First Seed-Start Season in Richfield — Midsummer Notes

This was the first year I tried to start a garden from seed in a serious way. I garden in Richfield, Minnesota — I treat it as USDA zone 5a, with a mid-May last frost. SeedStarter was not ready in time for this spring, so the calendar lived in my head.

As of midsummer, everything that made it into the ground is still alive. I have something like 12–20 tomato plants out there. They are growing hard and setting a lot of fruit — including Norfolk Healthy Produce Purple Tomatoes alongside Purple Cherokee and beefsteak. Serranos are alive too; they have not taken off the same way yet.

Why start from seed

I wanted varieties I could not reliably find as transplants:

• Little Gem lettuce
• Norfolk Healthy Produce Purple Tomato
• Purple Cherokee
• Purple tomatillo
• Serrano chiles
• Asparagus (established bed plus a new patch)

Store shelves are fine for the most common varieties. I have started collecting and trading heirloom seeds, though, so I want to put them to use — and starting from seed is cheaper.

A digital reminder on my calendar beats trying to remember on time while juggling a bunch of dates in my head. Every crop has a different indoor-start offset from last frost; mental math is how tomatillos die on the windowsill.

The basement setup

I started almost everything indoors under grow lights in the basement. That space already winters two Meyer lemon trees and two avocado trees, so the lights were not a one-season experiment — just a busier spring under the same fixtures.

Lettuce was the exception. I direct-sowed a lot of Little Gem. That worked, until it worked too well: we could not eat through it before it bolted. Nothing goes to waste on this little suburban homestead — the hens finished what we did not. Timing still needs work; the birds do not mind.

The tomatillo failure

Purple tomatillos were the expensive lesson. I started them too early. They got leggy under the lights, then they died — they never made it to the garden. Too many weeks before a mid-May transplant, and plants that look busy until they collapse.

That is the failure mode I wrote about in the frost-date post. Mid-May last frost only helps if you count backward correctly per crop. "Start early so they are big" is how you get weak stems.

Asparagus is different

I have an established asparagus bed and expanded from it this year. In the fall I collected seed from my plants; in early spring I scattered a bunch outdoors. About 6–10 new plants from that scatter have survived.

I also started 20–30 Mary Washington asparagus seeds indoors. Only two germinated — but those two did survive. I would not bother with indoor asparagus starts again. Outdoor scatter from my own seed has been the clearer win. Perennials do not follow the same tomato playbook.

Next spring

Next year I want the calendar out of my head. For my garden, that means reliable indoor-start and transplant dates for peppers and tomatoes first — and no more guessing tomatillos into an extra month downstairs. After that, succession planting for lettuce so harvest stays ahead of bolting instead of dumping one giant sowing on the hens.

If you are also in the Twin Cities metro on your first real seed-start year: write the frost date down, count offsets per crop, and do not gift tomatillos an extra month indoors. I already ran that experiment.

More on the tool build in the SeedStarter dev log.