Continuing with our germination kit deep dive, the next piece in our kit is our seeding tray! This is something that we borrow from commercial growers, but use in a very different way than most commercial growers use it.
Our seeding tray provides us with individual cells where we can place seeds and germinate plants in, eventually producing a “plug” once the seedling has gotten a little bigger. The seeding tray nests neatly into our 1020 tray, providing rigor, seedling mobility and containment of any lost soil.
There’s many sizes of seeding trays out there, but we use 200 cell seeding trays. Other common sizes are 128 cell, 72 cell and even other sizes. The seeding tray’s size dictates the size of each individual cell. Lower cell counts allow slightly larger seedlings to be developed whereas greater cell quantity allows more germination in less space.
It’s important to understand that the seeding tray is just a temporary home for our initial seedlings, designed primarily for germination and the earliest stages of plant growth. It is not intended for more mature plants, the limited soil is simply exhausted far too quickly. These “plugs” will be transplanted to another, more suitable container once the seedling is of appropriate size.
The typical use of seeding trays in commercial applications usually call for automatic seeders, where an entire tray is dedicated to a single plant type and variety. In our case, we just sow our seeds individually into each cell manually. In the home garden application, there’s a number of technical benefits from using a seeding tray beyond just commercial automation.
First, it easily allows us to over-sow the number of seeds we need, so we can then pick the “best of the best” to bring forward into our garden. This also allows us to eliminate “failed germination” spots within our indoor garden, again helping us achieve optimal use of space.
In addition, the cells work to create isolated environments for each seedling. This greatly helps in the event of a fungal invasion, where the fungus can have a hard time spreading quickly due to the cell walls. The individual cells also eliminate issues with allelopathy, which is where some seeds can emit chemicals that inhibit nearby seed germination.
We would say that the seeding tray is not essential to growing from seed and there are other ways to initiate germination. But, the tray does have a lot of benefits and we’ve grown to strongly prefer its use over other methods in our plant raising process. So, that’s why it’s part of our essential kit and how it helps us!
