For the final installment in our germination kit deep dive, let’s get into the humidity dome! This is an essential component of a solid seed germination kit.
At the root, the humidity dome is about increasing the relative humidity around your seedlings. Most seedlings generally prefer a high humidity environment and this increased moisture directly contributes to higher survival rates of your seedlings. Like with the rest of our germination kit, the humidity dome is sized to fit directly on top of our 1020 tray and seeding tray.
Humidity domes typically come in both “tall” and “short” variants. Having worked with both, we prefer the taller domes as they tend to be a lot more flexible across different plant types. There are no major drawbacks to using the tall domes on short plants, if that’s what you’re wondering.
One of the key features of the humidity domes are the vents at the top. This allows the gardener to dial in humidity levels more precisely. A common problem with high humidity is that green algae starts growing growing on the soil, which is both unsightly and creates biological competition for the seedlings. Opening these vents will help regulate the humidity from getting too high, which combats any algae growth. Reducing humidity levels can also reduce your fungal infection risks, too.
We usually keep our domes on our plants throughout the germination and early seedling growth process. Once we transplant our seedlings to their more suitable container, we no longer need the protection of high humidity. But, we see huge dividends from the increased humidity during the earliest stages of plant growth.
The humidity dome also works towards increasing the effectiveness of water application to the early seedlings. A dry environment promotes the soil drying up quickly, whereas a more humid environment slows that process down significantly. We’re not telling you anything you don’t know when we say plants need access to water!
While we’d say these specific humidity domes are not “absolutely” essential, seedlings do like their humidity and it increases survival rates in spades. The 1020 tray system, as we’ve displayed in these three deep dive posts, ultimately work to create the exact environment our seedlings need in their earliest growth stages. That’s why we use them and they are part of our germination kit.
We are at the point as growers where we could basically do “whatever we want,” perhaps aside from growing our plants in NASA grade space age gold foil super germination pods. That’s not even a real thing, so we figured we’d share with you all our second best alternative and how we do germination!
