Hi Booberry,
I highly recommend the Winter Sowing forum on Garden Web.You will get extremely healthy plants by wintersowing and you can start most of them now and forget about them until it warms up. Good luck and please keep us posted. Kareen

Here is a link that might be useful: Our pond and gardens

Booberry,
Last year, I started my indoor seeds mid-March, and that seemed to work out well. However, there are a few things you can do to transplant your plants a little earlier (one to two weeks earlier). You can warm up your soil by covering it with a black plastic cover as soon as the snow melts. That also cuts down on weeds. Then, end of May (double check the soil temperature first), you can just make a small cut in the plastic and plant. Also, you can surround the new plants with any clear plastic jars (taller than your seedlings) filled with water. The water absorbs the heat during the day and radiates it back to the plant at night. If you have any, you can also cover the plants with a horticultural white 'fabric' (I believe it is called 'row cover') until warm temperatures settle in for good.. It keeps the plants 6-10F warmer, lets enough light and water in. All this works well for tomato and pepper plants. For squash, I think it's better to wait until you can count on the right conditions. They'll catch up. Hopefully, we will have a normal summer, this year.

Well, hope you can use some of these tips.
Good luck,
Anne-Marie

P.S.: you can aslo wintersow tomatoes, they may not be a little behind at first, but they will catch up, and might even be healthier. I have done it both ways with success.

Look at the package. If it's reasonable to start them inside, the package will say when to do it. Most tomato packages say six to eight weeks before planting out, so that's in the beginning of April here. If you have lights, start earlier, if you don't, start later. Peppers have relatively small root systems, and can be started earlier.

Tomatoes can be tough because of the short, cool growing season. We've done much better with them since going to raised beds. They heat up earlier. I wouldn't wintersow tomatoes for that reason. They need the head start they get inside.

The end of March or first week of April is about the right time to start seeds to get young tomato plants 6 to 9 inches high for planting out at the end of May. They should have done just fine for you. Last year was a very poor gardening season though, cold and wet, so maybe this year will be different.

Check your growing conditions, something might be out of whack there aside from the weather. Sterile seed starting mix with no nutrients? Not enough light? (Are you growing the seedlings on a windowsill or under fluorescent lights or in a greenhouse?) Maybe the flats/pots/containers the young seedlings were started in were too small and the plants were stunted before you planted them in the garden.

Weather-wise, some varieties just seem to be more cold-tolerant than others, and some really need hot weather to do well, so maybe planting a different variety this year will make a difference.

If you post your query on the Growing Tomatoes forum and provide detailed info about the way you are starting your seeds and growing the plants on in the garden, you will get lots of advice on what could be going wrong. There is also a FAQ there that you can check first.

Here is a link that might be useful: FAQ -- Starting Tomatoes from Seed

I am WS some tomatoes, but I am also sowing some indoors. I'll start the indoor seeds in March, because although the plants did well when I started in April last year, I think I really should've started earlier to get a more mature plant before planting outdoors.
Last year was my first year starting from seed and the vegetables were probably the most successfull items in my effort. I just used peat pots and a sunny window. This year, I'll probably do the same, maybe start a few later on a heating mat.

Thanks so much for the help!

Last year which was a terrible year for veggies b/c of the cool wet weather, I had great success with my wintersown tomatoes. In fact I was giving plants away to anyone who would take them and I only sowed one variety and didn't even sow all of the seeds. The plants were very healthy, robust and large. I didn't get as many tomatoes last year but I have to blame it more on the weather than on anything else as my peppers didn't produce well either and they were nursery stock. I did still have tomatoes right up until frost though which was really plenty for us to use up.

Peppers I don't grow from seed as they need too much warmth. When I grew them down south they were the size of grapefruits and loaded. I just don't have that luck with them here so I usually just get a couple of plants from the nursery.

i will not do tomatoes any other way than wintersown b/c it is so easy.

penny

The "old people" who had to rely on their talent for growing in order to have food to eat used to say that St Patricks day was the time to plant tomato seed for garden transplants: It has been my experience over the last 45 years of gardening that this has been accurate over 90% of the time.
fwiw