On Apr 29, 10:56 am, James wrote:
Used peat pellets and planted pepper seeds on 4/5. Using my heating
pad I was able to get half of them sprouting after 10+ days. Now 24
days later they still don't have the true leaves yet.

Since I keep my house at 60F or less and don't have grow light system
set up, they grow very slowly. Guess I need to really put some money
into a germination system or else turn up the heat to get a good
seedling crop.

I guess you've already tried turning up the heat around the
germinated baby plants by wrapping an electric blanket around the
chilly side, but open to the light. We did that when we lived in zone
5a in upstateNY and couldn't afford to heat a whole room to keep a few
plants warm.


So it's much wiser for me to just buy from the
nursery. Even if i buy the mail order bare root plants from southern
nurseries, I would still save money and have bigger transplants. That
is until high gas prices make shipping too expensive.

Hm, hadn't thought of it that way. We still start some favorites
from seed. It's much easier where we are now (NC) to grow 6 or so
varieties of tomatoes ourselves. We buy a few other dependable
varieties locally as plants. After many years of starting ten times
as many plants as we had room for, we have learned to keep the P.I.Y.
operation small. Mostly.