Experience with the Winstrip air pruning tray?

Hello,

Would love to hear about people's experiences with the Winstrip tray. Its advantages over soil blocks (which I've done for past 2 seasons) that seem credible are: (a) less work - you're just dumping the dry potting mix into the tray (b) less potting mix - you're just using loose dry, potting mix, not wetting it and making it into tight blocks that will hold together.

It isn't intuitively obvious that it air prunes as well as soil blocks, but may be it does a good enough job?

The page above links to a ton of their videos about the product. Would love to hear thoughts, but specially experience using them.

Thanks,
Shayok

Good answers here:  

I'm way late to the party on this thread so I'm not sure how helpful this is. I used winstrip trays last summer and loved them. I have 10 each of the 50, 73, and 128 trays and still ran out of tray space. If I can find the money, I'll probably buy more. They're a bit pricey, but I doubt I'll ever break them. The only thing I don't like about them is that I can't use my fingers to pop the plugs out of the 72 and 128 trays. A stick worked though.

I used them for kale, cabbage, lettuce, peas, celery, lots of squash varieties, beats, fennel, various herbs, and lots of flowers for my bees. I wasn't sure about the beats as transplants but they were about the best performing crop I had last year. You can germinate inside, thin as needed, then plant them out on perfect spacing.

They are SO much easier than soil blocks. I used them for years and will never go back. Bootstrap Farmer sells a similar product for a little cheaper, but I've not tried it yet. As of now, they only sell the 72 cell trays, but the finger hole in the bottom looks bigger. I may buy some just to compare alongside my Winstrip trays.

Here's an update after using soil blocks for 4 seasons and Winstrips for 2 seasons.

I think I'm getting better at soil blocks and honestly it doesn't feel like that much more labor than Winstrips. I've tried the Mini Wini Large (this is equivalent to the 50-cell tray) and the Mini Wini Small (equivalent to 128-cell tray). The former works well for me. The latter I'd say is actually more work than soil blocks as the extra seeding mix doesn't readily fall through the gaps between the cells - I have to use a pencil to poke them through. Moreover, I had a significantly lower germination rate of onions with the Mini Wini Small than with soil blocks. I have no idea why that would happen and I should probably repeat the experiment to be certain. I wish the Small worked well for onions as they don't really need that much space/soil as seedlings.