I decided to try soil blocking this year. In November I bought my soil blocker and watched a ton of youtube videos on soil mixtures. I ordered my coconut coir, got my potting soil and vermiculite, ordered enough higher quality 1020 trays, got a new grow light setup that fits in a place at our rental house and started making plant markers. I impatiently waited until 8 weeks before our last frost. And then it was on. And I went admittedly a little overboard, but frankly, I did not expect the germination rates to be as high as they were. Many of my seeds are at least 3-4 years old, this is the first garden that I've started from seed for a few years due to our cross country move. But here we are! And knowing that I want to put up more tomato sauce this year, in addition to sharing the garden with friends, and that we will have construction workers and subcontractors building and working on our new house all summer and fall has me feeling a little more confident in regards to the number of tomatoes and peppers we're going to be growing, although I do have to prep a lot more garden space than I originally intended to. But here is where I am smugly showing you guys my organization, because this is far enough out of my frantic disorganization that I want to share how pretty it is. I made maps for all of my trays. All trays were labeled with letters on the front in paint pen.
We have peppers, and my misc tray. We did have a few failures to germinate, so I now know what seeds are bad and should be thrown out (savoy cabbage, cayenne peppers, grey zucchini)
And tomatoes, my precious. We moved from the PNW, so tomato selection had to be ruthless, anything over 80 days was a huge gamble. Here in Kentucky it seems basically anything will grow, so I just ordered an assortment of beefsteaks from someone on ebay and I'm ready to try growing all the weirdsies.
