Adventures in Soil Blocking, pt 1
Using seeds to start my garden has always seemed really daunting.
In fact, why would anyone go through the fuss of seed starting when they can just buy perfectly healthy plants at Lowes or Pike and plop them in the ground?! That has always been my thought until I started getting serious about vegetable gardening and then ran into a couple of problems with my original mindset. The first problem was that I could only find the pre-grown veggie plants in spring and early summer. Here in zone 7b, we’ve got 2 warm seasons to plant. So when I’m ready to plant another round of veggies in September, there’s nothing available at the box stores. 2nd problem - even if I could find the plants, planting year round can get VERY expensive if you’re spending $3-$5 per plant. Already grown plants are way more expensive than seeds. And, if you’ve ever looked through a seed catalog, the variety of veggie seeds is astounding! I mean who knew there were 62 different varieties of carrots?! I wanted to be able to grow all sorts of new varieties I have never seen in the garden center of my local Home Depot. In my quest to learn more about seed starting, I stumbled upon a clip about something called soil blocking from Monty Don’s Gardener’s World and was so intrigued. So I did a little more research! And what I found seemed sprisingly straight forward and do-able.
Basically, with soil blocking, you create a mushy mix of soil and water then compress it into a block of dirt using a mold. Think: making sand castles. Then, you plant the seed directly into the mold. No plastic seedling tray-things needed. Then, once the seeds get big enough, you plant the whole soil block into your garden!
There are quite a few advantages to soil blocking - my 2 favs are not spending money on plastic seed trays and it’s really the best way to create the healthiest seedlings possible. Due to a phenomenon called air pruning, the roots are forced to produce lots of secondary roots, creating a super robust root system. So, I decided to give it a go.
Here is what I ordered:
1 large plastic bin to hold the soil mush
Variety of seeds from Seed Savers and Johnny’s Selected Seeds
So all the materials have come in and I’m ready to start- let’s see how this goes!
To be continued . . .
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