In the vegetable garden, the new season begins quietly in the cold months of January and February, whose hints of another garden year are the subtle swelling of buds on the trees, the tentative emergence of daffodil stems and the gradual lengthening of daylight hours.

Even below the Mason-Dixon line, it’s still too early by three or four weeks to start most vegetable seeds. But it is neither too soon for gathering the apparatus required for this enterprise nor for ordering from seed catalogs.

You can spend a small fortune buying multidecked seed-starting light tables from horticultural supply places. But you can also make your own quite cheaply or use storage shelving from mass merchandisers.

You also can convert old bookshelves, as long as they are at least four feet long (the length of your standard fluorescent shop light; no need for fancy growing lights). The key is to keep the lights just 6 inches above the top of the seedlings, and to put the lights on adjustable chains so that they can be raised as the plants grow.

Couple of tips: Put the lights on a timer, as the seedlings need 14 to 16 hours of light per day. Second, have a fan running gently somewhere in the vicinity. This will reduce the chance of a fungal disease called damping off (sudden deathly wilting of seedlings) and the air movement will cause the wee stems to become sturdier.

Seeds need a free-draining, inert soil mix in which to germinate. I have used carefully screened and well-rotted compost, but it’s safer to use a seed-starting mix, which you can buy or make from a blend of peat moss, perlite and vermiculite.

The seed-starting containers differ. Some gardeners use purpose-built trays with individual cells; I use a soil block maker from Britain. At Green Spring Gardens in Annandale, Va., Cindy Brown, Donna Stecker and garden volunteers sow about a dozen seeds in each of several used foam coffee

cups.

All methods must share these features: a growing container that drains and a tray beneath. They will permit bottom watering to keep the mix moist without disturbing the seeds or seedlings. Drain holes prevent soil saturation, which would quickly rot the seeds. Until the seeds germinate, the containers should be covered with a clear plastic (film wrap or old dry cleaner bags work well). After germination, the bags should be removed and the seedlings misted daily. Don’t water them directly from a watering can, the force of the water will dislodge them.

The Green Spring gardeners are onion- and-leek lovers, so they have started a rather broad array of varieties (found through very good mail-order catalogs). Among the onions, they have chosen: A white pickling variety named Barletta; a yellow cippolo type named Borettana; an early large red globe named Mars; and a big globe onion named Super Star. Among the leeks: Bandit, stout and long-season; the tall and thick English heirloom named Prizetaker; and Blue de Solaize, which can be harvested right through until December.

These alliums were all started Jan.

12. Less than three weeks later, they are ready to be transferred from 12 in a coffee cup to one per 4-inch pot. They must be well labeled, because onion and leek seeds and seedlings look alike.

Moving them is a delicate but deeply satisfying operation. The Green Spring gang has the luxury of now placing them in a greenhouse until they go out into the garden in late March. For the rest of us, it will be a late winter of crammed tables under lights. Let’s look forward to July and August.