You can sow them outdoors in covered containers right now -it is a method called wintersowing - I have been doing it since January - no need to try and find places in the house and chase the sun and it works GREAT - many gardeners in your zone are planting right out in the garden now with wintersown hardy annuals. There is a forum here on GW devoted to it. Read the FAQ first to get an idea of what we are talking about - then ask all the questions you want - these are very helpful gardeners and eager to share - it will change your whole way of thinking.... Lynne Here is a link that might be useful: WinterSowing

We're north of you in Mass and we have in: cauliflower and broccoli seedlings, spinach, kale, radish, lettuce, and mesclun seed. Carrot seeds going in next weekend. Some kind soul on here pointed me to the site below where you input your last frost date and it will tell you when to plant what. Here is a link that might be useful: Planting Spreadsheet

I can tell you my experiences container-gardening bell peppers and jalapenos in Houston. I directly sow my seeds into small cheap pots, then transplant into large buckets with holes drilled in the bottom. For bell peppers: I keep the plant in partial shade year-round. I have a hanging system for them--the plant grows out of the bottom of a bucket hanging from the eve of my duplex. The pepper plant is 18 months old (no freeze last winter) and has given me several crops of peppers. I may start moving it to full sun in the Fall. For jalapenos: Right now, my jalapeno plants are in full sun. But the temperatures are only hitting the low to mid 90's. When it gets above 100, I'll move them to a shaded spot (using a cheap enclosure I made out of some leftover Ikea plastic shelving). Also: I cover the top of my jalapeno plants with compost (as the forum FAQ recommends) to help prevent the soil from drying out as quickly. We can get a lot of rain here, and my plants seem to tolerate it. One of my jalapeno plants did lose a bunch of flowers in a storm, and I think it will stay dormant until Fall. This happens a lot when we have very hot summers--my bell pepper and tomato plants stops producing when temperatures stay over 100, but will perk back up in late August. Last year I got a late summer crop, a February crop, and now they are going non-stop :).

Travellinjess; I have tried growing onions from direct seeding in the past in your zone. The problem is to seed them when they will amount to something, the germination is so slow that the weeds beat them, and it is almost impossible to find them when they do germinate. I start mine indoors March 31st, for a transplant May 15th I harvest about 2nd to 3rd week in august for storage onions. You can get one of those 10"X20" trays with 12 inserts and can grow enough transplants to provide you with a couple of hundred pounds of storage onions! once they germinate they are very tough, and you could move them outside in days and bring them in at night. I cut the tops a few times, and it causes them to bulb out, and by transplant time they have a good root system and a 3/16" bulb on some of them. I then make a furrow come planting time, and set them out with the appropriate spacing for the variety, they take about a week to settle in and then are away to the races! I tell you if you can manage it you will never go back to onion sets! The picture shows top and bottom shows only 2/3 of that particular crop Hope this helps Chic. PS onions shown are Walla Walla and Hendrix both from Stoke seeds.