5x5 Trays for Starting Flowers and Herbs
This article goes into solutions for starting small seeded crops. This process can be used for pretty much any seeds less than 1mm. It works particularly well for oddly shaped seeds like marigolds. Basil, dill, parsley, yarrow, salvias, bergamot and violas all work really well in this style of growing.
PLANTING HERBS AND FLOWERS
Herbs and flowers often have tiny seeds. This makes seeding and transplanting them with cell trays particularly tricky for a lot of reasons. It makes planning difficult since you don’t know how many viable transplants will make it through the planting process.
When planting herbs or flowers in cell trays it can be hard to tell if you have even gotten a seed into each cell. Often their root structures are fragile and small making the process of removing them from the cell and transplanting difficult. It leads to failed transplants and spotty harvests.
Using containers to start little seedbeds can solve all these problems. Using shallow pots with a broader surface area works best. The shallower soil keeps the roots condensed. The broader planting surface allows you to spread out more seeds per square inch than a traditional cell tray. In my experience the increased competition of sharing soil makes the transplants grow taller and stronger.
How to Plant Tiny Seeds
I use our tall 5x5 tray and shallow 5 x 5 tray to plant tiny seeds and then keep them under a humidity dome until they germinate. I love using these shallow 5 x 5 trays without drainage holes as a bottom trays. I like to shoot for around 2-3 seeds per square inch. Tiny seeds often don’t like to be covered or only want a LIGHT covering of soil.
It makes them really likely to get moved around and clumped with overhead watering. The humidity dome allows me to bottom water and still keep the soil surface moist.
Transplanting Small Seeded Flowers and Herbs
Once the majority of the starts have at least one set of true leaves they can be potted up or planted out. I do this by splitting each pot into 6 chunks each with a group of little plants and their roots. The goal here isn’t for all of the plants to survive but for the strongest few to make it.
A few days after transplanting I will go in and pinch out all but the two strongest plants. In this way I am guaranteed to get at least one viable flower or herb from each square inch of germinating space. The plant that survives is always strong and usually more productive than a comparable small seed coming out of a cell tray.
Happy Growing.
Happy Growing.