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New with introduction and questions on starting seeds

Hello folks,
I've been receiving this list for a few weeks and reading it all with
avid interest. I got here from a link posted in the rec.gardens.edible
newsgroup.
I'm fairly new to gardening. I grew up watching my mum's small garden
and compost pile, and my our next-door-neighbour, Chris, who grew
quite a lot of food he sold to his neighbours. Chris' garden always
fascinated me. I thought the whole thing was rather wonderful. This
was in England, by the way.
My husband and I used to live in Florida and I tried growing tomatoes,
peppers, zucchinis, corn, etc. there a couple of times without much
success. We never had good soil or enough sun.

We are now living in the western North Carolina mountains. Looking at
the USDA Zone map, we are right on the edge of ZOnes 6 and 7, but
because of the location of our property, the temperature here is at
least 10 F warmer than any of the surrounding areas. Therefore, I'd
say that we're definitely in Zone 7, as far as temperature goes, as
it's very rare that we ever get down to 10 F.

My main question at the moment (and I'll try to keep this short) is
about starting seeds. I've borrowed Mel's book from the library, along
with some other ones, and it appears that if I want to grow broccoli,
cauliflower, and cabbage, I'll have to start the seeds now. In order
to explain my question, I need to explain our situation a little more.

We are living in a 28 ft airstream, isolated in the wilderness (right
next to 40,000 acres of National Forest, actually), off-grid, no
running water, etc. Therefore, things like grow-lights and heaters are
out of the question. We have a couple of storage buildings for our
stuff, but it's really cramped in the airstream. While my husband has
promised to clear off his desk for me to lay seed trays, I know it
won't stay that way, so that's no point.

I bought one of those greenhouse seedling trays, some peat cups
(bigger than the size of the individual molds in the seedling tray)
and a bag of seedling mixture. I've been buying seeds for the last 2
years in anticipation of this spring (it was supposed to be last
spring, but don't ask...) so I have plenty of seeds of the basic
varieties of almost everything I'd like to grow this year. The
bathroom window is facing south, and it is the one area of the
airstream in which I could place something. I'd just have to keep the
cats off it. (We have 2 cats and 1 dog, a Samoyed). 

I have gleaned from my readings so far that seeds need to be kept at
about 70 F to sprout. I'm still unclear on much of this, so any
information or advice which would help would be appreciated. I'll go
back and read Mel's book on starting seeds again tonight, but I wanted
to send a mail to the list before I forgot yet again.

The seedling tray I have has 72 molds in it, and that's absolutely
plenty for me at the moment. I want to start fairly small. So it will
fit on a shelf in the bathroom in front of the window.Truth be told,
we don't have the garden dug yet (the ground doesn't seem to really
freeze too much unless there's a hard freeze. I dug down into it with
my fingers the other day). I have lots of questions about soil and
such, but I'll leave that for another post.

Okay, I'm done for now. If I've left any pertinent information out,
let me know.

Dara


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StarrWings Studio - a fine arts and graphics studio: http://www.starrwings.com
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