Gardening: The Easy Way

Greetings, Gardeners and non-Gardeners alike!

Gardening seems to have more parallels to life every time I write a post. Maybe I should rename the "Gardening" section of my blog to "Life Lessons With Plants."

Anyways, in gardening, it is often tempting to take the easy way. You see the wonderful, giant tomato plants at the store, or even the four-inch tall ones and think: I love gardening, and that would be so nice, and they'd do so much better than if I started my own seeds indoors. . . 

But would they do better? Just like in life, how the "short cut" or the "easy way" seems like it would reap many more benefits and be so much faster, in the long run, it often isn't. Usually, taking the time to go the long route proves to have more benefits. For example, in

baking, if you get the box of cake mix, it tastes nice, but a cake made from scratch tastes way better.

Tomatoes work the same way. The plants from the store often are thin and weak. Tomatoes started

Tomato From Store-Circled

From Store: Bushy-- But many thin branches

from seed indoors often grow much stronger central branches, and become large, healthy, bushes, whereas the ones from the store tend to not grow nearly as well. At least, in my experience. :) I have heard some people not get good plants from starting seeds indoors without grow lights and heating mats, which are really expensive, but mine do just fine without either.

Take my plants for example. I bet my two front tomatoes will be about the same size as my tomato plants last year, but here is the tomato I got from the store.

Also planted from seed, but smaller

Planted from seed

 

















So, what decision will you make?

Spruce Nogard