Pretty soon here, all you “from seed” growers are going to need a seed starting schedule! If you’re looking for the most complete far-northern seed sowing schedule on the planet, we’ve got you covered!
The beginning gardener often doesn’t know about seed sowing schedules. We’d even include ourselves in that group when we first started gardening so many years ago. But, as we learned, it soon became one of the most vital things we’d use in our “from seed” growing efforts.
The gist is that different plants grow at different rates. The schedule aims to get all your plants “roughly” to correct transplant size by the time our last frosts and garden planting times come around. If you take a willy-nilly approach, most people end up with a rather difficult jungle to manage and things can get out of control, making it difficult to care for your plants. Following a seed sowing schedule will make sure all your plants are the perfect size once we get to last frost.
We developed and published our own schedule, mostly because we grow a lot of things that just don’t make the “common” lists. We also found we didn’t agree with some things. Our schedule is good for USDA zones 2a through 4b and is “tuned” for the at-home gardener raising their plants indoors. Last year, we also put a ton of effort into sowing schedules for the “rest of Alaska” and other northern areas. So, now we offer sowing schedules from Utqiagvik to Adak!
We have two major schedules. The first is “easy mode” and is simply a downloadable PDF with most common garden plants. It simply provides you with rough dates of what to sow and when. Then, further down the page, we have our “uber” schedule. This operates on the “weeks to last frost” concept, such that it’s flexible across any possible climate. This is where we have all those “obscure” plants that you won’t find on “typical” sowing schedules. There is no major difference in the outcome between the schedules, but the latter schedule provides a lot more flexibility for the grower.
We are getting really excited about the upcoming growing season. We have about a month left and then we’ll be in the thick of growing for the season!
