Next year we’ll be focusing on the life sciences, so this year one of my student’s research project was to try to grow some plants using the system we’d set up the year before to see how effective it was and to find out if we could use the plants we grow for a plant sale at the end of the year. I also started some plants at home as did the student’s parents, which served as a reasonable control.
We learned that you have to account for the different germination times for different plants, and the importance of hardening plants off before taking them outside. We also learned that the greenhouse can get too warm in the spring. While the plants we started at school were not the most successful, it was an extremely useful project nonetheless, otherwise we’d probably have made the same mistakes next year. A pair of temperature/humidity data loggers, for inside and outside the greenhouse, will be extremely useful for monitoring growing conditions.
The big land-grant universities have fairly good extension services that have a lot of good information online. The University of Missouri’s page on Starting Plants From Seeds is quite useful, although it is not aimed at the organic gardener.