Happy Earth Day to all and Happy Birthday to my Aunt Judy too. But I am not going to talk about Earth Day this week, instead I will tell you a little bit about seed starting.

I was suppose to be the guest speaker this month for the Liberty Garden Club on Tuesday talking about seed starting. We were worried on Monday about this big snowstorm we were suppose to get, but luckily it didn’t amount to much. Well as bad luck would have it on Tuesday morning I was starting to feel a little queasy so I went home to rest before the Garden Club meeting.

It is a good thing I went home when I did as not 10 minutes after I got home, I was worshipping the porcelain god. Needless to say, I had to cancel my speaking engagement. But as I laid in bed on a heating pad it reminded me of heating mats that are beneficial to starting seeds. Longer sunny days warm the soil outdoors and trigger seeds to sprout.

Likewise unless you have a good southern window for your seed tray, you need a heat source to trigger your seeds to sprout. We used to sell many heat mats for seed starting back in the day, but these days they just are not as popular, which makes them hard to find at times.

Many of our suppliers don’t even carry them anymore, but they are still out there. These days most of those heat mats are sold as under tank heaters for lizards and snakes. Instead of packaging for the garden trade they are packaged for the pet trade instead, even though they are the same thing. Another good heat source are UV bulbs. These bulbs were developed for the pet trade but can be used for seed starting as well.

These bulbs produce different color spectrums of light and, unlike the newer LED bulbs, they produce a fair amount of heat, since reptiles are cold blooded they need the heat to survive. We carry both UVA and UVB bulbs as well as regular daylight and nighttime bulbs.

So if you plan on starting some seeds indoors and you don’t have a good southern window that can give you about six hours of direct sunlight, I would suggest adding a heat source.

On another note this week, I have been hearing about a lot of deer damage from customers. Even eating things that they should never eat unless they are starving like spruce and pine. We had a fairly mild winter and there should be no reason for the deer to be eating these things except for the fact that they just felt like it.

Well I would just like to say that we have once again the number one deer repellent, coyote urine. Deer do not have a tendency to eat around areas where coyotes are present for fear of being eaten themselves. And deer can smell coyote urine a quarter to half mile away depending on the wind.

Just don’t put it all around your patio or that bar-b-que in July could get a little smelly.