Growing Celery From Seeds

The seeds of the Celery plant are very tiny. I had a bottle of Celery seeds in my pantry because I was using this before in making my bottled Green Tomato pickles. I thought that perhaps I could use the seeds to grow my own celery. So I took a spoonful of seeds and put them in a covered bottle and added some water just to cover the seeds and put the bottle inside the refrigerator for 1 day just to soften them up a little bit. Then I bought a plastic seedling tray and a potting mix from the garden section at SM mall and sowed my seeds thinly in the dish and covered this lightly with more potting soil mix. I took a big basin and placed the seedling tray inside then I poured some water in the basin, just enough to come up to about half the height of the seedling tray. By doing this, the potting soil mix will soak up the water from the bottom and this will prevent what the experts call 'damping off" of the seeds. This method will also prevent the seeds from being dislodged if I were to water them from the top. It took awhile for the seeds to grow and I was getting impatient as usual. Thinking that the celery seeds will not germinate, I took the seedling tray and dumped the whole thing inside a disposable plastic cookie container that I was going to throw out. You see, I wanted to use the seedling tray to sow another kind of seeds and I was running out of seedling trays so why not just dump the whole Celery thing and forget about it. Then one day as I was working in the yard, I noticed the Celery seeds sprouting out from the plastic cookie sheet where I dumped them to. I was really surprised by this and I just decided not to touch them and just let them grow to see what will happen. Then I realized that as they were growing, they were getting too close to each other because they got compacted when I dumped them. So I removed some of the taller ones manually and believe me, that was not easy at all because I was trying so hard to be very careful so as not to damage the roots. Then I planted the one that I pricked into individual black plastic bags and put them in the shade until they are big enough to be transferred to the ground.