Luckily for me it’s a leap year.  My 2012 vegetable garden schedule called for me to start my first indoor seeds, onions, at the end of February.  And they just made it in the nick of time — thanks to a leap day today.

Planted Copra and Redwing onion starts from seed today.

This year I’ve decided to turn a little more professional for my seed starts.  I tried egg cartons and plastic containers last year and, while they worked, I don’t think they gave me the best results. This year I found these great Deep-Root Seed Starter Pots from Lee Valley, one of my favourite garden candy stores. The pots are deep, with grooved sidewalls, allowing for lots of root growth which should help grow larger transplants. Each cell has a hole in the bottom so you can water from the bottom up (a catch tray was included) and makes it possible to push the transplants up from the bottom. (Thank you to Lee Valley for the drawing)

For my onion starts, I used the smaller 72-cell trays. At $20 for a set of three I didn’t think that was unreasonable, especially since they are fairly heavy plastic and look like they will last quite a few years.

So in went 114 Copra onion seeds and 102 Redwing. More than I will need but we will see how germination goes.

Here’s hoping this approach results in more consistently larger onion bulbs this season.