Next up on our growing from seed gear, seeding trays! We borrow this from commercial growers, but use it very differently than most commercial growers. We find that it fits exceptionally well into the larger scale home nursery operation!
The primary goal of the seeding tray is for the first stage of growing from seed, the germination process. It’s designed to get us from seed to a baby seedling, the earliest stages of plant growth.
There’s a bunch of different sizes and types of seeding trays, such as 128 cell and 200 cell. Fewer cells provide for more soil and more time before you have to transplant to the next container size. More cells increase your sowing density. We opt for 200 cell, preferring to condense our germination as much as possible.
When we fill these trays with soil, we want it reasonably compact. so we stuff it down well with our fingers. Our end goal is a nice “plug” that can be transplanted. We perform surface sows, then sprinkle soil over the top of the seeds to meet our desired sowing depth.
In general, our aim is to get a single seed per cell. If you accidentally get a few seeds germinating in a single cell, you can simply trim out the weakest seedlings later. A few plants do like clustering, like mint and lobelia, so these are OK to germinate multiples in a single cell.
Unlike commercial growers, we plant all sorts of things next to one another in these trays. Each row (on the short side) is reserved for a specific seed type, but we don’t care if tomatoes germinate next to mint. We can remove only the plugs we want, when we want.
Almost all of our seeds are germinated in the seeding tray! The only exceptions are the physically largest seeds, such as sunflower, squash and cucumber. These plants simply grow too fast and large for these trays to be useful.
I’m sure we’ll have a bit more to say about these in the future, they’re a major piece of our germination kit!
