Starting with seeds; sprouting plants inside gets a jump on gardening season

It’s 8:30 on Sunday morning and Travis Shoup is all smiles walking back to his Moon home from his newly expanded vegetable garden.
“I call it an obsession,” his wife Karie says with a laugh about his love of gardening.
“I call it a passion,” he says in response.
Whatever you call it, Travis has the gardening bug bad.
“We’ve compromised,” she says. “He wanted to make it bigger, he would have done the whole yard.”
Over three gardening seasons, Travis has filled about a quarter of his nearly one acre lot with a fenced-in area for growing vegetables and flowers.
“Just seeing how much he loves it, makes me happy,” Karie says.

Travis Shoup of Moon has a gardening bug. He’s starting seeds indoors under lights to put into the garden. He’s been inspired by his mother and father to garden. Photos by Doug Oster

Karie Shoup poses with a tomato out of last year’s garden in Moon. Her husband Travis Shoup loves to garden for her and their daughter Jolene. Photo courtesy of Travis Shoup

To get the gardening season started, the basement is aglow in bright white light over stocky green vegetable and flower seedlings, all started from seeds weeks ago. He’s sowing more and there’s still plenty of time to get seeds started indoors.
Both of Travis’ parents enjoyed gardening. But like many adult gardeners, time with the plants wasn’t always fun growing up. “Then it was more of a chore,” he says. “We had chickens, rabbits and a huge garden.”
Last season was the first starting his own seeds.
“I made a lot of mistakes, but out of that I might have bought only five plants from the store,” he says proudly. “My biggest mistake was starting too many.”
The table next to the seedlings is covered with seed packets in storage bags and also notebooks with meticulous handwritten notes about what’s planted where and lists of friends and family who get the extras.
To learn how to start seeds inside, he got advice from his father, friends and watched a lot of YouTube videos. One of the easiest ways to start them is in peat pellets, he says, a trick he learned from his friend Tom Patton.
“They look like a really small hockey puck and you slowly add water,” Shoup says. The fibrous disc expands to be a little more than an inch high and is the perfect self-contained medium for sowing seeds.
“They’re a little bit more expensive (than planting in deep cell containers), but they are very easy,” he says.
He pushes a seed into the peat pellet, spritzes with water and then covers the flat with a clear plastic cover. Adding the cover will keep the medium moist until the seeds sprout. The pellet, flat and cover are often sold together as a kit. The flat is then put on a heat mat to speed germination. His tomatoes were up in about a week.
“They will definitely sprout if you don’t use the heat mat,” he says. “They just take a little longer.”

Travis Shoup of Moon started these tomatoes in peat pellets. They start off like as a small disc and grow when water is added.

The other way he starts seeds is to fill the deep cell packs — what most plants are sold in at garden centers. He made the mistake of using compost mixed with peat moss last year to get seeds going.
“Eggs, bugs and things hatched when it got warm,” he says with a laugh. “That was a problem.”
Shoup now uses a commercial organic seed starting mix, puts it into a 5-gallon bucket and adds water until the medium is the right consistency.
“I like to squeeze a little bit in my hand, if it sticks together, but will still fall apart a little and isn’t too soupy, it’s ready,” he says.
Travis packs the mix down into the cells and then sprinkles a little more mix on top. The seeds are gently pushed into the medium and then pushed down about a quarter inch. This flat is covered with a clear plastic cover and then placed on a heat mat. When the first signs of germination appear, the plastic is removed.
“As soon as they sprout you need to get them under the light,” he says. He uses inexpensive shop lights but replaced the bulbs with aquarium lights, and he’s also trying out one LED light. They run on a timer for 16 hours.
He started out planting seeds to save money, but there’s much more to it now. “What I really like about it, I can grow more and give them away,” he says.
In his short time gardening, Shoup has discovered some seeds that shouldn’t be started indoors and are better direct sown in the garden at the right time. He surrounds his home with beans, working them into any planting area he can in May. He actually has a pound of seeds to plant this spring. Radishes, Swiss chard, lettuce, arugula, spinach, vine crops like zucchini and a variety of other plants have all done better for him when planted right in the garden.
“He was like a little kid on Christmas when all these seeds came in,” his wife says. “Every day he was checking the mail, ‘did my seeds come yet, did my seeds come yet.’ ”

This photo, shot in 1953 shows Travis Shoup’s mother Maureen as a little girl with her step brother Johnny and Shoup’s grandfather Paul Couderc. They are on their four acre family farm in McDonald PA . “They are holding some tomatoes my pap proudly grew,” Shoup says.

Both inside and outside he’s growing a few hybrids, but mostly heirlooms. One reason he’s planting the heritage varieties is to save the seed for next season. Travis loves many of the back stories of the seeds, but there’s a deeper connection he has for these old fashioned cultivars. An old black and white picture of his grandfather, mother and her stepbrother from 1953 proudly holding garden tomatoes grown by the family’s patriarch evoke strong feelings about his own young family and how he hopes gardening will be part of their lives.
“My dream would be for my daughter, Jolene, to see a picture like this of me and her and be able to say to her children, ‘You see those tomatoes, those were your grandfather’s favorite and that tomato there in our garden is of that same strain,’ ” he says.
His wife can’t wait for Jolene to join in the fun either. “When the baby gets older, seeing her run through there will be awesome,” Karie says.

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His list goes deep for the tomatoes and peppers he’s starting from seed. The heirlooms are mostly from Seed Savers Exchange and hybrids from W. Atlee Burpee.
For peppers he’s growing jalapeño ‘Traveler Strain,’ ‘Golden Wax Pepper,’ ‘Hot Hungarian Wax Pepper,’ ‘California Wonder,’ and ‘Bulgarian Carrot.’ The tomatoes include ‘Early Girl’, ‘Nebraska Wedding,’ ‘Super Beefsteak,’ ‘Martino’s Roma,’ and ‘Baby Boomer.’ His so-called “claim to fame” variety is ‘San Marzano,’ a meaty plum tomato he shares.
“I gave most of them away, maybe planted one or two,” he says. He’s got 16 earmarked for other sauce tomato lovers on his list.
“My aunt wants six plants,” Karie says.
Like many growers who fall under the spell of heirlooms, he’s growing one introduced to him by a friend, Tom Patton. It’s called ‘All Meat Beefsteak’ and Patton knows it originated in Holland. He received the variety from an elderly neighbor who had grown it for decades.
His “passion” for the garden is evident, and like most gardeners, he understands that time spent playing in the dirt makes him part of a unique fraternity.
“I think the biggest thing is just sitting down on the porch and just being around the garden or the therapeutic nature of gardening,” he says. “I don’t think you can explain it someone who doesn’t garden.”

Travis Shoup of Moon poses in front of one of his two gardens in Moon. “We’ve compromised, his wife Karie says, he wanted to make it bigger, he would have done the whole yard.”

Travis Shoup calls himself a “wannabe homesteader.” He hunts, preserves from the garden, trades plants for all sorts of things and has set up a Facebook page called Pittsburgh Gardeners, Farmers and Homesteaders.
Doug Oster is the Tribune-Review home and garden editor. Reach him at 412-965-3278 or doster@tribweb.com. See other stories, blogs, videos and more at everybodygardens.com.