This year I decided to start seeds inside because I never have anything to donate to the annual Master Gardener plant sale at the end of May. Normally I research new projects, but for some reason I didn't do that. I ordered seed packs and dug out old plant flats that I was saving. I also bought a self-watering starter kit complete with a steel frame to hold a grow light or fluorescent bulb.

The seeds I chose are a form of milkweed called Asclepias tuberosa or butterfly weed. Asclepias tuberosa has a taproot and a pretty orange flower that starts blooming in summer. It's a great plant for attracting butterflies, though I've never managed to find a monarch caterpillar on the plant.The starter kit was 48 cells in a foam block plus 48 sponges. The seeds went into the sponges and the water into a tray that holds the foam block. Then disaster struck. The seeds sprouted and died in a few days because they ran out of water. First lesson to a novice - sponge starters dry out fast.I bought more seeds and tried a different self-watering kit. This one had a rectangular plastic arrangement of one-inch cells that sat on a wet mat. The ends of the mat were draped into a tray of water. I filled the cells with seed starter medium, covered it with a plastic cover, and waited for the seeds to sprout. Instead every seed in the starter kit grew mold.Having failed twice with Asclepias tuberosa, I decided to switch to parsley. I did away with the self-watering idea and planted the parsley in a standard seed starting flat with one cell for each seed. I thought I should put two seeds per cell in case of a new disaster. This time they all sprouted - all 72 of them. I realized quite quickly that one fluorescent bulb wasn't going to make it. I purchased additional grow lights for all my gooseneck desk lamps, plus a four-bulb florescent fixture to put in my steel frame.Things were OK for about a week when I realized that the burgeoning parsley was rapidly outgrowing the little cells. For some reason, I had thought the parsley would just stay in the cells until I was ready to donate it to the plant sale. Not only did the parsley grow too fast, but there were two plants in each cell. This meant I needed lots of bigger pots and some kind of potting medium. Also, more lights.I tried to figure out what kind of soil my plants required. The seed starter medium is soilless and has no nutrients. The solution to this problem is actually not straightforward. People who write about repotting on the Internet have their own ideas about potting mixes.I had some ideas too (which turned out to be wrong). I have lots of worm castings from my worm farm, so I made up a soil mix from worm castings, topsoil, and peat moss. The resulting mix was so heavy and wet the poor parsley couldn't take it. I had an emergency transplanting session in my kitchen that left me scrubbing and cleaning every surface so I could use the kitchen again for food preparation.The obvious answer to planting in bigger pots was to use premixed potting soil from the garden center. Once I had that figured out, the parsley was finally decently potted and growing. By now I had every kind of lamp I could find focused on one or more pots. Some of the Asclepias tuberosa also sprouted, so I must have mixed some of those seeds in with the parsley somehow.It was around this time that I realized I had started the seeds too early and the parsley was getting huge. A field of parsley covered one end of my office. The plants needed to be outside.Luckily, we were gifted with a warm, dry April. I had some plastic cold frame tops, and my husband built me wooden boxes that could sit on the deck with the cold frames on them.I put the parsley outside. For a week, I brought the plants in every night. Then I started leaving them out altogether. Of course, May has been the opposite of April - cold and wet. Still, the parsley can take it. My extra parsley will be at the plant sale in May. The rest is becoming tabbouleh very shortly.