OK, time for one of those annual tips we simply cannot miss! It’s one of the most vital to our sanity when it comes to watering hundreds of seeds and seedlings! You recently saw it in one of our “action” images, so let’s talk about it.
For our watering of seeds and seedling, we use a small handheld pressure sprayer. These can be found at your typical home improvement big box stores, usually for under 10 bucks. They hold 56 ounces of water (or, fert water) and can throw down a whole lot of water in a hurry.
Seedling trays take a surprising amount of water to fully saturate the soil. Many complain about seeding trays “drying out too quickly,” but that’s really a lack of proper water saturation within the soil. Using a pressure sprayer like this definitely makes that effort infinitely better, especially compared to traditional squeeze sprayer.
We get a few seasons of use out of them before we need to rehabilitate them. You can open them up and lubricate the small o-ring on the uptake tube, which gets them back to fully working condition with very little effort. We use a little bit of food safe lubricant (keg lube, specifically) to maintain the airtight seal.
This year, our decade+ old unit finally gave up the ghost. We’ve refurbished it so many times the o-ring is now simply obliterated beyond simple repairs. So we insta-bought two more as we realized how we simply cannot live with them! We’ll eventually replace the o-ring in our busted unit, too, and then we’ll have spares for our spares!
Having a second unit has also allowed us to get both regular water and a light fertilization water. We like to start giving our seedlings very light doses of fertilizer around when they start developing their first true leaves. This is right around the time where the seed no longer provides internal energy to the plant, so it needs to start feeding on its own. Having the two units is making that a simpler process, too!
So far, these pressure sprayers are approaching the “buy it for life” quality that we are generally after. But, even a decade+ of use for 10 bucks is pretty good! We can’t recommend this enough if you’re caring for a bunch of seedlings!
