do things the exact same way now that I did them in the 1980s or 1990s or early 2000s, and certainly not the way I did things in the 1970s when I was very young and tended to love my plants to death by overwatering them. It is important to not get stuck in a rut and keep on doing things the same way you did them in the past. There's always room for improvement and it is fun to try to improve your garden's appearance and productivity every year. Realistically speaking, here in OK, sometimes we are happy if we just manage to keep our gardens alive. Peas grow best and taste best when they mature before temperatures begin regularly exceeding 75 degrees. That statement sounds so calm and logical, but Oklahoma weather is not calm and logical. It is a wild roller coaster ride, and I find it rare for us to stay cool enough long enough for my snap peas to grow well enough that they are producing much of a crop while the daytime highs are still in the 70s. In that sense, this is looking like a really good pea year. The issue, though, is that just because we have highs at our house in the 70s this week, that doesn't mean they'll last long. We could be in the 80s next week and the 90s the week after that. That is why is it so important to plant early. Technically, the ground usually is a bit too cold for peas to sprout during the OSU-recommended planting time. They will sprout if conditions are perfect, but if we are too wet or too cold, they can rot before they sprout. That's why a lot of us sprout our peas indoors by soaking them in water for a few hours, wrapping them in a paper towel or coffee filter and popping them into soil-less mix as soon as the peas have small sprouts. I have done that every year I've grown them here except the first year, when I planted them in the ground and they sprouted and grew...and then it got hot and they died before making very many peas. The odd thing is that while they won't sprout easily in cold soil, they grow well in it. So, we start early and baby them through a few bitter cold nights (by covering them up) because it is the best way to "guarantee" a crop, though you really aren't guaranteeing a crop so much as improving your chance of getting one. In areas of the country that have a slower transition from winter's cold to summer's heat, gardeners can just wait for the soil to warm up some more and then plant the pea seeds directly in the ground. In OK, where we can literally go from too cold to too hot in one week some years, we don't have that luxury. I deviated from sprouting the pea seeds in paper towels this year because I wanted to see if they would sprout in soil-less mix as easily as in paper towels. They did, but were a little slower. I started early, so that wasn't a big issue. Had I been running behind on seed-starting, I would have sprouted them first in paper towels to speed up the process. I learned to grow almost everything in the ground from seed first (except tomatoes, peppers and eggplant which need to be started indoors far in advance of the transplant date) and then learned how to start seed indoors for transplants. I think that helped because I already knew when everything should be put into the ground, so all I had to work on was learning how early to start them indoors so they were the right size at transplant time and learning how to harden off plants grown indoors, which I learned in Texas in the 1990s. I had to change things a bit when I moved farther north to OK because our nights stay a lot colder a lot longer. With greenhouses, there is a learning curve. The smaller the greenhouse,l the harder it is to regulate the temperature and the light. I feel like the shadecloth made growing in the greenhouse so much easier. It also helps to have a fan to give your plants good air movement for good plant health while in the greenhouse, and I think that Dorothy has a heated propagation bench, but I don't. I'm going to assume you've seen the OSU Garden Planning Guide that has planting dates for cool season crops in winter/spring and warm season planting dates in spring/mid-summer. So, instead of linking it again since we link it often in various 'new gardener' threads, I am going to link the Fall Garden Planning Guide. You can look ahead to what you can plant in summer (and a few things in fall) for a fall harvest. I usually start my seeds for my fall tomato plants in May so I can put the fall tomatoes in the ground in mid-June through early July. It seems silly to a non-gardener when they look at the beautiful tomato plants in my garden in June and then look at the tiny seedlings I'm growing for fall. Not being gardeners, they don't understand why a person starts new plants for fall. If they were gardeners they'd understand that July and August are really tough on tomato plants here and that fresh, new plants that just went into the ground in early summer have more vigor and do better in fall than older plants that are running out of energy. For a long time....and I mean a couple of decades or further back, I carried over the spring plants through the fall but once I tried with fresh plants for fall, I was amazed at how much better they do. Now, see, that is the sort of experiment that pays off. I never would have known how well it would work if I hadn't tried it. One of the wonderful thing about gardening in Oklahoma is we have a very long growing season, although technically it is broken up into smaller sub-seasons. That means that we get a second chance in fall with many cool-season and warm-season plants. Keep in mind, we often have to plant in ridiculously hot and miserably dry weather in June through August so we can be harvesting in September through December or later. The fall season really is a fall harvesting season because the fall garden planting mostly occurs in summer. Technically, the fall garden planting season starts with tomatoes going into the ground July 1st. That means you need to start your seeds 6-8 weeks before that so you'll have transplants ready by July 1st, and I often put them into the ground a week or two earlier than that, usually to fill a space made empty by the removal of a cool-season crop that is finished producing. I personally haven't had much luck with snap peas in fall. Often, just about the time the heat drops enough that the plants grow well,, we turn significantly colder and we get too cold too early and the blossoms drop off the plants. I keep trying though, because maybe one of these years I'll get it right. Some crops, though, like kale, cauliflower and brussels sprouts do better in the fall than in the spring. Just keep planting and plugging away. Even when you encounter obstacles, every experience is a learning experience. Every learning experience makes you a better gardener. Nobody is successful with every crop every year. I'm happy if 75% if the crops I plant produce an edible harvest. We just have too much odd weather and too many pests to reasonably expect 100% success every year. Remember, too, to enjoy the process. Don't worry, don't hurry....and don't forget to stop and smell the flowers. To me, the process of gardening is more important than the end result. I try to enjoy every day of the journey, and then whatever crop is there at the end of the journey is just a bonus. Gardening is very rewarding and can add great joy to your life, but some years it brings a lot of stress and I think we all find ourselves too garden-stressed at times. If we had perfect weather and no pests, what would we talk about? We'd just sit here saying "the broccoli is going bonkers, the potatoes are perfect, the lettuce is lovely and the tomatoes are terrific" and it would be so boring. Generally, gardening in OK includes a certain amount of, hmm, let's call it "drama", and it often arrives in the form of late freezes, late snow, sleet, hail, tornadoes, derecho winds, microbursts, an occasional haboob, wind-driven wildfire, graupel, thundersnow, flooding rain or, conversely, months with almost no rain at all and tremendous drought. Sometimes I think to myself "if the weather was perfect, what would we discuss here?" Not to worry, though, because it never will happen. Our weather is many things, but "perfect" is not one of them, but we just keep on keeping on anyhow. Dawn Here is a link that might be useful: Fall Garden Planning Guide

It is not just the quantity of light (number of hours) but also the quality of light that matters. A T12 light gives much weaker light than a T5. Neither gives a plant the equivalent light energy or spectrum of the sun. I definitely saw an improvement in growth when I increased the number of hours my seedlings were exposed to T12 lights, and 24/7 produced the best results. With a better light source, like T5s, a dark period seemed to help. But I think 18 hours of T5 light was better than 14 or 16. HID and HPS lights provide much better light than any fluorescent light can, and could probably be used for a shorter light cycle. Choosing supplemental lighting that provides something close to what natural sunlight provides is more complicated than just matching the number of hours of exposure.