Growing lettuce seedlings in an egg carton

Now is the perfect time to plant lettuce
Try to grow lettuce seedlings indoors in an egg carton 🥬🥬
Great, easy and cheap method. Plus, it’s good for the environment!

https://youtu.be/rj8YVl86Dvo

Cool. I assume they break down well enough in your climate?

I read someplace where a guy planted seedlings in a chunk or scrounged eavestrough filled with homemade potting mix. For transplanting, he gently slid the whole mass into a trench. Lazy but effective.

I would love to find out how this went in the end.

I have always used egg cartons to sprout seeds for transplanting.

I feel the soil is too shallow for proper growing.  Maybe there will be stunted Plants?

Let us know when the plants mature and how this goes.

Anne Miller wrote:I would love to find out how this went in the end.

I have always used egg cartons to sprout seeds for transplanting.

I feel the soil is too shallow for proper growing.  Maybe there will be stunted Plants?

Let us know when the plants mature and how this goes.

In the video, the person removed the seedlings from the carton and transplanted them to give them plenty of space.

I find direct seeding lettuce is a lot less work but if you have a lot of slug pressure, starting them off in a egg carton can work nicely. I put the lid under the sectioned part as an added layer. The whole thing starts to fall apart by the time the seedlings are ready to be translated. Egg cartons are good for tiny and delicate seeds (like dainty flowers) when I don't want to waste my deeper cell trays. Then I can just easily tear each egg carton cell apart and plop it in the garden.

Jenny said, "In the video, the person removed the seedlings from the carton and transplanted them to give them plenty of space.

I find direct seeding lettuce is a lot less work

Jenny, thanks for explaining.  As you can obviously tell I did not watch the video.

I, too, prefer direct seeding because I have better luck planting outdoors.

For lettuce, I am inclined to just rough up the soil a little then pour the whole package of seeds out.  Press the soil down and water.  So easy.

I've tried this before, and found the soil to be too shallow for anything more than seed germination + ~1 week of seedling growth (depending on the plant of course).  I think it's most useful for trying to start seed with a low anticipated germination rate since you aren't devoting individual cells to single seeds until you see what sprouts.  Then you can carefully transplant the good seedlings into individual cells saving a lot of otherwise wasted space/effort.