City Organic Gardener

Right now I am using these 72 cell trays to start my seeds in. Some of the seedling go from here directly into the ground, such as the corn you can see at the upper right. The rest are transplanted into plastic cups to grow out a little more.
I start a new tray every Sunday. Taking the list of seeds that I have, I decide which plants I will be needing. Depending on the plant that can be one to three months away before that seedling hits the ground. Since I don't have anyone to take any extra seedlings that I can't use it means seeding these trays with only what I have room for in the garden. Then there are the cells that don't sprout at all, but since I fill a tray every week, I can just put in more seeds a week or two later.
These trays spend every day outside. Every night they are moved into the house and covered with their plastic domes. The last two nights were the first nights this year that the night time temperatre low was 65 or higher. At those temperatures the trays are left outside and covered with the plastic dome. Much easier than hauling them back and forth each day.

This is one of the areas (sitting on a lasagna garden) where I put some of the seedlings after they come out of the trays. Quite a few of these plants are more than ready for the ground, so that will be done in the next few days.
Since I don't buy very many transplant for nurseries I don't have a collection of 4" plastic pots to use so I was trying out plastic cups and finally settled on these. They are $11 or $12 dollars at Cosco for 240 of them. I can mark the variety on them with a Sharpie, and reuse them 3 or 4 times before they start cracking. I also think these cups are better than the 4" nursery pots because since the cups are taller, the root system grows longer that the 4" pots can provide.
I don't have a certain day that I move plants from the tray to the cups, it's just whenever they look right they get transplanted. The same is true for when the transplants come out of these red cups. When they look ready and there is room, they go in the ground.
Wish I could find more of the Coca-Cola carriers, they make great trays for these cups.



This other seedling area is for some flowers. It also has about 20 rosemary plants. These plants are in the lawn area, so they get moved every week. The rosemary will take a while before they can be transplanted into one gallon containers. I don't really know what I'm going to do with them, I only need one or two of them.
The flowers include 2 sunflowers, 6 marigold and 4 carnation.

Labels: Seedlings